The Big Clock

The Big Clock (1948) is a Paramount Pictures noir thriller — watch online on iFILM. George Stroud, crime-beat editor of a national magazine, spends one ill-timed evening with the wrong woman and wakes up as the prime suspect in her murder.

His boss, the imperious media magnate Earl Janoth — Charles Laughton — is the actual killer, and he turns Stroud's own newsroom against him, hunting for an unnamed witness who is Stroud himself. Ray Milland plays the editor threading a needle between avoiding capture and not tipping off his employer. Maureen O'Sullivan rounds out the principal cast.

Directed by John Farrow from Kenneth Fearing's 1946 novel, the film is a tight procedural that turns a news organisation into a beautifully efficient trap. Laughton owns the film — cold, precise, a man who runs an empire on other people's panic. Stream The Big Clock (1948) online on iFILM.