Two of Vincente Minnelli’s greatest scenes play as inversions of the other: the climatic kiss between Robert Walker and Judy Garland in The Clock, and Frank Sinatra’s first attempted seduction of Martha Hyer in Some Came Running.
The Clock is a perfectly condensed melodrama, one whose form of a pair of lovers meeting and suddenly falling hard over the course of the day has been replicated time and time again—knowingly, by filmmakers like Richard Linklater with Before Sunrise, and unknowingly, surely, by many of his imitators. While on a 48-hour leave in New York City, Cpl. Joe Allen (Walker) meets Alice Maybery (Garland) by chance when her heel trips over him right before she goes up the escalator at Grand Central Station. At first coy, she eventually gives into his niceties and small-town naivete and spends the day with him, culminating in their fast romance that criss-crosses Manhattan.
Minnelli consummates their relationship with a moment of ostensible quietude in Central Park, although Alice points out that once you really listen the sounds of the city creep up. Buses, subways, and voices start to fill the soundtrack, before the stirring chorales of George Bassman’s romantic score overtakes everything as the pair get close enough for a kiss. All we see is their faces pressed into each other’s, as if all of the world was flowing from them in this moment.
While The Clock remains something sweet despite its innumerable near-heartbreaks, Some Came Running makes you bleed out from a constant barrage of pinpricks, with every gesture of quiet injustice hurting more than the last. Here the small town G.I. is no boyish doofus, but a washed-up alcoholic writer, a man who’s supposed to know the world and can barely control himself.
When Dave Hirsh (Sinatra) comes home to Parkman, Indiana (a fictional town made for James Jones’ novel, which Minnelli shoots mostly in Madison, on the Ohio River border with Kentucky), he’s got a hanger-on from Chicago, Ginnie Moorehead (one of the greatest and most tragic cinematic ingenues, played by Shirley MacLaine), and his family isn’t exactly happy to see him. While falling into old habits with the cowboy-hatted roving gambler Bama Dillert (Dean Martin), Hirsh also tries to live a double life as a good, cleaned-up man while romancing the schoolteacher Gwen French (Hyer).
Gwen’s alone with Dave in her father’s cabin, there to talk about his short story which she thinks he should send to The Atlantic. Dave’s really just there for her. He keeps getting closer, finally pulling her in for a kiss. Gwen steps towards the camera, and an AC closes down the lens to go a few stops higher, suddenly silhouetting the actors and leaving the clear light being what’s gently blowing through the windows, the rest of the cabin enveloped in darkness as Hyer says, “Don’t. Don’t, Dave.” “Gwen,” Sinatra responds, “Gwen I truly love you. Don’t you know that?” He kisses her and carelessly throws her hairpins to the ground.
The emotion is immediate and visceral, but what makes the frigidness of this scene—it’s absolute absence of love in lieu of lust—so shocking, so stabbing, is because Minnelli is so capable of the warmth seen in The Clock. There, all the tools of cinema were used to unify, to bring two characters together and allow the audience to live it with them; then, in Some Came Running, Minnelli goes to the opposite end, pushing the audience back by combining the intricate movements of his mise-en-scene with an aggressive break in conventional lighting to make a love scene devoid of love, one where the betrayal from Hollywood film form betrays the very fantasy the characters are wishing to live on screen.