No Hands on the Clock

Private detective Chester Morris phones his boss: he has found the person their detective agency was hired to find, but he is not bringing her back—in fact, he's just married her and they're on their way to Reno for a honeymoon. Alas, the boss follows and mystery awaits Morris and new wife Jean Parker; the couple check into a hotel across the street from a mortuary fronted by a large clock with swinging pendulum but no actual hands, where they proceed to spend a merry 75 minutes chasing crooks and each other around the neighborhood.

A strong cast of B movie stalwarts includes Dick Purcell as a bank robber named Red, and Astrid Allwyn as a dangerous female at the bar. George Watts is the comical yet crafty boss detective who drags our man Chester into the case by promising to buy Parker a fur coat when the case is finished. (Other familiar faces who appear in bits include Milburn Stone as an FBI man and Keye Luke as a cash-hungry fired house servant.)

The plot is, frankly, way too involved and packed with too many characters for it all to make a lot of sense. Among other story threads, it seems that both the FBI and the gang of robbers think that Chester is a fellow bank robber whom he apparently resembles greatly (but whom we never meet).

What are easy to follow, however, are the reasons we watch in the first place—little touches like Morris's fondness for milk contrasted with Parker's inability to drink it at all; the accordion that Morris repeatedly picks up but never gets around to playing for more than a measure or so; and, of course, the handless clock that our heroes can see from their hotel window. (A symbol of something? Perhaps it would have been in a movie that had had the time to develop such an idea.)

It's fast moving and fun. Having watched with moderate attentiveness, I can honestly say that I don't feel much moved by the actual plot, and I'm not particularly concerned about the meaning of the clock. However—I would like to ask the same question of Chester Morris and his accordion that the room service boy asked him early on in the picture: "Can you jive on that thing?"

Chester Morris and Jean Parker star in this mystery that seems to have more comedy than mystery. They are newlyweds and are about to go on their honeymoon, when he is hired to find a missing person, as Chester is a detective. This film has a very relaxing and natural feel to it, as Chester and Jean banter back and forth. The viewer enjoys their company so much, you wish you could hang out with them for all the excitement and fun and games, particularly Chester. One might call it the Dean Martin trait. (They seem like the poor man's Nick and Nora Charles.) I tried to follow the mystery, as someone is indeed murdered. I did follow it, up the last 20 minutes or so. But what this has going for it is good company. If you're lucky enough to find this unknown little mystery, you've got one little gem, that has charm in spades.

Chester Morris stars as an investigator who finds lost persons. In his latest case, he found a woman (Jean Parker) and married her and is planning on a nice honeymoon in Reno of all places (nothing says romance than this city famed for its divorces!). Soon, however, Chester's pesky boss locates them and convinces him to take one more 'easy case'. Well, naturally the case is anything but easy and involves lots of peril. Can the couple manage to finish the case and survive at least long enough to consummate their marriage?

There isn't anything especially deep or memorable about this film--it's a low- budgeted B-mystery and Hollywood made a bazillion of these back in the 30s and 40s. It's a bit better than many simply because Morris is so good in such roles and Parker is cute as his rather clueless bride--though I must admit that the plot is a bit more complicated and confusing than the norm.

This much better than average comedy mystery made in 1941 by the Pine-Thomas B picture unit at Paramount is excellently staged by journeyman director Frank McDonald, but I'm guessing that much credit must go to film ediitor Bill Zeigler who started with comedies at the Roach studios, then did a number of Hitchcock pictures, and ended up editing many of Warner Bros. Greatest A budget musicals like MY FAIR LADY. Zeigler, master editor, keeps all his cuts moving so effortlessly, switching from laughs to drama and back, that the viewer soon doesn't give a damn about who did what to who and why. The crime plot is enormously convoluted, impossible to follow, but that doesn't inhibit us from enjoying the excellent Nick and Norah chemistry and laughs between Chester Morris and his jealous bride Jean Parker. They are surrounded, as to be expected, by first rate cast of familiar faces, including Jack Norton, who for once is not the drunk at the bar but the bartender behind it. All highly entertaining. This is one of those 1940s quickies that feels as if everyone working on it had a good time, having no idea how good the film would turn out,

The players here are wonderful, Chester Morris as his usually cocky confident self as PI Humphrey Campbell, Jean Parker doing a great poverty row version of Nora Charles minus the family fortune as new bride Louise Campbell, Rose Hobart looking like she's up to no good but you just can't catch her in the act, George Watts as Humphrey's flaky boss who is overly interested in hand puppets, Dick Purcell at his menacing best given his brief screen time, and I could just go on forever.

So, you might say what was needed here were "more hands on the script". The title comes from the fact that the Darwin mortuary, conveniently located across from where the Campbells are honeymooning, installs a clock with no hands because, as the macabre little man running the mortuary states "death is timeless". The film starts out straightforward enough - Humphrey is on his honeymoon with his wife in, of all places, Reno??? That was the divorce capital of the U.S. back at the time this film was made, so things start out goofy and just get goofier. Turns out Humphrey only drinks milk, and loves to play the accordion, which he does as he and his bride settle into the honeymoon suite. Then Humphrey's boss Flack comes knocking at the door. Turns out he came all the way from LA to get Humphrey to interrupt his honeymoon and go looking for the missing son of a rich man, one that the FBI is looking for too, although they won't say why. Flack promises the pay off will be big and will only take a couple of hours, so Humphrey decides to take the case, although with Flack being a bit of flake you have to wonder why Humphrey would believe him. Well, it turns out things are more complex than that and eventually involve three murders, one of which looks like it's going to be pinned on Humphrey for awhile.

The main problem with this goofy little mystery is that in several places one of the characters will spout off a slew off facts in rapid fire. Humphrey will seize on just one thing said and that will comprise the motivation of the next ten minutes of action without any further explanation. So you have to rewind and look for what was said that would be causing Humphrey to take a particular action. This confusing state of affairs goes on all through the film, and if it were not for the delightful and often comic delivery of the players it might ruin the entire experience.

There is one great big plot hole involving Dick Purcell's character that is not explained in this movie as far as I can tell, and I watched it twice. It has to do with Red Harris' relationship to Humphrey and why Harris is useful to Humphrey in the first place. It looks like maybe they forgot to shoot at least one entire scene that would have sewed up all the loose ends.

I'd still recommend this one, just be prepared to rewind a lot and maybe even watch it in its entirety a second time. If this thing had been put out by a major studio with the same story and exactly the same players and had the benefit of the direction, screenplay finesse, and editing talents they had at their disposal, I would have given this one an 8/10 and put it right up there with The Thin Man.