Johnny O'Clock

One more movie that's currently available on Tubi through the end of November is Johnny O'Clock. Since it's leaving soon, I wanted to make certain I could watch it and give you enough of a heads-up to catch it yourself.

Dick Powell, having made the transition to darker movies, plays the titular character, a man who runs a casino and lives in what seems like one of those apartment hotels adjacent to the casino. As the movie opens, we learn of an alleged gangster who was shot to death resisting arrest, something that brings police detective Koch (a young Lee J. Cobb, although this movie hows he never looked young) into the case, and eventually closer and closer to Johnny's life.

Johnny manages the casino for his business partner Guido Marchettis (Thomas Gomez, who for some reason gets credited as S. Thomas Gomez). Their relationship is a bit more complicated, however, as at some point in the past Johnny had been in a relationship with Nelle (Ellen Drew), who is now Mrs. Guido Marchettis. Nelle still holds some sort of torch for Johnny, however, as she sends him a fancy fob watch that's engraved on the back. Johnny, fairly horrified by this, gives the watch to the hat-check girl, Harriet Hobson (Nina Foch), so that she can arrange to have it returned to Nelle.

The watch never gets returned to Nelle, however. Harriet is found dead of a suicide in her apartment, having stuck her head in the gas oven and turned it on. She was in a relationship with Chuck, a cop who turns out to have been corrupt, and also goes missing. Eventually, he too is found dead, and that gives Koch the idea that either Johnny or Guido must be responsible for the killing. Worse, it's later discovered that Harriet had poison in her stomach, leading Koch to believe she was murdered too, with the oven thing designed to make it look like she had committed suicide.

As has happened several times in movies, especially in movies of the 1940s, the dead girl has a sibling who suddenly comes to the big city to try to find out what happened to her sister and hopefully win justice in the case. In this movie, that sister is Nancy Hobson (Evelyn Keyes). Making things more complicated, Nancy finds herself falling in love with Johnny. Johnny eventually finds the same is happening with him, not that he wants it, as he's smart enough to know how much danger this will put Nancy in. So he tries to put Nancy on a plane out of town for her own safety, only to become a victim of a drive-by shooting just as he's heading out of the airport.

It's a bit of a complicated plot that Johnny O'Clock has, and to be honest that's not always to the movie's benefit. Thankfully, everybody in the cast show themselves to be quite good at the sort of material they're given, making the movie better than it probably has a right to be. It's stylish, and definitely a nice entry to the noir cycle, something that Eddie Muller should probably show if he hasn't done so already.