The subject of my first Drink & a Movie post of 2023 is brought to you by a character in Vincente Minnelli’s The Clock identified simply as The Drunk:
Played by Keenan Wynn, he appears in a single long take positioned halfway through the film. Our heroes Corporal Joe Allen (Robert Walker) and Alice Maybery (Judy Garland) and their milkman friend Al (James Gleason) encounter him in a lunch room that they’ve ducked into to call for help with a flat tire. “Would you care to join me in a vermouth, cassis, or champagne cocktail?” he asks despite the fact that alcoholic beverages aren’t actually served in this establishment. This makes his suggestion inappropriate for their setting, but the latter two ingredients go together perfectly in one of my favorite cocktails for January, a very slightly original drink made entirely with local spirits that I call a Finger Lakes Kir Royale. Here’s how you make it:
1/2 oz. Finger Lakes Distilling Cassis Liqueur
4 oz. Dr. Konstantin Frank Winery Célèbre Rosé
Add the cassis to a chilled champagne coupe and top with the sparkling rosé. Garnish with a lemon twist cut (we use linzer cookie cutters) in the shape of a fireworks burst.
Célèbre Rosé was part of a case of local wines handpicked for us by David Sparrow shortly after we moved to Ithaca and has been a staple in our house ever since. It’s quite delicious, and together with the cassis it gives this drink a lovely pink color, but any good dry sparkling wine you have left over from the holidays will do just fine. This drink doesn’t necessarily improve upon a glass of plain bubbly, but it does take it in a bit of a different direction, which can be nice in the days and weeks after New Year’s Eve. Anyway, my screengrabs from The Clock are taken from my copy of the Warner Archives Collection DVD release of the film:
It can also be streamed via Amazon Prime and Apple TV for a rental or purchase fee.
Joe is a soldier from Indiana spending a two-day leave in New York City before he ships out to Europe who reacts to the Empire State Building a bit differently from Buddy the Elf:
Specific references and impressively accurate studio sets aside, the New York of The Clock is more of a generic Big City than a specific place and unlike Buddy, Joe doesn’t know what he’s looking for when he arrives there. He soon discovers that it’s Alice after she trips over his foot and loses the heel of her shoe:
He convinces a cobbler to keep his shop open late to fix it:
And she agrees to show him the sights in a sequence that features some pretty impressive back projection work:
Joe spends the first third of the film’s ninety-minute run time being just charming enough to convince Alice to make and keep (over the warnings of her roommate about the dangers of being “picked up”) a date with him “under the clock at the Astor at seven.” They spend the next fifteen minutes falling in love, culminating in a kiss that Sheila O’Malley describes as having World War II in it:
Frightened by what she is feeling, Alice hesitates. “I don’t know whether we ought to see each other again at all,” she tells Joe. Enter The Drunk. Alice and Joe realized that they’ve inadvertently stayed out past midnight and that the buses have stopped running. Luckily, Al appears and offers to give Alice a ride home in his milk truck. Alas, no good deed goes unpunished, and he winds up getting smacked in the face:
As described by Emmanuel Burdeau (via a translation by Bill Krohn) in Joe McElhaney’s book Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment, Keenan Wynn’s main function in the film is to provide Joe and Alice with an opportunity to “act as a team to save Al”: with him grappling with the effects of what in 2023 is obviously a concussion, they decide to work together to complete his shift. What makes The Drunk and to a large extent The Clock itself memorable, though, is Vincente Minnelli and company’s decision to give him three whole minutes of screen time to build up to this moment. Just for good measure, much of his rambling discourse is delivered around or to this lady (played by Moyna Macgill) who could care less because she is utterly lost in her own thoughts and rapturous enjoyment of her plate of food:
The scenes which follow the one in the lunch counter are some of my favorites in the entire film. As the city’s working class bemusedly look on, Alice and Joe deliver milk:
Per Burdeau, by the time the sun rises they will have shown “what they could be as a man-and-wife team performing a job together, making money, being economically grounded.” With their hearts and heads now in alignment, they decide to spend Joe’s final day of leave together, which is when the city that has brought them together conspires to show them what life apart would now feel like. Over breakfast with Al and his wife, both Joe and Alice express skepticism about servicemen getting married immediately prior to a tour of duty:
This all changes after they get separated on the subway a little while later:
Joe tries to meet Alice at her next stop, but mistakenly boards an express instead of a local train. She is trying to find him as well and has left by the time he gets there. Joe’s face records his horror at what has befallen them:
A window display proudly announcing the population of New York as 7,454,995 underscores the odds against them ever finding each other again:
Especially when, as Alice humiliatingly admits to the USO official she seeks help from, they don’t even know each other’s last names:
They finally do rediscover each other at the spot where they first met and realize that they already have all the information they need to decide to spend the rest of their lives together. The next six minutes of the film are another reason it reminds me of New Year’s Eve, featuring as it does shots of at least five different clocks, with one appearing in a shot every 30 seconds or so on average. Alice and Joe race all over town to successfully navigate a thicket of red tape and secure all the paperwork they need to officially wed at literally the last possible moment–the city clerk who performs their ceremony is getting into the elevator to leave for the day when they arrive.
The Clock concludes with Joe and Alice enjoying their first morning together as man and wife. The scene is nearly two and half minutes old before either of them speaks a word, which is not to say they aren’t communicating the entire time:
This sequence, too, is another reason The Clock strikes me as a perfect movie with which to ring in the new year. It’s a time both for making bold, potentially life-changing resolutions, and for coming up with a plan to keep them; for marrying the man of your dreams, and for figuring out how he likes his coffee. Or, if I may, both for stocking up on champagne, and for finding creative uses for the bottles you don’t drink.
Cheers!
All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 