Earlier this week, I saw an old movie at Lincoln Center called The Clock. I was excited to see it on the big screen, mainly because it’s an immensely comforting movie to me and secondly because it covers a lot of ground in New York City (OK, NYC via soundstage).
My favorite part of the movie starts in the above clip around 6:05, when Joe (Robert Walker) slides over on the other side of Alice (Judy Garland) to act as a buffer between her and this drunk stranger. It’s a sweet moment, I think, because we see that this guy isn’t out to bed her or impress her or even, primarily, win her over… he wants to protect, to take care of her. I like the way Alice then glances at the drunk, and next at Joe, processing what he’s just done and thinking to herself, “Now that was nice.” (Judy really is wonderful and sensitive and absorbing throughout the movie.)
The Clock is a fairy tale, of course, and the historian who introduced the movie told us that, throughout the filming, Robert Walker was dealing with a highly-publicized divorce and battling depression and alcoholism. Walker died from a toxic mix of alcohol and barbituates six years after the movie was released.
And Judy, five times married by the end of her life,
… often didn’t even have enough money for food to eat, and there was no pension forthcoming from MGM, a studio that made millions off of her movies. In those last years, her voice started to fray and she physically aged until she resembled a careworn little old lady who had been felled by some drastic illness.
[from Dan Callahan’s must-read retrospective essay in Alt Screen]
