big clock black moon rising

The term film noir gets stretched awfully thin at times, including movies produced at the height of the then unnamed and unrecognized genre's popularity and those that took their inspiration long after. The Big Clock (1948) was released right in the thick of post-war pessimism and certainly shares a good amount of cinematic DNA, yet never really looks the part. Director John Farrow's thriller is a bit bland visually, but compensates with a crackerjack concept that was good enough to inspire a Kevin Costner remake (No Way Out) in 1987.

George Stroud (Ray Milland) is a workaholic magazine editor who specializes in locating missing people. Pushed to the breaking point by Mr. Janoth, his merciless boss (Charles Laughton), Stroud misses his family vacation and winds up spending the evening with a beautiful woman...who just so happens to be Janoth's mistress. Furious at her indiscretion, Janoth murders her and relies on a business associate to cover up the crime, blaming it all on this unknown stranger who left just before he arrived. In a dangerously ironic turn of events, Stroud is then asked to hunt down himself, trapped in the office while a dodging a parade of witness who could place him at the scene of the crime.

The Big Clock (named after a rather irrelevant plot device) is a complicated piece of filmmaking with a ridiculous amount of moving parts. The first half-hour is a confusing as anything in The Big Sleep, with dialogue fired off at a nearly incomprehensible pace. But once Stroud's predicament becomes clear, the script settles into an entertainingly edgy rhythm, with multiple near misses amping up the suspense. Milland's performance as the victim of circumstance is curiously good-natured despite the stakes involved. As an actor, he's too charming by half and never sells the situation. But the rest of the cast keeps the plot ticking, including Laughton's icy aloofness and Elsa Lanchester's spot-on comic relief. The Big Clock may be watered down noir, but with a script this clever it certainly goes down easy.

Arrow Academy's new Blu-ray presentation is the sort of treatment the studios should be putting out themselves. But who's complaining when we get extras like an audio commentary by film scholar Adrian Martin, several video appreciations by other film experts, a rare hour-long radio dramatization, trailer, stills and collector's booklet. Live it up, classic film fans!

Lifting elements of noir, sci-fi and corporate espionage, Black Moon Rising (1986) is an odd amalgamation of genre tropes produced by Roger Corman's New World Pictures based on a reworked script from John Carpenter. This under-the-radar relic of '80s cinema wouldn't add up to much without the presence of a pre-Fugitive Tommy Lee Jones and post-Terminator Linda Hamilton as a pair of thieves who join forces to steal back a hydrogen powered super car, the titular Black Moon.

Although marketing obviously played up the exploits of Knight Rider, director Harley Cokeliss delivers a old-fashioned heist film that ignores the vehicle almost entirely until the final stunt (a building-to-building jump recreated in one of the Fast & Furious films). It's a bold, but budget conscious choice, that should have completely backfired if not for Tommy Lee Jones. The actor single handedly makes the movie - and his blank canvas of a character - better by his very presence. He never plays down to the material; instead taking a minimalist approach to give every line of dialogue more weight. He's believable and compelling in a movie that's often anything but. The token love scenes with Linda Hamilton (who has a pretty thankless role here) are awkward and Robert Vaughn's "Trump-esque" villain motivations don't make a lick of sense. But Black Moon Rising still crosses the finish line with a few drops of gas (or water) left in the tank.

Kino Lorber's Blu-ray comes standard with a hell of a slate of extras, including an audio commentary, interviews, video essay, archival documentary and clips from an alternate Hong Kong version. The film's presentation, however, is a mixed affair. Colors and detail look great, but there's a surprising amount of dirt and speckling throughout made all the more apparent because the rest of the transfer looks so good. It's no deal breaker, but Black Moon Rising could have used a quick wash and wax.