He plays a go-getting, workaholic editor employed at a sensational crime magazine his specialty is finding missing persons and producing a story for the magazine about them.įellow Britisher Charles Laughton, looking rather odd with a seldom-worn moustache, plays his boss, Earl Janoth, the dictatorial, megalomaniacal owner of the magazine. Ray Milland plays the typical film noir protagonist, trapped in a web of circumstance that he must extricate himself from or perish. In the new production, only the general plot was retained, with the setting being changed completely. With this film, we have the chance to see the original version of Kenneth Fearing’s novel, which was remade as No Way Out (starring Kevin Costner) in 1987. Art Directors: Hans Drier, Roland Anderson, Albert Nozaki.Ĭast: Ray Milland ( George Stroud), Maureen O’Sullivan ( Georgette Stroud), Charles Laughton ( Earl Janoth), George Macready ( Steve Hagen), Rita Johnson ( Pauline York), Elsa Lanchester ( Louise Patterson), Dan Tobin ( Roy Cordette), Henry Morgan ( Bill Womach), Richard Webb ( Nat Sperling), Lloyd Corrigan ( McInley), Ted Van Brunt ( Tony Watson), Harold Vermilyea ( Don Klausmeyer), Douglas Spencer ( Bert Finch). ![]() Screenplay: Jonathan Latimer, adapted by Harold Goldman, from the novel by Kenneth Fearing. "This gigantic watch that fixes order and establishes the pattern for chaos itself," Fearing writes: "it has never changed, it will never change, or be changed."Īdam Sternbergh is the author of Shovel Ready.Toronto Film Society presented The Big Clock (1948) on Monday, Septemin a double bill with Act of Violence as part of the Season 41 Monday Evening Film Buffs Series “D”, Programme 1. For despite Stroud's increasingly desperate efforts to prove his innocence, the big clock grinds relentlessly on. Fearing's novel fell out of print until it was rediscovered by NYRB Classics and reissued as what it is: That rare noir masterwork that somehow both keeps you in suspense and unmoors you with its underlying fatalism. In the end, Fearing manages that rare and enviable feat: a page-turner that's expertly plotted and coiled tight as a watch-spring, yet whose narrative gears also serve as an affecting existential metaphor. (If that sounds trite, blame me, not Fearing it's all much more affecting when delivered by characters in fedoras.) It's the big clock we're all trying, and failing, to outrace: the timekeeper of our own mortality. The big clock is also the one that winds down the wasted hours of the working man. So instead of white dress uniforms, the Pentagon and Sean Young's pouffed-out hair, you get the more comforting staples of noir fiction: Fedoras, mean streets and snappy dialogue.īut Fearing, an accomplished poet, laces another theme deftly through the novel. It's better than the film, in part, because it's a straight shot of distilled noir: The setting is New York, not Washington, in the 1940s, not the 1980s. But Fearing's novel is something much more: a cunning clockwork mystery that's also an ingenious meditation on fate. ![]() What No Way Out does borrow from the book, however, is the exquisitely calibrated mechanism of Fearing's ingenious plot: the gears that run inside the big clock, as it were.īut if you've seen No Way Out, you should still seek out and read The Big Clock. ![]() Unlike No Way Out, Fearing's novel, published in 1946 - and also made into a well-known noir movie of the same name in 1948 - wasn't about the military, or Washington, D.C., or backseat sex in a limo. ![]() How?Įven if you've never read Kenneth Fearing's noir novel The Big Clock, it's likely you already know its basic story and its biggest twist: the book was (very) loosely adapted as the popular (and pretty excellent) 1987 thriller No Way Out, starring Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman and Sean Young. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Big Clock Author Kenneth Fearing
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