Da Big Clock
On vacation, we watched three different adaptations of a thriller novel from 1946:
- The Big Clock, 1948, John Farrow
- Police Python 357, 1976, Alain Corneau
- No Way Out, 1987, Roger Donaldson
They're all wildly different versions of the same complex plot. I'm going to spoil it in this blog post, so if you want to experience any of these movies for yourself, skip this one!
Basically, all three of these stories have the same four key characters:
- The Cat, a powerful leader of a company or a major public institution. He's morally corrupt and abusive.
- The Mouse, a humbler worker who is employed by The Cat. We're expected to think of them as A Good Guy.
- The Girlfriend. Both The Cat and The Mouse are dating the same girl, but neither knows one another's identity at first. The Girlfriend loves The Mouse because he is a good guy, but cannot leave The Cat because he exerts coercive power over her and pays for her rent.
- The Enabler. The Cat always has a shrewd, manipulative assistant. The relationship between the Cat and the Enabler may be tense and twisted. The Enabler is sometimes forcing the Cat to keep on being evil, even when he wants to confess his crimes.
The plot goes like this: The Cat is dating a girl. The Mouse hits it off with her without realizing that his boss at work is his new girlfriend's long-time sugar daddy. She prefers the Mouse, though, and they have a great time.
One night, the girlfriend tries to break up with The Cat. He becomes enraged and murders her in her home. Somewhere in this process, the Mouse and the Cat become aware of one another without ever identifying one another clearly. Each of them saw evidence of the other's presence at the girlfriend's home - a shadow on a streetcorner, a light in a window, etc - but not a face.
After the murder, however, the Cat hides his tracks, escapes, and immediately calls up his Enabler. The Enabler convinces the Cat to pin the murder on the shadowy figure the Cat saw at his girlfriend's house. In all adaptations, the Cat is, at this time, unaware of the identity of the man they're choosing to blame. In most adaptations, the Mouse is also unaware of the Cat's identity at this time, too.
The Cat goes into work the next day and summons the Mouse. The Mouse is then assigned to find the killer. Soon, it's inescapably obvious to him: HE is the one he's been assigned to find! The Mouse must research his own "crime" while hiding evidence and carefully combating his boss's manipulations.
All adaptations also include sequences before the murder where the Mouse accidentally creates a lot of highly specific, damning evidence identifying himself, and interacts with many people who can easily remember his face. All the stories involve third-act crises where the Mouse must physically avoid the witnesses when they suddenly arrive at headquarters for his team to interrogate. This usually involves hiding from the witnesses within a large, complex structure, or tricking them in clever ways.
This thriller plot has a TON of potential, so it's unsurprising to me that it's been adapted so many times. A cat and mouse story about a murder, where an innocent man must investigate his own "crime" while totally aware that it will be pinned on him unfairly?! Very cool! Lots of possibilities!
One of the structural difficulties of the story, however, is the fact that the Cat and Mouse are unaware of one another's identities at the start of the conflict. In No Way Out, the Mouse - Kevin Costner - is aware of the Cat - Gene Hackman - but that's the only adaptation where either character has any real awareness of the other's identity before the hunt begins.
This mutual ignorance makes it difficult for these stories to depict the growing adversarial relationship between the two characters. Even No Way Out suffers from the fact that Hackman's character is unaware of Costner's. It's super cool and interesting to see so many different creative teams try to deal with what seems like a difficulty of logistics, or of physics. How do we keep the plot going? How do we create moments where characters learn shocking truths about one another? What guard-rails do we put in place to force these characters to continue interacting as they begin to figure out their hidden relationship? Who knows what clues about the crime, and how do they manipulate or hide those clues to affect the mystery?
Most of all, how do we keep the tension raising throughout a story where two people are hunting one another, but have no fucking idea who they're hunting, or who is hunting them?
I was very interested to see how each movie dealt with this problem. In the end, Police Python was the most successful at solving it - as a thriller, in fact, I think it's far and away the most structurally-sound of the three. Police Python does a very good job of presenting the audience with easily-parseable visual clues which the Mouse can track down and try to mitigate. The clues are so physical and meaningful that the movie can show the Mouse cleaning up the evidence in complete silence, which helps keep the cast small and lets the plot move quickly. No Way Out requires the characters to chatter about the clues constantly, and several of the clues are digital, in CIA databases or whatever, so they're much less interesting and dynamic in a dramatic context.
Police Python also has the Mouse remain completely ignorant of WHO killed his girlfriend until the very last possible moment, but allows the Cat to discover his identity earlier. It does so in a moment which interrogates the who-knows-what question very effectively using a physical prop which the Mouse has no idea the Cat has previously seen. Again, this allows the audience to track the clues visually without the help of explanatory dialogue. This is the only movie of the three which has the Cat discover the Mouse's identity first, but it turns out to be a great choice. The Cat and the Enabler scheme evilly about how to punish him, which is a great third-act tension-raiser.
The adaptations disagree pretty mightily on how erotic this thriller should be. The Big Clock novel starts off with the Mouse clearly cheating on his wife with the Cat's girlfriend... but the movie removes sex and romance from the plot entirely. He's not dating the Girlfriend... they just hang out! For one night!! Chastely!!!! I swear!!!!!!! The lack of boning in this movie is downright distracting.
No Way Out is much better at being an erotic thriller than Police Python, which is old-school-French (derogatory) and has zero convincing relationships whatsoever. Police Python stars Yves Montand of The Wages of Fear; he's fully An Old Guy in Python, and the Girlfriend looks like 30 years younger than him. She's also constantly rude and weird to him, and does not look at all enthused when they bone.
On the other hand, No Way Out contains a ton of enthusiastic boning and very convincingly sells the core conflict that leads to the murder: the Girlfriend massively prefers Costner over Hackman, to the point where she'd risk breaking up with this powerful man in order to be with him instead. We believe it because they clearly love to fuck. That chemistry is completely missing from the other two movies.
Setting-wise, Police Python beats the other two movies by a mile. This story is very clearly working at its best when it takes place inside a police department.
The Big Clock, however, perplexingly sets it inside a publishing company that makes magazines? And No Way Out takes place inside the US Pentagon. It's really, really perplexing to me that No Way Out did not just go all the way to being a cop story - the national defense angle ends up being not so great for it, IMO.
Just making this into a story about police and police corruption is absolutely the right call. It is fully insane to me that the original novel these books are all based on features a magazine editor instead of a cop. The character's goal is to solve a murder... hunt down a guy... resolve a mystery... and he's NOT A COP? There's a powerful man in charge who uses money and violence to get his way... and he's NOT A COP? Come on! Just make this a cop story. You can actually, like, say things about the world if you make it a cop story.
(Unfortunately, Police Python doesn't say anything important about the world. But No Way Out could have done a better job saying things about the world if the characters had just been cops, I think.)
If you really want to see a bunch of different creative teams tackle the same story and all kinda fail it in different ways, I really cannot recommend these films enough. It is absolutely fascinating stuff.
In the mid 2010s, I watched every single adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in one month, and this was just as much fun, in a different way.
No Way Out is pretty easy to get ahold of. We utilized Kanopy, the streaming service many libraries in the US offer cardholders access to, for Police Python 357. And The Big Clock is on the Internet Archive. Have fun!!