Noir Film/Book Adaptations: "The Big Clock" (1948), "Gone Girl" (2014)

David Fincher film "Gone Girl" unfolds in voice-over flashback narration, the supreme film-noir device used by every doomed anti-hero searching for insight into his fate – from the philandering husband accused in They Won’t Believe Me to rueful, lovelorn patsy Walter Neff in Double Indemnity (“How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”). The bemusement is the tipoff that there’s something to be understood, in hindsight, even if it’s just a doomed man trying to make sense of his fate. What’s initially sustained in suspense and teased out is what and how Nick (Ben Affleck) is confessing. The question of whether Nick has killed his cool, smart, missing wife, Amy, plays out in public opinion using the now-familiar and garish visual grammar of the 24-hour news cycle of recrimination and amateur accusation.

Peel that layer off and this cinematic "Gone Girl" and its cohorts can only arise from the the pulp crime and cinematic noir tradition. The femme fatale? Dear reader, he unwittingly married her. Contemporary noir renditions such as The Guest, The Other Typist and Gone Girl work as well as they do because their plots and stylistic conventions play on reader/audience expectations, relying on fragments and tropes lodged in our collective cultural memory of film noir, like 1952’s Sudden Fear.

Like Cornell Woolrich’s early pulp writing, where the Depression figures as the economic catalyst, the 2008 recession sets Gone Girl’s events in motion. The desperation is less one of impending financial ruin than of domestic complacency and contempt. Nick is a powerless anti-hero in an adulterous mess, in part, of his own passive making – albeit faced with a (sociopath) wife who would rather mete out preposterous punishment than admit romantic failure and divorce. Source: www.theglobeandmail.com

"She hovered over me for just a few seconds, then, Go-like, trotted down the hall, clearly not sleepy, and closed her door, knowing the kindest thing was to leave me alone. A lot of people lacked that gift:
knowing when to fuck off. People love talking, and I have never been a huge talker. I carry on an inner monologue, but the words often don’t reach my lips. She looks nice today, I’d think, but somehow it wouldn’t occur to me to say it out loud. My mom talked, my sister talked. I’d been raised to listen. So, sitting on the couch by myself, not talking, felt decadent. I leafed through one of Go’s magazines, flipped through TV channels, finally alighting on an old black-and-white show, men in fedoras scribbling notes while a pretty housewife explained that her husband was away in Fresno, which made the two cops look at each other significantly and nod. I smiled. I’d introduced Andie to noir – to Bogart and The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, all the classics.

Amy Elliott Dunne - Nine Days Gone: I am penniless and on the run. How fucking noir. Except that I am sitting in my Festiva at the far end of the parking lot of a vast fast-food complex on the banks of the Mississippi River, the smell of salt and factory-farm meat floating on the warm breezes. It is evening now – I’ve wasted hours – but I can’t move. I don’t know where to move to. At 5 o’clock, I begin driving north to the meeting spot, a river casino called Horseshoe Alley. It appears out of nowhere, a blinking neon clump in the middle of a scrawny forest. I roll in on fumes – a cliché I’ve never put to practice – park the car, and take in the view: a migration of the elderly, scuttling like broken insects on walkers and canes, jerking oxygen tanks toward the bright lights. Sliding in and out of the groups of octogenarians are hustling, overdressed boys who’ve watched too many Vegas movies and don’t know how poignant they are, trying to imitate Rat Pack cool in cheap suits in the Missouri woods. I enter under a glowing billboard promoting – for two nights only – the reunion of a ’50s doo-wop group. Inside, the casino is frigid and close." -"Gone Girl" (2012) by Gillian Flynn

The novel "The Big Clock" (1946) becomes a kind of dual race against time — what Nicholas Christopher, in his introduction to the 2006 New York Review Books reissue, describes as "the nocturnal hall of mirrors in which Stroud is hunter and hunted, suspect and witness, a man who is seeking to expose one part of the truth while suppressing another." Fearing, an accomplished poet, laces another theme deftly through the novel. The big clock is also the one that winds down the wasted hours of the working man. It's the big clock we're all trying, and failing, to outrace: the timekeeper of our own mortality. 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. 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. For despite Stroud's increasingly desperate efforts to prove his innocence, the big clock grinds relentlessly on. "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." Source: www.npr.org


John Farrow's movie adaptation of Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock (1948), based on a screenplay by Jonathan Latimer, is a near-perfect match for the book, telling in generally superb visual style a tale set against the backdrop of upscale 1940s New York and offering an early (but accurate) depiction of the modern media industry.

Told in the back-to-front fashion typical of film noir, it opens with George Stroud (Ray Milland) trapped, his life in danger, his survival measured in the minute-by-minute movements of the huge central clock of the office building where he's hiding. In flashback we learn that Stroud works for media baron Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton), loosely based on Henry Luce, as the editor of Crimeways magazine. Janoth is a manipulative, self-centered megalomaniac with various obsessions, including clocks; among other manifestations of the latter fixation, the skyscraper housing his empire's headquarters has as one of its central features a huge clock that reads out the time around the world down to the second.

Twenty-four hours earlier, on the eve of a combined honeymoon/vacation with his wife, Georgia (Maureen O'Sullivan), that has been put off for seven years, Stroud was ordered by Janoth to cancel the trip in order to work on a special project, and he resigned. As the narrative picks up speed, in his depression, Stroud misses the train his wife is on and crosses paths with Pauline (Rita Johnson), a former model for Janoth's Styleways magazine, who is also Janoth's very unhappy mistress, and the two commiserate by getting drunk together in a night on the town. Janoth and Pauline quarrel, and the publisher kills her in a jealous rage, using a sundial that she and Stroud picked up while wandering around in their revels. Janoth and his general manager, Steve Hagen (George Macready), contrive to pin the murder on the man that Janoth glimpsed leaving Pauline's apartment, whom he thinks was named Jefferson Randolph -- the name Stroud was drunkenly bandying about the night before. He gets Stroud back to Crimeways to lead the magazine's investigators in hunting down "Jefferson Randolph," never realizing that this was Stroud.

And Stroud has no choice but to return, desperately trying to gather evidence against Janoth and, in turn, prevent the clues gathered by the Crimeways staff from leading back to him. The two play this clever, disjointed game of cat-and-mouse, Janoth and Hagen planting evidence that will hang "Randolph", while Stroud, knowing what they don't about how close the man they seek to destroy is, arranges to obscure those clues and, in a comical twist, sends the least capable reporters and investigators to follow up on the most substantial clues. Stroud can't escape the inevitable, or the moments of weakness caused by fear and his own guilt over his near-unfaithfulness to his wife or the inscrutable gaze of Janoth's mute bodyguard Bill Womack (Harry Morgan), a stone-cold killer dedicated to protecting his employer.

Milland is perfect in the role of the hapless Stroud, and Laughton is brilliant as the vain, self-centered Janoth, but George Macready is equally good as Hagen, his smooth, upper-crust Waspy smarminess making one's skin crawl. Also worth noting is Harry Morgan's sinister, silent performance as Womack, and sharp-eyed viewers will also recognize such performers as Douglas Spencer, Noel Neill (especially memorable as a tart-tongued elevator operator), Margaret Field, Ruth Roman, and Lane Chandler in small roles. Additionally, the Janoth Publications building where most of the action takes place is almost a cast member in itself, an art deco wonder, especially the room housing the clock mechanism and the lobby and vestibules, all loosely inspired by such structures as the Empire State Building and the real-life Daily News headquarters on East 42nd Street. Source: www.nytimes.com

The book has been adapted for the cinema three times. The first and most faithful was the film of the same title, a little gem by the team of director John Farrow and writer Jonathan Latimer. It boasts a terrific cast that is superbly suited to its role, most notably Ray Milland as Stroud as he was so often at his best as anti-heroes with a roving eye. Charles Laughton is simply perfect as the slightly campy Janoth, here made into a man truly obsessed with the minutiae of time, adding an extra layer to the story. The movie is narrated solely by Stroud and told in flashback with him literally trapped inside the huge clock that dominates the inside of the Janoth building – after an elegant shot sweeping us through the Janoth building late at night, we then go back 36 hours to see how he ended up on the run. Latimer adds a lot of his trademark humorous dialogue in the script. Source: bloodymurder.wordpress.com

"It was five-thirty when I walked into the Silver Lining, alone. I had a drink and reviewed what I would have said to Roy and Steve Hagen, had they been present to listen. It did not sound as convincing as I had made it sound this morning. The bar of the Silver Lining is only twenty feet from the nearest tables. Pauline Delos was tall, ice-blonde, and splendid. The eye saw nothing but innocence, to the instincts she was undiluted sex, the brain said here was perfect hell. The face, the voice, and the figure registered all at once. We looked at each other across half the width of the room, and before I had quite placed her I had smiled and nodded. I said could I buy her a drink. She was blonde as hell, wearing a lot of black. I think we had an apple-brandy sidecar to begin with. It did not seem this was only the second time we had met. All at once a whole lot of things were moving and mixing, as though they had always been there. The attractions of the Delos woman multiplied themselves by ten, and then presently they were multiplying by the hundreds. We looked at each other, and that instant was like the white flash of a thrown switch when a new circuit is formed and then the current flows invisibly through another channel. She was smiling, and I realized I had been having an imaginary argument with a shadow of George Stroud standing just in back of the blazing nimbus she had become. It was amazing. All that other Stroud seemed to be saying was: Why not? Whatever he meant, I couldn't imagine." -"The Big Clock" (1946) by Kenneth Fearing