evanston_dad
This nifty little noir stars Ray Milland as a hot shot employee in a publishing firm who becomes the fall guy for his boss, played unctuously by Charles Laughton, when the boss commits murder. As the film's title suggests, time, and a race against it, is a running motif and provides some propulsive suspense to the action. In a fashion typical in films like this, the undoing of the villain relies on the flimsiest of plot mechanics, but, also typically for films of this kind, we don't care all that much about the specifics and instead enjoy the stylish ride.Grade: B+
ellenirishellen-62962
Laughton,a media mogul,has a mistress,and he doesn't treat her as he should.She baits him one night,and you guessed it,he cleans her clock.Then he sends his boyfriend (in the book),his go-to guy,Steve Hagen to clean up his mess.Then he's out to frame an innocent party who doesn't know his one night stand (again,in the book) is dead.The story takes off with the attempted frame-up .Harry Morgan gets hazardous duty pay having to provide chubby Laughton with a massage,and Macready nearly jumps out of his skin when Laughton grabs him by the arm.O'Sullivan is entirely unnecessary to the story,even to provide a home life for George.No Way Out isn't in the same class with this original.Who thought anyone but Hackman even approached any of these actors,certainly not Costner,Patton,maybe because his character was as ruthless as Hagen,and George and Will are both quality actors.
jadedalex
This movie stands out for films in the genre. It's a very gimmicky tale, and a bit confusing, but it remains entertaining and by the flick's end, it asserts its own individuality.Laughton is a wonderful villain here. His performance? For the most part, lethargic would be an apt description. His one 'Mr. Hyde' moment is his brutal killing of his paramour, a very pretty Rita Johnson, which stands out, because we see the tub of lard Laughton back to his old lethargy soon afterward, as he is enjoying a massage.Featured also is a strangely sinister Henry Morgan, who of course later became the amiable character actor Harry Morgan of 'MASH' and 'Pete and Gladys' from television.Maureen O'Sullivan is given a very nominal role as Ray Milland's long-suffering wife. She actually figures into the movie's melodramatic climax, but is seen throughout the film basically nagging her husband, who is of course 'married' to the Jonith Newspaper, Jonith being Laughton's role.Farrow and his screenwriter have fashioned an unusual murder tale where we are given all of the information. We are shown the murder, and, as even Sir Alfred Hitchcock would surely appreciate, we are left to agonize over Milland's plight of easily being framed for a crime he didn't commit.Venerable character actor Lloyd Corrigan is put to good use. George Macready is wonderful playing his usual shady, snaky character. Milland's performance is spirited and the action moves fast. It's easily a film you would appreciate more the second time.In short, the film is made with the assumption that the audience has a brain and an imagination. And let's not forget the wonderfully eccentric Elsa Lanchester, perfectly cast as the down-on-her-luck painter out to profit one way or another from the scandal.
felixoteiza
Call me a disbeliever, but I find the plot of this movie utterly unrealistic. A pretty good one though; an action packaged, solidly built, suspense flick moving along at a sustained pace, as regular as the drumbeat in Ravel's Bolero. And its acting is the best, especially from Milland and Macready, while Laughton overplays his character a little bit. As for Lanchester, she's clearly enjoying each one of her moments in front of the camera, but it's Sullivan the one underused here, almost an afterthought—just see how almost nothing would have changed to the plot had they taken out her Georgette. Good cinematography also, especially with the overlapping shots, fade-outs and the group shots during the war councils in the blackboard room. An entertaining thriller, which I don't know why people insist in calling noir. In my book, a film noir is the application of the physical laws of entropy--everything in Nature tends to chaos, fragmentation and loss—to movies, so it's impossible for a noir to have a happy, or at least satisfying, ending. It always has to be bad, at least sad. If main characters end up alive and well, at least they got to be are sad because of losses or failures, even when there is no moral degradation--as it happened in Scarlet Street. Instead, the mood here is upbeat, even optimistic, so much so TBC could have easily been turned into a comedy--for ex., had the corpse disappeared from the lieu of the crime and had Pauline appeared alive & well at the end, because she didn't die after all, but went into hiding, after regaining consciousness, for fear of Janoth. In any case this film has the looks and the feel of a Hitchcock and I would have certainly thought so had not known beforehand that was Mia Farrow's dad the man behind the camera.When I say unrealistic, I'm referring to two basic plot elements which make it hard to digest. The first concerns not so much the jam Janoth finds himself in after the killing of his mistress, but the way he acts in such a circumstance. See, I have lived enough to realize that the higher your social standing is, the bigger the things you may get away with--including murder. Janoth should have known better and realized that what he does then is stupid, something showing his lack of awareness about his own place in society, and that he didn't need to do any police job. Someone as powerful as him would have never acted the way he does.In real life, after thinking about it for a minute, Janoth would have simply called police and reported that he has just found Pauline dead when coming to visit her. Then, not much later phones would have started ringing in offices of politicians, chiefs of police, members of the judiciary, and every effort would have been displayed to get him out of the jam and away from the lieu of the crime and from the case itself. (remember The Sting, when the "FBI brass" orders the local policeman to get the high profile hoodlum out of the place where two men have been just killed; and he was just a bandit!).That's what would have happened in TBC: the intervening policemen would have been ordered to get Janoth immediately out of that apt. and to keep complete silence about his presence there. And even if he had arrived to confess the killing, that wouldn't have made any difference; he would have been shielded anyway, on account of his importance for society. Before TV, or the Internet, press barons were of great importance for the political and economical establishments. And even after that; just remember the Life magazine photos of L.H. Oswald holding a rifle, after the Kennedy assassination, which went a long way into convincing public opinion he was really a gun nut. That's the kind of favor men like Janoth used to provide regularly to people in high places, so was anybody going to rock his boat just because of such a silly thing, for a dead woman? That's why if a man like him had ever found himself in such a bind he wouldn't have even lost his cool. All he had to do then was to make a few phone calls, inform the right people, and wait there to be taken out of the jam, so he may keep performing such valuable services. (In fact Stroud himself recognizes this when he says to his wife: Janoth could find dozens of alibis, I only have myself.) If anybody doesn't agree with such analysis I invite him, her, to see the Italian movie Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (1970) where Gian Maria Volonté--of spaghetti western fame--plays a Chief of Homicides who murders his mistress and who starts intentionally leaving clues around, linking him to the crime, as if wanting to test how far he could go; if he can get away with murder, so to speak, because of his high post. Despite all his efforts at auto-incrimination his peers refuse to take him in. The film ends in a surreal scene, where his comrades gang up on him, forcing him to confess his...innocence. That was brilliant, much more realistic than what's shown here. Imagine Janoth leaving many clues linking him to the murder and watching with amusement how the police deploy every effort to lead the investigation in some other direction. That would have been a fun movie, but another one also.Another unrealistic element concerns Janoth's nasty "hobby" of firing people at a whim, but his employees still laboring happily under his orders. Believe me, I knew one of such places and that's no picnic; rather a living hell. But an entertaining flick anyway, if you overlook all what I said. 7/10.
