A prime candidate for film noir is Johnny O’Clock (1947), a movie about a junior partner, O’Clock, in a gambling operation who happens to be involved with the senior partner’s wife. A cool customer who continuously calculates the odds and is always on the lookout for himself, he misses something when the corrupt cop trying to muscle in on the operation disappears, and the cop’s girlfriend commits suicide. When the girlfriend’s sister shows up to mourn her sister, O’Clock, knowing the slain woman, finds himself taking the role of consoler as he pretends to be a decent man.
And, as a man who’s always calculated the odds, coolly made the right decisions (those being the decisions in his best interest) he’s always been a pretender. Decency gains him trust, thus he’ll be decent. So the man who works as his personal servant is an ex-con who owes his living to O’Clock; he treats the lower-level players in the gambling operation decently, because that enhances their performance. Even the cheating dealer is treated decently, not because O’Clock is necessarily soft but because, as O’Clock observes, the man’s a good worker, a poor cheat, and now knows he’ll be under suspicion. A replacement might be better at cheating, and thus get away with it.
But O’Clock will slap a woman when he thinks it’ll improve her behavior, at least as it relates to himself; and he’ll formulate a complex plan ending in murder, betraying just a small amount of rage that the man may have tried to have O’Clock murdered. First, he’ll get the money owed him by the intended victim. Then, when the time is right … he’ll stop pretending.
O’Clock’s an elemental, only restrained by the practical considerations of breaking the rules of society, unconcerned about the indirect effects of law-breaking. God plays no role in his life, nor any other entity that influences him in the moral realm. He pursues what he wants, as a narcissist, possibly even a solipsist, although admittedly the topic is not broached in the movie.
So when the slain woman’s sister, Nancy, appears and finally awakens his passion, he finds himself ill-equipped to manage a relationship with her. She won’t run to escape danger when so instructed. Unlike him, she doesn’t have a clear view of how to make a decision; she may, in fact, be “the fool” that he is not.
Nancy, however, is the one who sees clearly in the end.
And yet, the film technically fails as film noir. A good noir film follows the logic of the behavior of those living in the twilight of society right to their sordid ends. So the anti-hero of Rififi, even as he rescues the child, ends up dying because of his evil ways; film noir is full of morality tales. O’Clock may meet a destiny he’d spent a lifetime avoiding, but it’s not the one we’d been expecting. My Arts Editor exclaimed, “Well, that was a little flat.” And it was.
The cinematography is wonderful. We were exclaiming over it immediately, while the audio is better than many movies of the era. The characters were mostly fascinating, although the slain woman was a bit of a cliched milksop. Dick Powell’s O’Clock is a cool cucumber, betraying emotions in small, ambiguous ways; Nancy (Evelyn Keyes) brings a certain freshness to a role requiring vivacity, vulnerability, frustration, and a certain sly sarcasm; and actor Lee Cobb. playing the cop who’s investigating the disappearance of a fellow cop, is neither perfunctory nor brutal and is given a certain cleverness, even if it’s not always effective. The supporting characters vary, but I thought the ladies in the boarding house where the woman’s corpse is found were a minor delight, betraying eccentricities and contradictions worthy of real life.
But the plot, while intriguing, does fail to give us a good view of O’Clock’s inner life. We can understand him, but too much of it is from inference and deduction, which is another strike against it being a noir film; illustrating that ill choices lead to ill ends is the raison d’être of the genre, so not understanding O’Clock is a strike against including the movie in the noir genre – and makes it a little harder to enjoy the movie. It’s hard to whole-heartedly endorse this movie, but it’s certainly worth your time if you enjoy the genre.
