394
PARTISAN REVIEW
isn't very happy to be married to him, she replies, "I guess I don't feel
very married- it was so ugly!" Shortly after, passing a church in which
the candles from another wedding still burn, the two shyly enter, and
read over the service, hopefully. When sh e comes to the phrase, "in the
face of this company," she gives him a little look. He cuts in stoutly to
stress "matrimony . . . is an honourable estate." The underlining of these
two phrases contains a hair-raising irony.
The makers of the film do not intend the irony. At the end of this
scene the girl exclaims, "Oh Joe, I love you!" and supposedly now every–
thing is all right ; we cut to the two alone in their hotel room, and the
isolation in which they love is no longer viewed as pathetic: the Moment
of Love is larger-than-life again. For
The Clock
has not sketched the
plight of these lovers to show it forth, but rather to outface it, to wish
it away.
But artistic anarchy can possess, as T yler himself remarks and for–
gets, the "compulsiveness and the interior meaning" symptomatic of
dreams. And dreams made in Hollywood betray more than their makers.
The "reality and complexity" they labored to annul is suffered as such by
the public-or the public would not put down its money witli such regu–
larity. It is only because the Single Instance reads back to us the public
that it is worth deciphering further, in
Th e Clock
and in four other
popular films. It is relevant to examine in each the relation in which
the lovers stand to society.
In
T he Enchanted Cottage
the lovers are an aviator returned from
the war disfigured, unable to take up his old role ; and a girl so homely
that she has never had the feeling of "belonging" in any group. In
To
Hav e and Ha ve Not
the man is an American living in Martinique in '40,
who doesn't like Vichy but isn't going to be a sucker and risk his neck
for Free France. The girl has left the States six months before, for un–
specified adventures, and now is tired, would walk home if it weren't
for all that water. In
None But Th e Lonely Heart
the man won't settle
down and "take hold" as his mother begs, because he feels it would
mean playing either hare or hound ; he would rather be a "tramp of the
universe." The girl is a divorcee, with a child, and an ex-husband who
is still possessive. In
M urder, M y Sweet
the man is a "private eye." One
of the characters says of him she doesn't know why he involves himself,
for he doesn't know what side he's on. H e's out for money of course and
when accused of murder he's out to clear his name, but in the long run
he seems to feed on proving to himself that he's a tough guy, who can
take being nowhere. The girl with whom he's really matched in the film
is a free lance in her own deadly fashion. The younger girl, with whom
the film pretends at the end to match him more romantically, is a strang–
er in her home, hating her step-mother. Though some of these characters
recognize it and some do not, none can be said to have "dynamic rela–
tion" to family, community or cause.
