![]() ![]() And he's not particularly happy to see her. Much later, she finds him: he's Stroud's actor friend, Mc Kinley. Brick Joke: In her first scene, Louise Patterson mentions that her husband's whereabouts are unknown.Under Janoth's orders, Stroud has to set one of these up to try and track down the mysterious "Jefferson Randolph" – even though Jefferson Randolph is actually him. The Big Board: When hunting fugitives, George Stroud and the staff of Crimeways magazine set up a blackboard known as 'the clue board', on which they list everything they learn about the fugitive.Accidental Misnaming: Scatterbrained artist Louise Patterson keeps getting art critic Don Klausmeyer's name wrong calling him (amongst other things) Klausman and Klausberger.Together they come up with a half-inebriated plot to embarrass Janoth – but the plan takes an unexpected turn toward murder. Stroud resigns and finds solace over multiple drinks at a local bar with Janoth's unhappy mistress, Pauline York (O'Sullivan). ![]() "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.The Big Clock is a 1948 American Film Noir adapted by screenwriter Jonathan Latimer from the 1946 novel of the same name by Kenneth Fearing, directed by John Farrow and starring Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, and Maureen O'Sullivan.Īnticipating a much-needed vacation from his abusive boss Earl Janoth (Laughton), magazine editor George Stroud (Milland) finally reaches a breaking point when Janoth insists he skip his much-delayed honeymoon and go out of town on assignment. 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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