the clock

"At precisely 3:45 on that Saturday afternoon
in the last week of September..."
-- the omniscient and anonymous "Voice of Destiny" narrator
who simultaneously delineates and dictates the clockwork plot machinations
of Stanley Kubrick's The Killers (1956)

"Would you be so kind as to remind me when it's 10:30?
Sometimes I'm inclined to lose track of time."
--  staid Prof. Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) to his club steward
in Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944);
a reckless impulse will soon  plunge him into a nightmare...

"I shall never forget the weekend Laura died..."
-- narrator Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), proud owner
of the fastidiously refined and superior sensibilty that infuses every frame
of Otto Preminger's Laura (1944); he begins by placing the story in the past tense,
if only so that he may exert greater control over the telling of it

In the world of noir, time is always running out.  It might be that a trap is closing steadily around someone whose time is growing short. Or a seemingly foolproof scheme that's been planned like clockwork is coming apart because the timing has slipped out of joint. Or perhaps something or someone has suddenly emerged from out of the dim past to cast a shadow  over the present...

Time is an implacable force that marches steadily forward, crushing men's plans and destroying their lives with a kind of awesome indifference. Then again, it may be something more sinister, an agent of fate deployed on some cruel whim by a malevolent and misanthropic universe to play a black joke on some poor sucker.  Time always has the last laugh.

Films noir often shuffle back and forth in time, using flashbacks and past-tense narration to lend an ominous air of destiny and inevitibility to their stories. The picture just retraces the characters' steps to see how each one led inexorably to a fate that's already been decided. Classics such as Otto Preminger's Laura (1944) and Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) are actually narrated by dead men.  Who says they tell no tales?  In film noir, corpses may have plenty to say about how they got that way. 

The clock starts running at the beginning of Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), until time runs out at the end.   These two shots of identical clocks -- one belonging to viciously witty newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), and the other his gift to friend and protege Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), are from the opening and closing shots of the film, respectively.  In the first shot, Waldo starts the clock ticking, the camera running with his voiceover narration, and immediately lets us know that the story takes place in the recent past: "I shall never forget the weekend Laura died..."    Waldo himself is sitting in the bathtub through the door on the right, tapping out words on a typewriter (perhaps even the narration we're hearing).  But the gliding shot that offers us a guided tour of the exquisite objects in Waldo's impeccable living room -- where police detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) waits to talk to him -- is definitely from Waldo's "point of view."  It's his way of introducing himself, and the movie, and claiming the story as his own (no matter that the movie's named after Laura).  And Waldo knows how to make  a fine first impression.  The movie ends when the clock -- and by extension, time itself -- stops dead.
Charles Laughton and Ray Milland pose for a still that captures the atmosphere of John Farrow's aptly titled The Big Clock (1948). A missed train, a chance meeting, a reckless night on the town: they all add up to murder.  George Stroud (Milland), the editor of Crimeways magazine, must solve the crime himself before time runs out and the evidence his own staff is uncovering implicates him as the killer.
	Orson Welles starts a time bomb ticking in the long and intricate opening take of the film that marks the end of noir's classic period: Touch of Evil (1959).  The suspense builds in real time as the shot (quoted and celebrated in Robert Altman's 1992 The Player) tracks the characters' intertwining paths, by foot and by car, across the US-Mexican border.  It ends with a bang.
"It's 10:30, Professor."  In Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944), Prof. Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) finds that this clock on the fireplace mantle at his club is something of an agent of fate.  But once the clock tolls, is it too late to ever turn back the hands of time?
(Click on the image above for an animated sequence of the images that set the specific time and place for Psycho.)	The opening scenes of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) are quintessential film noir:  The camera pans slowly across an anonymous cityscape while a series of superimposed titles locks down the exact location in time and space. We begin to move in on one particular window, seemingly no different from any other (chosen by chance or by design?) and pass through the sill into a dark room shaded by (what else?) venetian blinds. Our eyes take a moment to adjust and we discover a pair of clandestine lovers finishing a lunchtime tryst in a cheap hotel room.  They're still partially undressed. It's a hot day, the kind of day when (as remarked in Body Heat, Lawrence Kasdan's 1981 reworking of Double Indemnity) people think the ordinary rules don't apply.  The tone is set for an impulsive action that will have fateful consequences...
Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.  This is Claire Trevor and her co-star, a wall clock, in Anthony Mann's Raw Deal (1948).
	The ornate clock in the Dark Room bears a resemblance to both the grandfather clock in Laura, as well as the mantle clock in The Woman in the Window.  But I actually found this timepiece in a still from one of my favorite screwball comedies: George Cukor's Holiday (1938).  It appears on the mantle in the big, haunting house that (to describe it in noir terms) holds Katharine Hepburn and her alcoholic brother Lew Ayres prisoner, slowly suffocating the very life out of them. Yep, it's a comedy... but maybe there are more noir elements to it than I had previously suspected...

out

back into the dark room