Very big clock movie#

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. (If that sounds trite, blame me, not Fearing it's all much more affecting when delivered by characters in fedoras.) It's the big clock we're all trying, and failing, to outrace: the timekeeper of our own mortality. The big clock is also the one that winds down the wasted hours of the working man. So instead of white dress uniforms, the Pentagon and Sean Young's pouffed-out hair, you get the more comforting staples of noir fiction: Fedoras, mean streets and snappy dialogue.Д«ut Fearing, an accomplished poet, laces another theme deftly through the novel. It's better than the film, in part, because it's a straight shot of distilled noir: The setting is New York, not Washington, in the 1940s, not the 1980s. But Fearing's novel is something much more: a cunning clockwork mystery that's also an ingenious meditation on fate. What No Way Out does borrow from the book, however, is the exquisitely calibrated mechanism of Fearing's ingenious plot: the gears that run inside the big clock, as it were.Д«ut if you've seen No Way Out, you should still seek out and read The Big Clock.

Very big clock movie#

Unlike No Way Out, Fearing's novel, published in 1946 - and also made into a well-known noir movie of the same name in 1948 - wasn't about the military, or Washington, D.C., or backseat sex in a limo. How?Д®ven if you've never read Kenneth Fearing's noir novel The Big Clock, it's likely you already know its basic story and its biggest twist: the book was (very) loosely adapted as the popular (and pretty excellent) 1987 thriller No Way Out, starring Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman and Sean Young. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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