NO HANDS ON THE CLOCK
US, 1941, 76 minutes, Black and white.
Chester Morris, Jean Parker, Rose Hobart, Dick Purcell, Rod Cameron, George Watts.
Directed by Frank Mc Donald.
This is a rather cheery murder mystery, underlying serious, but comic on the surface. It was based on a novel and crams a lot of action as well as a lot of suspects into its hour and a quarter running time.
The film opens with a detective who tracks down missing people marrying the young woman that he had been searching for: Chester Morris and Jean Parker. They marry in Reno and their boss phones for an investigation into a missing person, persuading the detective to take on the job by promising a mink coat if his wife persuades him to go on the job.
This is a B-budget variation on Nick and Nora of the Thin Man series.
On the one hand, there are the routines that the detective goes through, interrogating the musician in a club, being picked up by a blonde at the bar, finding a dead body with a silver coin in its hand, interrogations of the father of the missing man, the widow that his father is interested in, the ward the father wants his son to marry… In the meantime, there has been a bank robbery (rather too easily effected) which the married couple witnesses.
In the meantime, with the comedy, the boss locks the new wife in the bathroom because she wanted to join in the search. Gradually, of course, she becomes more involved but not before witnessing her husband with the glamorous blonde and challenging him – but has to back down when the police suspect the detective and there is a comic shower scene as they try to evade the police. She ends up being a hostage.
The audience has to concentrate on Who’s Who, with quite a lot of characters and then the bank robbers coming in, hearing that their coin signature had been used in the murder, mistaking the detective for someone who had betrayed them…
Eventually, the detective persuades the bank robber to stand behind a glass and for each of the suspects to stand in front of the glass so that the robber can identify the killer. However, in the meantime, the police shoot the robber.
Sorting out the complications of the missing man, his death, an embalmed body being substituted for him, the ransom money being carried and the carrier being killed, one of the suspects marrying the ward… And it turns out that it was the manager of the funeral parlour whodunnit!
