Review of The Big Clock (1948) by Ryan H — 24 Aug 2012

A great film noir that I had never heard of until I signed up to screen it for a class. Ray Milland and Charles Laughton could not have been cast better for the two guys that will eventually go head to head in a game of wits, which will lead to the incarceration of one of them.

Earl Janoth runs a huge magazine. He gets respect and anything he wants. Earl Stroud is the top guy at the magazine who can hunt down people and get great stories about the bad things they've done.

No one knows how he's so good at tracking people down. He's basically a detective for a magazine. Stroud has been working for Janoth long enough and wants to go on a honeymoon with his wife, which has been delayed many years because whenever it's time for him to leave a new job comes up that he can't back away from.

But this time around he won't say no, which doesn't fly with Janoth. He's told that if he goes on his honeymoon now he will be fired and blacklisted from every single magazine company. That's okay with him; he would rather be fired than lose his wife.

That's not to say he's not upset about what's happened, so when he gets a call from a beautiful blonde woman he met the other day who says she knows how to get Janoth back he decides to meet up with her.

Unfortunately this leads to him losing track of time and missing the train. He continues his night with the blonde woman in an innocent way and at the end of the night Stroud finds himself in her place, but Janoth ends up coming over.

He rushes out and what happens when he's gone? Janoth kills the blonde because of a fight. Stroud sees him walk in then the next day figures out she has been murdered. Janoth is such a rich and important man that he can get an alibi from anywhere, which means that all of the places Stroud went with her that night has people that will connect him to the murder.

Stroud decides to go on his honeymoon but when he gets there he has to leave because he discovers what kind of incriminating evidence could be held against him, and Janoth wants him to come back and put the blame on the man who was with her all night.

Janoth doesn't know it's Stroud, so Stroud has to find a way to work the blame back on to him before it's too late. There's plenty of humor in the film. The twists in the storyline kept me interested, like the woman he haggled the painting over the night before was the woman who painted it and she is a desperate and poor woman, so when she discovers a fan is the supposed murderer she covers for him.

She was probably the funniest part of the film. The tension builds slowly and evenly. We want Stroud to be able to turn things around and blame the right man, but we also want him to be with his wife.

I guess this turns into us wanting the wife to be understanding. I'm really glad that Dale Pollock showed this for his film noir class. I really wish I could be in it to hear him talk about things that I didn't pick up on within the first viewing.