The Big Clock

Excellent noir thriller in which crime-journalist Milland, innocently involved with a girl subsequently murdered by his megalomaniac boss Laughton, is then commissioned by Laughton to find the culprit. When he himself becomes the framed suspect, the trap seems closed... With strong performances (especially Laughton as the gross, sexually insecure tycoon, confident in his ability to control the law through his wealth and status), the film also delights through Farrow's evocative direction: the newspaper conglomerate's enormous clock indicating not only the race against time but also the inhumanly inflexible world in which the action takes place; the phallic ornament with which the impotent murderer kills his mocking mistress; and John Seitz's marvellous high contrast photography, portraying a world of isolation in which nothing is as it seems. The source novel by Kenneth Fearing was remade, much altered, as No Way Out (1986).