MonsterHunter

The most interesting thing surrounding the dull murder melodrama The Big Clock is that director John Farrow and star Maureen O’Sullivan were the husband and wife team that gave filmdom Mia Farrow and more importantly for us, her Zombie star sister Tisa. Other than that, this movie stands out as a creaky, talky, uneventful double cross that for some reason was emblazoned with Universal’s “Universal Noir” packaging.

I was watching this all prepared for a movie about a man wrongfully accused, racing against time to clear himself despite the plot twists and backstabbing that all the characters with questionable motives engage in, while some blonde was getting herself killed or pretending to get killed. Absolutely none of this happened. In fact, Ray Milland is never actually accused of anything in this movie other than of being a gigantic wuss when it comes to standing up to his tubby and menacing boss played by the tubby and menacing Charles Laughton.

I kept slapping myself as I tried to convince myself that a movie with Laughton and Milland could not be so perpetually dull. It was Laughton after all that gave Dr. Moreau as many layers as his belly undoubtedly had in Paramount’s Island Of Lost Souls, and it was Ray Milland that survived the apocalypse with Frankie Avalon in Panic In Year Zero. Shoot, even during this movie, Laughton was periodically amusingly creepy and Milland was energetically earnest as he tried to simultaneously solve and not solve the murder of some tramp he had been with the night she was killed.

None of it mattered because the story is so badly structured and executed that it reduces everyone in the movie to standing around talking about how they should catch the mythical Jefferson Randolph for the last half of things. And that’s after a first half that is so slowly paced that Milland’s wife gets tired of waiting for him to come home that she goes off to West Virginia on vacation!

George Stroud (Milland) is the head of the crime magazine Crimeways. The offices are in this building along with a bunch of similarly named magazines that unimaginatively describe their content (Styleways, Airways, Barely 18ways - that sort of thing) and they are all owned by Earl Janoth (Laughton) a fat guy obsessed with increasing circulation and clocks. The whole obsession with clocks is never fully brought to light other than I suppose that “time is money” and all that cliched garbage.

Janoth has a whole bunch of clocks and they are hooked up to this really big clock that never goes off (except toward the end of the movie when Stroud punches out a mute gun-toting masseuse played by Col. Potter himself, Harry Morgan - providing the sole source of anything remotely resembling action in this flick).

Now that we’ve established this stupid clock angle we can get back to Stroud who is just one day away from vacation. He’s been running the magazine for something like five years and has never had a vacation. He’s promised his wife that this time they really are going on vacation, but even his little kid doesn’t believe him. See, this is actually going to be the long-delayed honeymoon that he never got to have with his wife since he went to work for Janoth on the very night of his wedding!

It is therefore understandable that when Janoth tells Stroud that he needs him to stay and keep that rag of his afloat that Stroud tells Janoth he can take this job and shove it! Naturally it takes him way too long to tell him this and he ends up getting home way too late and his antsy wife has already headed out to West VA. Instead of hightailing it out there along with coming up with a million ways to suck up to the old lady so that she’ll take him back, he falls back instead on Plan B. Plan B is to go out to the bar and get wasted with the boss’ mistress!

Even this isn’t as sordid or as exciting as it sounds. The boss’ mistress is somewhat dissatisfied with Tubby’s treatment of her and is wanting George’s help in exposing him for the fat horny toad he is. George agrees to this by ordering a bunch of Green Stingers and going on a tour of the city in search of a green clock. Why? Because the movie is called The Green Clock! Oh, it’s not? Then I don’t know why.

He ends up with a sundial with a green ribbon tied around it and also manages to end up at her apartment! As George leaves her apartment, Janoth shows up, but Janoth can’t make out who he is. Once inside, Janoth and his mistress have an argument over who she was with and she makes up the name of Jefferson Randolph. Janoth eventually gets mad at her and plants the sundial in her face. Janoth then goes over to see his right hand man, Steve Hagen and Stevie decides that they need to pin it on someone else, someone by the name of Jefferson Randolph.

In order for this to work, they need to find Jefferson Randolph, especially since he was seen all over town with her that evening. Of course everyone really saw George, not this fictitious Jefferson. Since George is an expert in tracking down criminals for his magazine (he’s kind of like a less annoying version of John Walsh), Janoth calls him in West Virginia (he finally sobered up and made it out there to see his family). Despite the threats from his wife about how bad she’s going to punk him if he leaves, George realizes he needs to be there leading the search, otherwise they might figure out it was him with her that night. Thus ends the first boring segment of the movie, which coincidentally ushers in the second boring segment of the movie.

Back at the office, George takes charge of the investigation and begins using his famous “irrelevant clues” system he has developed for cracking cases. This system involves him figuring that if the police can’t solve a case with relevant clues, it must be the irrelevant ones that hold the key to the solution. Thank you, Inspector Clouseau. Since he doesn’t really want anyone finding out that there is no such person as Jefferson Randolph or that he was with this woman the night she was dead, he sends people out on wild goose chases, assigns them to tasks they aren’t suited for and hides his hat in a refrigerator.!

The only problem I can see with that scheme is that it kind of makes him have to be in charge of the fridge whenever someone needs a soft drink or cottage cheese or something. “Oh, since I’ve been standing next to this for six hours while you guys were busting your ass on this case, I’ll get what you need. Thousand Island or Catalina?”

We get treated to a never ending parade of people talking to other people, trying to run down leads, making and taking telephone calls, all the while George stands around looking guilty. Finally they locate a guy that can identify George from the night before. He tells everyone that the killer is in the building and they go into lockdown mode. George decides that he needs to force Janoth and Hagen’s hand to get the real killer out in the open. All this takes place after he beats down Col. Potter in the big clock and then screws up the elevator so that it doesn’t work anymore. Confrontations ensue, doublecrosses are attempted, guys get ratted out, fat guy goes down elevator shaft.

Proving that these older movies have every chance to stink the joint up like the new ones, The Big Clock, is everything a real film noir isn’t. There isn’t any question of morality in this one. At all times George is a stand up guy. He just gets caught up in a stupid situation. He isn’t destroyed by anything like a woman or his destiny. In fact, he ends up better off than when the whole boring plot began. His crappy boss is dead and he’s gone and solved another murder!

The movie itself wasn’t even photographed in any creative fashion to at least approximate film noir (see The Big Combo). There was a clumsy attempt at a fancy shot early on and you get some of George running around in the dark hallways and around this big clock’s control room, but most everything took place in his brightly lit and badly decorated (think art deco meets sixties mod) offices.

Laughton is okay as the slimy boss, but his real-life wife, Elsa Lanchester (Bride of Frankenstein ) merely serves to fill time and provide inept comic relief as the artist that fought George over her own artwork and who might be able to identify him as Jefferson Randolph. I suppose the real comic relief is that Charles Laughton ever bothered to have a real-life wife, if you know what I mean. With Laughton, and Milland only a few years removed from his Best Actor Oscar, this doesn’t come down to incompetent performers, but to a script that is wholly lacking in any surprises or thrills.

© 2008 MonsterHunter