THE BIG CLOCK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 467, 4 June 1948, Page 24

THE BIG CLOCK

(Paramount) ; NE of the things which attracts me to a Charles Laughton picture is the possibility that room has been found in the cast for his wife, Elsa Lanchester, for I am not sure but that she wears the better of the two. It is a long time now since I first saw Laughton-if memory serves, in a film version of C. S. Forester’s Payment Deterred-and in the intervening decade and a half he has so often played the menace that Hollywood has apparently come to rely on his appearance rather than his acting to convey the essence of his villainy. That, at least, is the impression I got from The Big Clockand I don’t like to have my conditioned reflexes taken for granted. The Big Clock, because of its horological motif, and for the reason that it

focuses interest on the discomfiture and not the discovery of the murderer, invites recollection of Orson Welles’s film The Stranger, but hardly bears comparison with it» In place of the straightforward simplicity and small cast *of the Welles story, The. Big Clock has too many faces and an over-complicated movement. Scene of the film is the skyscraper headquarters of a big U.S. magazine factory-shades of Walter Mitty! As the proprietor of the organisation, Laughton, too, has a Secret Life, and the action gets properly under way when, in a moment of pique, he bats her over the head with a _sundial-cum-paper-weight which Ray Milland has carelessly left lying around. Milland, who is editor of the crime magazine in the ‘Laughton chain-and who knows more

about this crime than is healthy for him -becomes deeply involved when the magazine staff begin unofficial investigations. Only the most bewildering story complications save him from his own indiscretions. The most entertaining of these complications is undoubtedly Elsa Lanchester, as an intensely comic surrealist painter with a clutch of children and a complicated marital case-history. Would that I had seen more of her. ; Ray Milland seems a good deal happier teamed up with Maureen O’Sullivan than he was recently with Marlene Dietrich, but I wish Hollywood would forget the old gag about the journalist who can’t get time to go off on his honeymoon. That one may have been good enough for the front page when Hecht and Macarthur were in their prime, but it doesn’t even look like news any longer, However, in spite of the overtime worked in the stereotyping departmefit, the film maintains a good pace and is competent entertainment of its kind.