LGM Film Club, Part 428: The Big Clock

I recently watched John Farrow’s 1948 film The Big Clock, adapted from the Kenneth Fearing novel, and starring Ray Milland and Charles Laughton. I’d read the novel some years ago, but didn’t totally remember the details as it turned out, as I wasn’t quite sure how this film would turn out. It’s a bit of a odd fit as a noir because the story is about a very faithful, if workaholic, crime magazine editor who isn’t overly or at least not dangerously attracted to the femme fatale, who rather quickly become more fatale than femme anyway. It’s really a story of a scumbag boss and a man trying to save himself from an unjust setup from a bitter old rich man. But it shares a lot of aesthetics with more classic noir and once you get over a few expectations of what should happen in a film identified this way, you realize you are just watching a quite good film.

I’ll also note here that Criterion has this in a Queer Noir collection and……I dunno. What queerness there allegedly is really doesn’t become that noticeable until the end, and even there, you really have to read that into it. Sometimes I think scholars really do want to read a bit too much into the past for present political and identity concerns. That’s very much not to say that there’s not slightly hidden queerness in many old movies. But this didn’t seem like a great example of it to me. Now I need to go back and reread the novel to see if it’s clearer there.