One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie.
1945’s The Clock, Vincente Minnelli’s tender war-time New York romance, unfolds at first with trepidation: small-town G.I. Joe Allen (Robert Walker) is on a 48-hour leave visiting New York City for the first time when Alice Mayberry (Judy Garland) trips over his foot and breaks the heel of one of her shoes. At first, Joe and Alice float around each other, avoid looking too long, but their hesitation soon dissolves. Their love becomes inevitable, and the rest of the film is marked by a sense of claustrophobic urgency, a try-and-fail to match New York’s indifferent hyperkinetic rhythm, from losing each other at the train station to getting married when all they have left together is a few hours. Even so, Minnelli carefully etches the details of their relationship, the random miracle of meeting and loving each other: they dwindle away the dark hours of the night with food, flowers, and laughter—so often punctuated by Garland’s own, musical and unrestrained—helping the local milkman deliver milk bottles and falling asleep on each other’s shoulders. In Minnelli’s own words, his films invariably return to the words “beauty” and “magic,” to the creation of images that propel audiences away from the present moment and into different time streams, but here that penchant for the slippery and fantastic is pointed, self-aware, and yields to rather than resists the material reality it meets. Midway through the film, Joe and Alice find themselves in the milkman’s home, greeted by his wife. "My flower's all wilted," Alice mentions in passing about the gift Joe had bought for her a few hours earlier. Joe smiles absentmindedly, as if the words had failed to register, and then his features reconfigure into something more perplexing: a curious mix of adoration and sadness. This is the face of a man who’s seen the future split in two, each bifurcated path as tactile and concrete as the other. On one side, Alice and the other woman are one and the same, loving wives preparing breakfast for their husbands; on the other, Joe dies in the war, and he never sees Alice again. But for a split second, aware of the stretch of each branch, Joe dreams. Theirs will be a small, cozy space like this one, marked by the easy pulse of time. New York will be quiet there. The clock will pitch forward like it always does, but there will be nothing to wait for or race against. They will have all the time in the world.