The Big ClockI'm not a big fan of Ray Milland, the leading man here, but he has energy and pulls off a kind of Jimmy Stewart fellow pretty well. I am, for sure, a big fan of two other actors here, Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, who are great, and of the cinematographer, John Seitz. It is Seitz who makes this movie launch and go far, right from the get go, with a really nice establishing shot merging into a moving camera interior scene.Milland is not bad, of course—he's better in normal dramatic roles like his most famous as an alcoholic in "The Lost Weekend"—but he lacks both the everyman ease of Stewart and the troubled dramatic noir intensity of Bogart or Mitchum. His predicament opens the movie, ominously, in classic noir fashion with voice-over, and within a heartbeat we are in a flashback getting to the backstory.The little trick of the plot (having the main characters involved in a crime solving magazine) is great fun, actually, and never seems contrived. The title however points to a weird quirk in the whole works, a highly elaborate clock that is sort of forced onto the situation, and really isn't very integral to the plot after all (even if it's used dramatically a couple of times). Mostly this is a noir about a fairly normal guy and a crime he ends up having to solve, a la Hitchcock.The femme fatale here, Maureen O'Sullivan, is great, and Laughton is his quirky self, with mustache. Look for Harry Morgan ("Dragnet" and "Mash") in a weird fun role. Mostly just enjoy a well constructed, offbeat noir-ish crime film and the great visuals throughout.

This movie stands out for films in the genre. It's a very gimmicky tale, and a bit confusing, but it remains entertaining and by the flick's end, it asserts its own individuality.Laughton is a wonderful villain here. His performance? For the most part, lethargic would be an apt description. His one 'Mr. Hyde' moment is his brutal killing of his paramour, a very pretty Rita Johnson, which stands out, because we see the tub of lard Laughton back to his old lethargy soon afterward, as he is enjoying a massage.Featured also is a strangely sinister Henry Morgan, who of course later became the amiable character actor Harry Morgan of 'MASH' and 'Pete and Gladys' from television.Maureen O'Sullivan is given a very nominal role as Ray Milland's long-suffering wife. She actually figures into the movie's melodramatic climax, but is seen throughout the film basically nagging her husband, who is of course 'married' to the Jonith Newspaper, Jonith being Laughton's role.Farrow and his screenwriter have fashioned an unusual murder tale where we are given all of the information. We are shown the murder, and, as even Sir Alfred Hitchcock would surely appreciate, we are left to agonize over Milland's plight of easily being framed for a crime he didn't commit.Venerable character actor Lloyd Corrigan is put to good use. George Macready is wonderful playing his usual shady, snaky character. Milland's performance is spirited and the action moves fast. It's easily a film you would appreciate more the second time.In short, the film is made with the assumption that the audience has a brain and an imagination. And let's not forget the wonderfully eccentric Elsa Lanchester, perfectly cast as the down-on-her-luck painter out to profit one way or another from the scandal.

This is a great, high enjoyable film, that can easily compete with some of Hitchock's greatest films, like "Dial M for Murder", "Frenzy", "The wrong man" etc.Milland and Laughton are both great and the movie keeps you in suspense with a smart script and a lot of anxiety while Milland tries to avoid being discovered. Many good films let you down in the end, but fortunately this is not one of them.I do not understand how someone could not like this movie, especially if you like Hitchcock style. I honestly believe it is unfair for this film to have a rating below 8...

Call me a disbeliever, but I find the plot of this movie utterly unrealistic. A pretty good one though; an action packaged, solidly built, suspense flick moving along at a sustained pace, as regular as the drumbeat in Ravel's Bolero. And its acting is the best, especially from Milland and Macready, while Laughton overplays his character a little bit. As for Lanchester, she's clearly enjoying each one of her moments in front of the camera, but it's Sullivan the one underused here, almost an afterthought—just see how almost nothing would have changed to the plot had they taken out her Georgette. Good cinematography also, especially with the overlapping shots, fade-outs and the group shots during the war councils in the blackboard room. An entertaining thriller, which I don't know why people insist in calling noir. In my book, a film noir is the application of the physical laws of entropy--everything in Nature tends to chaos, fragmentation and loss—to movies, so it's impossible for a noir to have a happy, or at least satisfying, ending. It always has to be bad, at least sad. If main characters end up alive and well, at least they got to be are sad because of losses or failures, even when there is no moral degradation--as it happened in Scarlet Street. Instead, the mood here is upbeat, even optimistic, so much so TBC could have easily been turned into a comedy--for ex., had the corpse disappeared from the lieu of the crime and had Pauline appeared alive & well at the end, because she didn't die after all, but went into hiding, after regaining consciousness, for fear of Janoth. In any case this film has the looks and the feel of a Hitchcock and I would have certainly thought so had not known beforehand that was Mia Farrow's dad the man behind the camera.When I say unrealistic, I'm referring to two basic plot elements which make it hard to digest. The first concerns not so much the jam Janoth finds himself in after the killing of his mistress, but the way he acts in such a circumstance. See, I have lived enough to realize that the higher your social standing is, the bigger the things you may get away with--including murder. Janoth should have known better and realized that what he does then is stupid, something showing his lack of awareness about his own place in society, and that he didn't need to do any police job. Someone as powerful as him would have never acted the way he does.In real life, after thinking about it for a minute, Janoth would have simply called police and reported that he has just found Pauline dead when coming to visit her. Then, not much later phones would have started ringing in offices of politicians, chiefs of police, members of the judiciary, and every effort would have been displayed to get him out of the jam and away from the lieu of the crime and from the case itself. (remember The Sting, when the "FBI brass" orders the local policeman to get the high profile hoodlum out of the place where two men have been just killed; and he was just a bandit!).That's what would have happened in TBC: the intervening policemen would have been ordered to get Janoth immediately out of that apt. and to keep complete silence about his presence there. And even if he had arrived to confess the killing, that wouldn't have made any difference; he would have been shielded anyway, on account of his importance for society. Before TV, or the Internet, press barons were of great importance for the political and economical establishments. And even after that; just remember the Life magazine photos of L.H. Oswald holding a rifle, after the Kennedy assassination, which went a long way into convincing public opinion he was really a gun nut. That's the kind of favor men like Janoth used to provide regularly to people in high places, so was anybody going to rock his boat just because of such a silly thing, for a dead woman? That's why if a man like him had ever found himself in such a bind he wouldn't have even lost his cool. All he had to do then was to make a few phone calls, inform the right people, and wait there to be taken out of the jam, so he may keep performing such valuable services. (In fact Stroud himself recognizes this when he says to his wife: Janoth could find dozens of alibis, I only have myself.) If anybody doesn't agree with such analysis I invite him, her, to see the Italian movie Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (1970) where Gian Maria Volonté--of spaghetti western fame--plays a Chief of Homicides who murders his mistress and who starts intentionally leaving clues around, linking him to the crime, as if wanting to test how far he could go; if he can get away with murder, so to speak, because of his high post. Despite all his efforts at auto-incrimination his peers refuse to take him in. The film ends in a surreal scene, where his comrades gang up on him, forcing him to confess his...innocence. That was brilliant, much more realistic than what's shown here. Imagine Janoth leaving many clues linking him to the murder and watching with amusement how the police deploy every effort to lead the investigation in some other direction. That would have been a fun movie, but another one also.Another unrealistic element concerns Janoth's nasty "hobby" of firing people at a whim, but his employees still laboring happily under his orders. Believe me, I knew one of such places and that's no picnic; rather a living hell. But an entertaining flick anyway, if you overlook all what I said. 7/10.