No Hands on the Clock

It's one of the movies that Chester Morris starred in for Pine-Thomas, producers of good B movies for Paramount. Morris plays a private detective who has just married his occasional co-star Jean Parker, when they get involved in a missing person case in Reno.

It's a decent effort, although director Frank MacDonald directs it with his budget clearly in mind, and Miss Parker seems to be doing a Paulette Goddard imitation. There are mild screwball overtones, and Morris is good at them, but there are too many suspects left in from Daniel Mainwaring's novel.

Still, as with most of the Pine-Thomas productions, there's a good deal of pleasure watching actors and actresses either before they became famous (there's Rod Cameron away from the westerns), or past their glory days (Jack Norton, perennial comic drunk, plays a bar tender!), While by no means one of Pine-Thomas' better productions, it gets the job done.

In one of the first Pine-Thomas B films from Paramount Chester Morris and Jean Parker play a bargain basement version of Nick and Nora Charles in No Hands On The Clock. I'm thinking this might have been something that Bill Pine and Bill Thomas had in mind for a series, but Morris's next film was his first Boston Blackie.

Morris is a detective specializing in missing persons cases and is hired to find the missing son of a ranch owner who enjoys the casinos in Reno and all they have to offer. Several murders later we find who's been responsible for a small crime wave including a fake kidnapping of the missing son in question.

Dick Purcell has a nice role along with Astrid Allwyn as a known gangster whom the cops and the FBI think is responsible for all of this. Allwyn plays a very wise moll to Purcell, their scenes with Morris and Parker have some real bite.

This definitely could have been a series had Morris not already signed for Boston Blackie.

Chester Morris plays investigator Humphrey Campbell who searches for runaways and others for Flack's Missing Persons Bureau. As the film opens he has married a runaway woman who had just got bored with her home-life. They are in a bank while it is being robbed by the Red Harris gang. Campbell takes on another job while he is honeymooning in Nevada which leads him into all sorts of trouble.

Hal Benedict had gone missing for two weeks leaving his father and fiance wondering what sort of trouble he had got himself into. Campbell begins his search at the Nugget Room at a local club where Hal was known to frequent. Campbell gets involved with a fast blonde and the murder of an ex showgirl and the Red Harris gang show up again. Campbell's fingerprints found in the murder room and his identity confused with a lookalike informer means he is in trouble with people on both sides of the law.

This works well as a crime comedy but it is impaired as a mystery by having too many characters in it. We have to deal with characters who are spoken of but who never appear in the action. You will have to pay really close attention to fathom what's really going on. There are some novel ideas in this but some of these just get a brief mention.

I think there were plans to feature Chester Morris as the Humphrey Campbell character again but this was just a one-off. He had already done a Boston Blackie movie and that's the character that really proved to be a winner for him in the 1940s.

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,