Lonely office worker Judy Garland and country-bred soldier Robert Walker meet in “New York, New York.” As the clock ticks away until the soldier's two-day leave ends, they spend an afternoon sightseeing, an evening strolling, a night riding through the city, and the next day scurrying around to obtain a marriage license. The wedding supper finds two strangers facing each other in a grimy cafe, frozen by sudden shyness and bewildering sadness. James Agee, writing in 1945, called The Clock “so good that it inspires ingratitude for not being great. Its basic story is about as simple and as moving as they come.... But Director Vincente Minnelli's talents are...many sided and generous.... He has used most of his bit players and extras and crowds and streets so well that time and again you wonder whether some swarming, multitudinously human scenes were made in the actual city, with only a few of the actors aware of concealed cameras.... Few films in recent years have managed so movingly to combine first-grade truth with second-grade fiction.... His semi-surrealist juxtapositions, accidental or no, help turn The Clock into a rich image of a great city. His love of mobility, of snooping and sailing and drifting and drooping his camera booms and dollies, makes The Clock, largely boom-shot, one of the most satisfactorily flexible movies since Murnau's epoch-making The Last Laugh.”