The first, but by no means the last non-musical film that Arthur Freed produced at MGM was The Clock based on a short story by Paul and Pauline Gallico about a whirlwind 48 hour romance between a soldier on leave and a young girl in New York. The title refers to the famous clock in Pennsylvania Station where they first meet and later agree to a rendezvous there.

The young lovers are Robert Walker and Judy Garland. Walker the previous year had scored with a couple of breakthrough roles in Since You Went Away and See Here Private Hargrove. Garland was doing her first non-singing part on screen.

It's a tender and touching story about young people in war time. Walker is playing an extension of the earnest young soldier he played in Since You Went Away. You can see his character living home and hearth and grandfather Monty Woolley from Since You Went Away and having a 48 hour leave and meeting Judy Garland.

Originally Fred Zinneman was to direct The Clock, but he and Garland had no rapport and Zinneman himself got Arthur Freed to take him off. Judy's then husband Vincente Minnelli finished his work on Ziegfeld Follies and came over to direct his wife. This was also Minnelli's first non-musical effort in any medium since on the stage he had done nothing but musicals.

James Gleason almost steals the film from Walker and Garland as the romantic minded milkman who gives them a lift and then when he gets injured, they finish his deliveries. Walker and Garland then join Gleason for breakfast at his home where his wife is played by his real life wife Lucille Gleason. They would suffer a horrific tragedy that year when their son Russell Gleason was killed in a fall from a window, circumstances still unknown. In fact this was a tragic film all around because both Walker and Garland died way too young.

Keenan Wynn is in the film for one scene and it's a good one as he does a great drunk act.

The Clock is a fine romantic story that still holds up well for today. For lovers of young love everywhere.

This is a gently lyrical parable of two people trying to find a quiet corner in their manic world in which to be alone and to fall in love. We are constantly aware of the barriers that make their ephemeral courtship unlikely, in both the cosmic sense (Minnelli's sudden crane shots or omniscient rejoinders to an intimate close-up, which make us all too aware that their moments are marked by something ineffable) and in the modern world (he's great at evoking the terror of losing your lover amid the swirl of vacant, anonymous faces).

Whether critiquing bureaucracy—Alice and Joe have to go through a hell of an ordeal to obtain a marriage license—or simply the impossibility of getting lost in a moment in our fast-paced lives, the film stresses the importance of crafting independent rituals and moments of reverence. For instance, their marriage feels "ugly" and sterilely modern, until, once alone inside St. Peter's Cathedral, they read marriage vows to one another in tremulous whispers, signifying that theirs is a union both traditional and unique, sanctified to and by one another. And there is a really wonderful touch that Minnelli uses to close out this most important of scenes: cutting to a long deep-focus shot, in the foreground an acolyte methodically extinguishes the flames on the holy candelabra, obscuring their faces with the bell of his staff for several seconds—in effect a "wiping away" of this moment, and the religious closure of the altar-boy's ritual gesture, as if blessing their memory of this moment for posterity.

It's very bittersweet on a metaphysical level, because these lovers may never see other again, once more imposed upon by the cruel fate of a massive human construct (WWII)—this is about finding love and happiness apart from the monotony of mass routine, finding a place of serenity in a place of chaos, where there seems no respite. I love how Minnelli emphasizes their guardedness to the world by playing up the fragilely diffident nature of their relationship. My favorite example comes as they're sharing a tender moment in a park, drawing ever nearer to one another, but as they see a stranger approach both curtly withdraw in unison. In that park, the music of the city sounds far enough away that they feel safe enough to embrace it. As they walk on contentedly, this moment, too, dissipates (Minnelli raises the view until we're in the trees, their bodies wiped away), and their night of happy accidents will continue, until they'll have nothing in common but memories.

***SPOILERS*** The film "The Clock" ends where it began at the vast spacious and impersonal Pennsylvania Train Station in NYC as we see Alice, Judy Garland, disappear as the camera pull away and she's become just a small speck in the mass of humanity milling around there.

During the proceeding 48 hours Alice met by chance a young soldier Joe, Robert Walker, on a two-day pass before he's to be shipped over the Atlantic to England and eventually to the bloody battlegrounds in France and Germany to fight in the European Theater of War. During that time Alice and Joe fall in love have a whirlwind romance take a night-time sight-seeing ride of the city on a milk truck with milkman Al Henry (James Gleason), whom they helped in making his early morning deliveries. Later after getting married the two leave each other, Joe for the European battlefield and Alice for her home and job, knowing that it was fate that brought them together and it will be fate, that in the end, will bring them back together again after the war is over.

A very cute and adorable 22 year-old Judy Garland in her first adult, as well as non-singing, role playing Alice the type of girl that every GI would want to have waiting for them back home. Robert Walker is very effective as the naive and befuddled small town boy in the big city who finds, among the millions of people living and working there, the one girl that he's always been looking for to bring home and meet the parents as well as marry.

Touching little wartime romance involving two persons from totally different backgrounds and localities who would have never met if it wasn't for circumstances beyond their control, WWII, that in a strange and mysterious way brought them together more then anything else ever could. Besides the touching and poignant story and wonderful chemistry between the two top stars, Judy Garland & Robert Walker, "The Clock" was beautifully photographed with a stunning and nostalgic look at war-time, 1945, New York City. The film also brought out the people who lived there and how the war affected them and those that went "Over There" as well as those who were soon to go "Over There" to fight, and possibly die, "Over There".

There was a very touching scene at a almost empty church with Alice and Joe quietly taking the vows of matrimony that would bring you, like it did them, to tears. This after the chaotic scene at the Justice of the Peace office in City Hall that had Alice wondering if she did, in marrying Joe, the right thing in the first place P.S She Did.