The Big Clock

John Farrow’s art deco noir traps George Stroud (Ray Milland) inside Earl Janoth’s (Charles Laughton) power-hungry media empire, both physically and metaphorically, when he’s implicated in the murder of Janoth’s no-good mistress, Pauline York (Rita Johnson). While the noir sensibilities are slightly compromised by occasional comic flourishes a la The Thin Man, Farrow deftly uses wide overhead angles, deep focus compositions, and a uniquely brutal murder to remind us that the noir “underworld” lives even amidst America’s most revered, legitimate institutions. Janoth’s meticulous henchman Steve Hagen (George Macready) open up the film to unmistakably homoerotic interpretations (made explicit in Fearing’s source novel) which skirmish with the happy family life tugging on Stroud from the other direction and embodied in the form of Maureen O’Sullivan, who plays Stroud’s lovely but increasingly impatient wife Georgette.