The Big Clock is a thriller by Kenneth Fearing in which magazine publisher Earl Janosh murders his promiscuous mistress, then tries to pin the crime on her latest lover. He directs his true-crime magazine staff to find the killer (without explaining why), unaware that said lover is actually George, the editor. Realizing he’s being assigned to frame himself, George tries to slow up the investigation, but his staff are very good, and before long, they’re closing in.
Movie fans may recognize this as the basis for both the 1948 Ray Milland movie The Big Clock, and Kevin Costner’s eighties thriller, No Way Out which shifted the setting to the Pentagon, and turned Janosh into Secretary of Defense Gene Hackman( who blames the killing on a possibly mythical Russian mole, justifying Hackman taking control of the case from the cops). Having just read Fearing’s novel, I started thinking about the changes in adaptating books to film:
•Sex. In Fearing’s book, George is a serial adulterer, which would never have flown for the hero of a 1948 movie, so Milland’s evening with the mistress never gets beyond a pub crawl and a drunken snooze on her couch. In No Way Out, there’s plenty of sex, but military officer Costner is clearly in love with Sean Young, rather than the sordid liaison of the original (I’ve always loved the word ‘sordid,’ by the way).
Either way the effect is a much more sympathetic hero; I think you can get away in print with a selfish protagonist such as George more easily than when you have to ask the audience to watch him for a couple of hours.
•Ending twists. All three versions end with someone who can identify George tracking him to the publisher’s offices (or the Pentagon), then going office to office. He escapes in Fearing’s novel because Janosh is taken over by a rival publisher who has no interest in Janosh’s little pet project.
Even though it’s not a deus ex machina (Janosh’s financial problems are set up well in advance), I can’t see such a lucky break working on screen—and neither version tries. Milland bluffs that he can frame Janosh’s right-hand man and co-conspirator for the crime; when Janosh decides this is the easy way out, the man kills him, only to die himself (in the book, Janosh, ruined, commits suicide, but his aide gets off scott free). Costner plays the same card on Hackman’s devoted gay aide, who kills himself when he realizes the man he loves will sell him out (a fairly typical resolution for a gay character back in the day).
A further twist comes when Costner is revealed to be the very mole Hackman was trying to frame (which is really hard to swallow in the light of day, but it works for me in the movie).
I think they made the right choice to drop Fearing’s ending, because of the third difference:
•Tone. Fearing’s novel certainly has plenty of tension, it’s not a straight thriller. We see into the minds of not only George but Janosh, his right-hand man, George’s long-suffering wife and a couple of supporting characters. It’s as much a character study as a thriller.
The 1948 movie, on the other hand, is a taut thriller first and foremost and I really don’t think having George saved by chance would have worked (nor in the Costner version). Because of the running time and the way they have to focus to get the story in, it’s tougher for film to meander the way a book can do (not impossible, but rarer—particularly in a mystery/thriller story).
•Languange.
I do think the 1948 film might have kept Fearing’s theme of “the big clock” as a metaphor for life, a relentless machine that inevitably grinds you down in the gears on its own schedule; then again, it may be one of those literary metaphors that would have sounded odd if Milland kept referring to it. The movie justifies the title by having him hide in the building clock-tower at one point, which works—though as my brother pointed out, it doesn’t play enough of a role to really explain it.
Language and metaphor are tough ones: Any Raymond Chandler novel loses some of the authors poetry when it comes to the screen, for instance. Also, the speech you can get away with in print doesn’t always work so well on the screen where actual people are saying it.
The Fearing novel and both movies are worth catching, but it’s interesting to observe the changes.
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