What time is it...?

It's Johnny O'Clock.

You know, I have always had a really hard time accepting Dick Powell in the noir genre. I keep picturing him as the "juvenile" of 42nd Street, so it's a little silly to see him belt out the hard-man roles and shoot guns.

That said, there is one moment in Johnny O'Clock that completely stunned me -- in fact, I was going to turn it off. Sure, it's always good to see Evelyn Keyes (with her "Bratz eyes" as Mallory called them), but it was kind of a lame story with only little touches of interest (ie: the reproduction of the Diego Rivera painting that Johnny's got over his fireplace ... "some people are walking ... some people are riding..."). But I held out until the end:

Johnny's boss, Marchettis (who's played by the guy who kept saying "I'll bet they'll bring Prohibition back" in Key Largo), is holding a gun on Johnny's back, trying to get him to turn around. He thinks Johnny's been fooling around with Mrs. Marchettis, his drunk, slut wife. While they're bantering, she's telling her husband to let Johnny go, that nothing happened or will happen, etc...

It's then that Dick's face turns hard and his voice gets really dark.

He barks: "Don't beg for me!" to the wife.

Okay, maybe in a blog it doesn't come across, but this scene gets played out time and again in films and this is the first time it was believable and incredibly masculine.

I mean, this is the guy that offers to go shopping (and then sings about it) with Gloria Stuart in Gold Diggers of '35! ... crazy ...