Oscar-winner Ray Milland plays George Stroud, an ace reporter for a New York City crime magazine who decides to take some scheduled vacation time to go on a long-postponed honeymoon, rather than follow the orders of his boss (played by Oscar-winner Charles Laughton) to go to Utah to work on an important story. Stroud's decision to not go to Utah is the key turning point that hurtles Stroud into a series of events which ultimately has Stroud investigating a murder, a murder for which he soon becomes the prime suspect. The film becomes a taut cat-and-mouse tale of suspence and intrigue, as Stroud attempts to elude police and his own employer, while at the same time trying to find evidence pointing to who really committed the murder.

Stroud never is able to leave on his honeymoon trip during the course of the movie. Had he simply gone to Utah, Stroud never would have become the suspect in a murder. Arguably, the movie may have been less interesting.

One is reminded of X-Files: Fight the Future, in which FBI special agent Dana Scully ends up in all kinds of trouble that she would have avoided by quickly moving to Utah where the FBI was re-assigning her, rather than going off on an unauthorized investigation with Fox Mulder. Had she simply gone to Utah perhaps the film's plot would have been more like Jack Weyland's Charly and less like Close Encounters of the Third Kind meets North by Northwest. Ah, the road not taken...

Interestingly enough, The Big Clock director John Farrow won the Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award for Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), which as directed by Michael Anderson. Farrow's screenplay was based on the classic Jules Verne novel in which characters not only talk about Utah, they actually go there, after spending an entire chapter talking to a Latter-day Saint missionary about Church history and doctrine. Around the World in Eighty Days is the best-known film that Farrow worked on, but The Big Clock is probably Farrow's best and most-remembered film as a director.

George Stroud, played by actor Ray Milland, is the protagonist and lead character of "The Big Clock." Milland received the Best Actor in a Leading Role Academy Award for "The Lost Weekend" (1945). He also received Golden Globe, Cannes Film Festival and other awards for that role.

The film opens by showing Stroud in a darkened office building, trying to elude men clad in business suits who are attempting to find him. Then the scene flashes back to the beginning of the events that led to this harrowing predicament: Stroud's decision to take a scheduled vacation trip with his family rather than go to Utah in pursuit of a story, as his boss wants him to do. Had he only gone to Utah, all of troubles and tragedies he encounters in the film would have been avoided.

The Utah references in "The Big Clock" feature film were apparently created by the screenwriters. The film is a fairly faithful adaptation of the novel by Kenneth Fearing, but the novel contains no mention at all of Utah or Salt Lake City. I also could find no mention of the man known in the film only as "Fleming" - the person that George Stroud was supposed to go see in Utah.

One commonality between the novel and the film is central character George Stroud's generally positive nature and humanitarian outlook, demonstrated by his dialogue in the passage from the book:

"We can suggest a new approach to the whole problem of crime," I concluded. "Crime is no more inherent in society than diphtheria, horse-cards, or black magic. We are accustomed to thinking that crime will crease in some far-off Utopia. But the conditions for abolishing i are at hand--right now."

The conversation between Stroud and the executive is a generally amicable one, and the two men seem at ease with each other. But ultimately Stroud does not commit to doing what the executive asks of him (which is what Janoth wants Stroud to do). The executive explains that if he doesn't go to Utah to follow up on the story personally, he will be fired from his job. Stroud says he will not change his vacation plans, no matter what, and if that means losing his job, so be it. This scene does not mention Utah or Salt Lake City by name, although the men do mention Fleming by name.

More about Big Clock author Kenneth Fearing

Kenneth Fearing was born in 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois, the son of a Chicago corporation lawyer. In 1924 he was graduated from the University of Wisconsin, where his literary career received its start after he won a fifty-dollar poetry prize.

As the author of six volumes of poetry, Mr. Fearing was regarded as a significant voice in twentieth-century American poetry, and during the thirties his talent brought him two Guggenheim fellowships. During the forties, however, Fearing was to attract a wider audience with fiction than with poetry. His novels, in the psycho-thriller genre, spoke for the metropolitan world, in a prose which Howard Haycraft has termed "lean, vernacular, and effective."

The most successful of these novels was The Big Clock (1946), which was made into a movie co-starring Ray Milland and Maureen O'Sullivan. It has since become a perennial favorite among late-late-show viewers. Mr. Fearing's other novels include The Dagger of the Mind (1941) and The Loneliest Girl in the World (1951).

Fearing, married twice, lived almost continuously in New York City until hs death in 1961.