Greater Boston Film Classics Club

For our September virtual event, we’ll watch The Clock, the tender 1945 wartime romance starring Judy Garland and Robert Walker and directed by Vincente Minnelli. The film was selected by the group at our recent discussion of Liza Minnelli’s memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! The connection is especially fitting: Garland was Liza’s mother, Minnelli her father, and they married shortly after the film’s release.

Walker plays Joe Allen, a young soldier with just 48 hours of leave in New York City before heading back to duty. A chance encounter at Penn Station introduces him to Alice Maybery (Garland), a secretary who agrees to show him around the city. Over the course of two hectic days, their casual meeting develops into something much more serious. The result is a simple but moving romance shaped by the uncertainty and urgency of wartime.

The Clock also marked an important departure for Garland: it was her first starring film in which she did not sing, giving her an opportunity to show what she could do as a purely dramatic actress. Minnelli, meanwhile, created an unusually vivid portrait of wartime New York, despite the fact that the scenes with the actors were actually filmed at MGM in California. Writing about the film in 2022, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody went so far as to call it Garland’s “greatest movie.”