‘No Hands on the Clock’ (1 December 1941)

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 16 minutes, rated 6.2 by 112 opinionators.
Genre: Krimi komedy
NoHand Clock.jpg
Verdict: Snappy
Boston Blackie (avant le nom) locates a missing heiress and marries her in Reno. Since he is already there, his boss gives him another missing person to find in Reno. He does this by locking his new bride in the bathroom, in the hotel room, and in a car. How anyone can be locked in any of these is beside the point. The sexism is surpassing. He locks her up to keep her out of trouble, he says.
She is feisty enough to get loose, to make him regret it but not enough to stop him from doing it again, and finally to save his bacon though it is too little, too late.
The missing man remains missing, and there is a secondary plot about mistaken identity that was lost on me.
There are many familiar faces from the time and genre: the feisty bride is Jean Parker, Rod Cameron towering over all, Grant Withers scowling, Keye Luke faking bad English, Dick Purcell for once acting, the glacial Astrid Allwyn being glacial, Doc Adams before med school, and those eyebrows on Oscar!
The title comes from a clock on a mortuary across the street from the hotel which has a large pendulum for seconds but no hands for the time. Symbolic? Yes. Of what? Dunno.
By 7 December I suppose audiences had other thing to think about, like the 2,000 widows created on Oahu in just under two hours.