The Big Clock (1948, John Farrow)

Ray Milland is a bad husband to Maureen O’Sullivan, working for toxic boss Charles Laughton. When the boss threatens to fire and blacklist Ray from the publishing industry if he leaves for a long-delayed honeymoon, Ray responds by standing up his wife and getting drunk with some strange girl (Rita Johnson, Ray’s fiancee in The Major and the Minor). Coincidentally the strange girl is the boss’s mistress, whom the boss murders that same night, calling in his cleaner Steve (Human Duplicator George Macready) and his top crime investigator Ray (still 15 years away from acquiring his X-RAY EYES). Ray runs around finding clues that all point to himself, while everyone he met that night is being generous to him and his wife, understandably, is not. Bringing together the two greatest movies of the past decade, Laughton is terrific as the wicked publisher, and he’s inordinately proud of his clockwork device. Fighting his way out from the big clock, Ray incapacitates the henchman, and to…