Clint Eastwood's magnificent Flags Of Our Fathers is out on DVD today, as well as a movie that provides an ideal companion, Vincente Minnelli's The Clock.
Flags, of course, tells the tale of three guys who happened to be in a certain place at a certain time, who, by raising a flag, somehow became acclaimed as heroes. For all three, the pressure of trying to live up to what the public expected of them caused nothing but pain.
Eastwood neatly delineates the full breadth of their lives, the camarederie with their fellow troops before they ship out to Iwo Jima, the mounting dread as they approach the island, the pure, unbelievable horror of combat, and the slow descent of their lives afterwards.
Flags is a contemporary film trying to recreate the attitudes and mores of a specific time. The Clock is a product of that time, a bittersweet love story about a GI on forty-eight hour leave in Manhattan, who meets a young woman in Penn Station, and their whirlwind romance is a sort of dance of the damned, two people who must cram a lifetime into their brief time together, because who knows what will happen when he ships out?
There's much wrong with The Clock--lots of cornball comedy relief, and the backlot shemping for New York City doesn't always work, although Minnelli's magnificent staging of sequences in the colossal Penn Station set shows his flawless rhythmic and visual sense--but knowing that it was made in 1944 (though released in '45), at the height of a war with an outcome that was very much in doubt, lends it an overwhelming poignance. The heartfelt performances of Robert Walker and Judy Garland help, too. When it's finally time for Walker to ship out, and Garland says with absolute certainty, "You're coming back," you're going to cry, guaranteed. And Minnelli's magnificent final shot, watching Walker and Garland's private goodbyes enacted by dozens of other couples as the camera pulls back to the rafters reminds us--all of these soldiers and all of their lovers promised each other they'd stay together forever, and very few of them would.
