Huh. And here I was thinking that I had already seen all of the great film noir. I saw John Farrow's The Big Clock as the second part of a double feature shown at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (the first was Anthony Mann's superlative Reign of Terror [1949]). While I admit that I might have nodded off for a few seconds once or twice, I was still blown away by the film's air-tight plotting and razor-sharp screenwriting. It reminded me a great deal of Irving Pichel's Quicksand (1950) in that it spends the first third setting up an environment and a cast of characters and devotes the rest of the run-time utilizing them to create the ultimate bad day for the protagonist. The film's central idea--an innocent man being hunted in a skyscraper by people who may or may not know what he looks like--it absolutely ingenious. Charles Laughton is delicious as the evil head publisher.
8/10
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