The Big Clock

source: The Big Clock

I'd been wanting to see The Big Clock for a while, and when I finally slipped it into the DVD player, the excitement was fairly palpable (that's true, no kidding). Oh, what a misbegotten letdown it ended up being! A silly piece of fluffy nothingness that wastes quality actors, always a crying shame. I made the mistake of buying this movie and I Wake Up Screaming together, as my sum-total "payday" films (I buy at least two every payday). I of course didn't know how strong/weak they were, as I never read reviews before I see films, and I never will, but...well, this one wasn't as bad as IWUS (that movie was pure wretchedness) but it was still pretty darned bad. Or - better - it was just plain uninteresting, easy to figure out and preposterous in more than few places. Sometimes that's okay, sometimes it's not. It was just barely okay in The Big Clock, although hardly okay enough to warrant any viewing beyond the first one, and tell me, is that not the joy of noir? Multiple viewings, and beyond? If you ever see it and you tell me that the ending wasn't tacked on in desperation, I'll know you're lying. What a horrific waste, Ray Milland and Charles Laughton (picking at his undoubtedly fake mustache with his pinkie to hilariously distracting ends) acting to do no more than pick up paychecks. Depressing.

This film has not one extra line of dialogue, not one wasted scene. It is about a magazine ("Crimeways") employee, George Stroud (Ray Milland), who has been working for Earl Janoth who owns the magazine (Charles Laughton) for seven years without enough time off to take his wife on a honeymoon. He and his young son are practically strangers. And so he is on the eve of taking a long overdue vacation when Janoth demands he postpone his vacation again to follow up on a lead in person. He refuses and is fired. Stroud doesn't care. You see, Stroud's gift is finding missing people before anybody else does. It is what got him the tony job in the first place. Stroud manages to miss the train his wife and son are on, figures his marriage is over, and spends the evening drunk and in the company of Janoth's mistress, Pauline. He wakes up on her couch and leaves, but has to dodge Janoth on the way out. Stroud catches up and reconciles with his wife. But then a call from Janoth again. It seems he is unfired and Janoth wants him to track down a person who is an accused embezzler, but Janoth gives enough details that George realizes the person he would be looking for is himself. He also does not buy the embezzler story and figures Janoth is looking for the person Janoth thinks that Pauline is seeing behind his back. Stroud goes back to New York, to the chagrin of his wife, thinking he can derail the story long enough to come up with a plausible explanation. It's not long before Stroud realizes that this is a much bigger matter than Janoth looking for the other man, and things get very complex. I'll just say watch and find out. Whatever you do, don't go see this at a film festival or any place where you cannot control the stopping and starting of the film. Miss any part of it, or let your mind wander, and you'll likely get lost. Hitchcock's work looks like a B programmer compared to the intricacy of this film. There are likely going to be some questions as to motivation while you watch this film. Why did Character X just do that??? The reason for the plot holes is this film was taken from written material in which Stroud really is having an affair with Janoth's mistress, and Janoth himself is bisexual. The production code and director John Farrow cut those parts but didn't really add any sufficient substitute explanations. The most annoying thing about the film? Maureen O'Sullivan's character, George's wife. She is thrilled at the idea of them being poor again, she says, but she sure dresses to the nines, has a spacious apartment and a maid. Roll the film "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and let her see what real poverty can do to a person when they are in a prolonged marriage to someone with no ambition and no prospects, only dreams. But then George's wife's name is Georgette(??) so maybe we are not supposed to take her seriously. Extra kudos to Elsa Lanchester as a much married maternal mercenary maven artist who steals the show whenever she is onscreen. Highly recommended in spite of the complexity and definitely worth your time.

I posted a message last night about some of the differences between the book and film, and the reasons I think the film is superior, but it strikes me that I left out the most important one. The title, "The Big Clock," carries a much different meaning. In the book, it's a tortured metaphor, nothing more. There's a big clock up the sky, you see, ticking away, and there's nothing you can do about it, and it just ticks and ticks until finally something happens. This is probably not as eloquent as author Kenneth Fearing's explanation, but it ought to suffice. It's not such a bad idea, really -- the story is one of the best examples of the "ticking clock" device ever set to paper or film, and it's interesting to note that the book was written long before critics started using the term to describe stories of this kind. But Fearing uses this metaphor awkwardly. He describes the concept at great length in the first few pages of the book, and it shows up several more times throughout the novel. And yet it is inserted so clumsily that you have to wonder if he wrote the book first, and then decided he needed a dandy metaphor, so he added a few pages here and there to boost his word-count. It seems to be dropped into the narration without much justification, and the explanation of the concept seems to go on forever. It comes out sounding something like the narration in an above-average forties radio play, the sort of thing you might have heard on, say, Suspense. The film dispenses with this metaphor, at least in such an obvious way. Instead, it gives us a great big clock in the skyscraper's lobby. (There's no such thing in the book.) Beyond that, no one bothers to explain the title. The metaphor is present in the movie, of course -- it's just that the entire story serves as an illustration of the concept. It goes without saying; the idea is presented more subtly. No doubt the screenwriters decided that it was a terrific title, but if they were going to dispense with awkward metaphors, they needed a different sort of justification for the name. Their solution works. The clock in the lobby gives the movie a focal point. Better yet, because the movie opens with Ray Milland hiding from his pursuers within the "big clock," we know that a climactic scene will eventually be played out there. The screenwriters buttressed this idea with other clock references. Ray Milland is late for a train. Much of the dialogue concerns the passage of time. People keep checking watches. And notice that Janoth's girlfriend is beaten to death with a sundial? Let me add one other thought. The narration in the book and movie carries many similarities to the sort of narration you might have heard on the radio show Suspense, perhaps the best of all nourish radio programs. This type of narration was a standard device in radio and the movies, back in the forties. But there's another connection. In the original trailer for this movie, we see Ray Milland in a radio studio as the show Suspense is being recorded, and the show's director (Anton M. Leder, I believe) steps out from the broadcast booth to offer a testimonial for the movie. An interesting bit of trivia.

Most filmgoers are probably more familiar with this film's 1987 updating, "No Way Out", starring Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman. That said, "The Big Clock", as with most originals which later spawn remakes of one form or another, is the better film to my mind. It features Ray Milland as a workaholic crime magazine editor for a ruthless publisher (Charles Laughton). Milland has developed his own special method of catching criminals, consisting of glomming onto details that the police disregard as irrelevant. How little does he suspect that, within 24 hours, that same method is going to be used against him... He stays the night at his boss' mistress to sleep off a hangover. When Laughton strolls in for a suprise visit, Milland manages to get away before being IDed, but not before Laughton sees his shadowy figure on the stairs. In a jealous rage, Laughton kills his mistress and later sets about framing the figure he saw...who, unknown to him, is actually the man he's putting in charge of the investigation, Milland! What follows from this setup is one of the most elaborate cat-and-mouse games I have ever seen on celluloid, the key difference here being that the cat has no idea who the mouse is. The leads are what make this film stand out. Milland was always very good at playing "the man caught in the middle" and this time is no exception. Kirk Douglas once noted in his autobiography, "The Ragman's Son", that whenever Laughton speaks his lines, it's as though the words just suddenly occurred to him rather than reciting something from memory. It's definitely put to good use here; Laughton oozes menace and coldness with no discernable effort. Other notables in the cast include Elsa Lancaster ("Bride of Frankenstein" and Laughton's real-life wife) as an eccentric artist who helps Milland and a then-unknown Harry Morgan as a silent, suspicious bodyguard to Laughton's publisher. While perhaps not extraordinary in and of itself, "The Big Clock" is still a good film worth watching, buying, and owning.

Ray Milland plays a man who is overworked by his sadistic boss (Charles Laughton). The boss delights in firing people in his publishing empire and is one of the most malevolent employers in film history. When this evil boss becomes angry and kills his mistress, he sets Milland up to be the patsy--and offers a reward for his capture. And, since the facts do seem to point to him, much of the film consists of Milland trying to prove who the killer actually is as well as hiding from the authorities when suspicions turn to him. The clock from the title plays a pivotal role in the film and it's where Milland hides out when the heat is bearing down on him. The movie does an exceptional job in many ways. Not only are the characters interesting, the plot very dark and the story well-written, but the mood is wonderfully tense--with a great score and direction. I actually felt tense as i watched! Plus, it sure had a dandy ending....truly satisfying and entertaining. It's clearly one of Ray Milland's and Charles Laughton's best. By way, near the beginning of the film you should pay attention to the elevator operator in a tiny uncredited part. She is Noel Neill--the same lady who would play Lois Lane in the 1950s "Superman" show. Her voice was a dead giveaway. Later you will see Harry Morgan in a small role as a combination masseur and 'fixer'.

Before I rented The Big Clock, I read a review in which someone praised the film as Charles Laughton's greatest performance. Since I really like Charles Laughton, I was pretty excited. And since I really like Charles Laughton, I can tell it like it is: whoever wrote that was an idiot. He doesn't do a bad job by any means, but he's no Quasimodo or King Henry VIII. Ray Milland, or as I've lovingly dubbed him Ray Mi-bland, is the star of this supposed thriller, and if you don't think to yourself after every line that comes out of his mouth, "Why wasn't this James Stewart?" then you need to watch some more old movies. Ray isn't likable, and he rattles off his lines like he's in a speed contest. Jimmy would have been likable, and I'm sure he would have found some way to make his character's stupidity believable. Ray is the employee of big-shot Charles Laughton, and he very stupidly spends time with Charles's mistress, Rita Johnson, when he's supposed to be going on vacation with his wife and son. He goes barhopping with Rita and then passes out in her apartment, all the while getting angry at his wife, Maureen O'Sullivan, for leaving for the vacation without him. This is not a guy to root for. We're supposed to root for him, though, because after Charles kills Rita in the heat of an argument, Ray gets framed for it. I just kept thinking that Rita was really mean for saying such terrible things to her sweetie pie, and Ray was a jerk for lying to his wife about the whole situation. So, since that was my mindset, it's understandable why I didn't really like this movie. There was one really cute part to the movie, though. Elsa Lanchester has a small part as a quirky artist, and when someone admires one of her paintings, she makes a joke about it not being a Rembrandt. She and her hubby Charles Laughton were in the 1936 biopic Rembrandt!

Magazine editor Ray Milland has his non-stop working life pressed even further after he spends a drunken night partying with a gorgeous blonde; she's the mistress of publication czar Charles Laughton, Milland's boss--but when she winds up dead after a spat with her lover, somebody's gotta take the fall! Kenneth Fearing's novel (reworked in 1987 as "No Way Out") becomes cracking good thriller, full of eccentric characters, outré bits of business, acerbic humor, and a top cast doing first-rate work. The plot contrivance of getting devoted family man Milland involved with Rita Johnson can possibly be overlooked, as can Ray's staff at the crime magazine (who come up with clues and leads faster than Sherlock Holmes). Framing the story in flashback doesn't hurt, but one does get impatient with some of the implausibilities taken. Still, there's enough action in the picture to keep things tense, and enough funny, throwaway jabs to keep it enjoyable. **1/2 from ****

I thoroughly enjoyed this film. I'm not sure I would categorize it a noir as much as I would a Mystery/suspense film. But whatever you call it, I call it a great way to spend 95 minutes. I can't recall a film that does a better job of building the suspense as this one. I was on the edge of my seat for the entire last half of the film. The film makes great use of irony to help achieve this - in that the lead character, George Stroud (Ray Milland), is called upon to search for a wanted man - who turns out to be himself. He is mistakenly believed to be the killer of his boss' mistress, when in reality, it is the boss, Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton), who is the guilty party. It is a classic cat and mouse game - except that instead of searching for the "Randolph" character, Stroud is actually trying to find the real killer so as to clear his own name. Stroud is literally surrounded on all sides by people who could identify him as the man who was with the murdered mistress on the night she was killed. He is running for his life within his own office building trying to avoid being identified. I love how the painting and the artist are used in the story. Elsa Lanchester was a true gem and quite a funny character. It's interesting to note that she was married to Charles Laughton. They certainly make an odd pair - especially in light of the fact of his known homosexuality. Another married couple from the film was actress Maureen O'Sullivan, who played Stroud's wife, and Director John Farrow. They were married for 27 years (until his death) and had 7 children together, including Mia Farrow. Maureen and Mia appeared together in HANNAH AND HER SISTERS (1986). Overall, a very good movie with a talented cast.

John Farrow, directing a fine cast, including his wife, Maureen O'Sullivan comes up with a winner here. Ray Milland plays the part of an innocent, albeit irresponsible, man who becomes trapped by his own actions and portrays it with style and a sense of desperation that will make you nervous for him. Charles Laughton just reeks of power, greed and evil intent as the boss of a large publishing empire who is also desperate to hide his little secret. George McCready,who was one of the best supporting actors in films, is his sidekick and Harry Morgan is the sinister henchman who hunts for Milland under the big clock. Maureen O'Sullivan doesn't have much of a part in this film but as usual she is believable. And then, up pops Elsa Lanchester as the dotty artist who plays a key role in the mystery.......she is always a great addition to any film and often appeared in her husband's (Laughton) movies. The story moves along quickly and keeps you on edge as the hunted is also the hunter. It's really quite nervewracking as Milland dodges and covers up to keep one step ahead of the truth. Put this film on your list......you won't regret it.