No Way Out (1987)

August 14, 1987, release date

Directed by Roger Donaldson

Screenplay by Robert Garland

Based on the novel The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

Music by Maurice Jarre

Edited by William Hoy, Neil Travis

Cinematography by John Alcott

Kevin Costner as Lieutenant Commander Tom Farrell, U.S. Navy

Gene Hackman as Secretary of Defense David Brice

Will Patton as Scott Pritchard

Sean Young as Susan Atwell

George Dzundza as Sam Hesselman

Howard Duff as Senator Duvall

Jason Bernard as Major Donovan, Criminal Investigation Division

Fred Dalton Thompson as CIA Director Marshall

Iman as Nina Beka

Michael Shillo as Schiller

Distributed by Orion Pictures

Produced by Nufeld-Ziskin Garland, Roger Donaldson

I had seen No Way Out several times on television before I decided to see the whole film, from start to finish, on DVD. Before I saw the film on DVD, I had learned that it was a remake of The Big Clock (1948), starring Ray Milland. (Another remake is a 1976 French film called Python 357.) No Way Out seemed much more suspenseful than what I remembered from my first viewing of The Big Clock. I haven’t read the book, but I wondered, how could both films be adapted from the same book? I decided to find out.

I started with The Big Clock, which I have already written about for this blog. Click here for my blog post about it.

No Way Out starts with a shot of the U.S. Capitol building, with the Washington Monument in the foreground. The camera pulls back and then away from the National Mall in an aerial shot. As it glides over the Potomac River, the credits start. The movement of the camera and the music on the soundtrack set up a tense mood from the very beginning. The credits keep rolling and the camera keeps moving, which adds to the tension. Or it did for me: I kept wondering where the camera, and thus the viewers, were headed. The camera moves in over a particular house, and in that house is Tom Farrell. He’s being questioned by two men, but he doesn’t seem too concerned. In fact, he gets up, goes to the mirror in the room, and asks, “When’s he going to come out from behind here?”

The camera movement that I just described for No Way Out is similar to the way that The Big Clock opens. In No Way Out, the setting is Washington, D.C., and the camera moves from familiar capital landmarks to the interior of a house where Tom Farrell is being interrogated. In The Big Clock, the opening sequence is much shorter, and the camera moves from a shot of part of the New York City skyline to the interior hallway of an office building, where the main character, George Stroud, is hiding from a security guard.

In No Way Out, viewers have no idea who Tom Farrell is at first, and the two men questioning him are never identified. They never explain why they are questioning Farrell, and viewers aren’t even sure that Farrell is being watched by someone behind the mirror. After Farrell asks his question, the film cuts suddenly to a flashback, starting six months earlier. Most of the rest of the film follows past events in an extended flashback.

(This blog post about No Way Out contains some spoilers.)

At the beginning of the flashback (six months earlier in the film’s narrative), Commander Tom Farrell attends a formal event; viewers learn later that it is a presidential inaugural ball. Inside, he spots Susan Atwell. All party guests are frisked with an electronic wand. When it’s Susan’s turn, she says, “Lucky that’s not a bullsh-- detector or none of us would get in.” Farrell finds Susan’s remark amusing, and it seems to make Susan more attractive to him. He pursues her, but he is intercepted by a college friend. (Later, viewers learn that Farrell already knew something about Susan Atwell and that he was assigned to get to know her.)

Scott Pritchard, assistant to Secretary of Defense David Brice, is the friend who intercepts Farrell. Pritchard asks Farrell if he would like to work for Secretary Brice. He mentions a note that Farrell sent. Farrell says that he sent a Christmas card and all it said was Merry Christmas. It’s an odd exchange, and viewers are left wondering if Pritchard has some ulterior motive for making more of a holiday card. Commander Farrell doesn’t seem to give it another thought, but it’s impossible to know what to expect from what the film has shown so far—and that’s exactly the point. No Way Out sets up the different plot threads without any background explanation and then reveals the interconnections as the narrative unfolds.

Tom Farrell and Susan Atwell leave the inaugural ball together. Their liaison in the back of a limousine is an extended sequence and a bit of a diversion in the plot, but it leaves no doubt about their physical attraction to one another. Atwell takes Farrell to the home of her friend Nina Beka and asks Nina for a favor. She tells Nina that she can use her home while she (Susan) and Farrell use Nina’s apartment. No explanation is given for Susan’s reluctance to bring Tom to her own home, which is another odd sign that something is amiss.

Commander Farrell goes back to sea on a U.S. naval ship and makes a daring rescue of one of the crew members during a storm. The news coverage catches Secretary Brice’s attention, and he directs Pritchard to contact Farrell and invite him to work with them. Farrell is reassigned to the Defense Department. Now that Secretary Brice is Farrell’s boss, Farrell learns that Susan Atwell is having an affair with him (Brice is married; she is not), but Atwell is in love with Tom Farrell. They continue their romance on the sly because Farrell has to protect his new position. The relationship between Tom Farrell and Susan Atwell is another point of difference compared to The Big Clock. George Stroud never becomes romantically involved with his boss’s mistress.

In time, Farrell learns that Susan is in fact a kept woman: Secretary Brice is paying all her living expenses. Scott Pritchard tries to convince Secretary Brice to cut ties with Susan, but his efforts are useless. And part of his duties is to continue to act as go-between as the affair continues. Pritchard’s willingness to keep secrets and protect his boss explains why Brice turns to him when he needs help later.

The film allows viewers to see the differences between Commander Farrell and Secretary Brice. Farrell is angry that he and Susan can only meet on the sly, but Secretary Brice becomes enraged when he realizes that Susan went away one weekend (he doesn’t realize that she went with Tom Farrell). In his fit of jealous rage, Secretary Brice pushes Susan off the second-floor balcony inside her apartment. She crashes through a glass coffee table and ultimately lands on her living room floor—she is dead.

Secretary Brice confides in Scott Pritchard about Susan’s murder. Pritchard convinces Brice not to go to the police. Instead, Pritchard goes to Atwell’s apartment and cleans up, retrieving anything that might be incriminating for Secretary Brice. A shot of Pritchard upon his arrival in Susan’s living room, observing her dead body, is especially unnerving because Pritchard’s hostility toward Susan, barely evident until this point in the film, is unmistakable now. He regarded her as useless and distracting for Secretary Brice. After her death, all he wants to do is clean up any connection between her and his boss and make her disappear.

Pritchard comes up with what seems like a crazy plan to blame Atwell’s murder on someone named Yuri, a suspected mole in the Defense Department. Everyone has been talking about this mole for four years, but no one is even sure that he (or she) exists. Farrell is afraid that he will be blamed for Atwell’s murder because he knew her and was in love with her, but he is fairly sure that Secretary Brice had something to do with it. He has to protect his identity throughout the staged investigation that Pritchard starts. And now that Farrell works for Secretary Brice and Pritchard, he is put in charge of the investigation. As the investigation proceeds, however, more and more people are convinced of Yuri’s existence and they are intent on finding this person. The rest of the film follows the investigation and brings viewers right back to the scene in the house at the start of the film and to Commander Tom Farrell’s question: “When’s he going to come out from behind here?”

Farrell’s question is finally answered, but his future is still an open question. I was surprised by the film’s ending, but I thought it made sense, too, once I thought about it. No Way Out is a film to see from beginning to end, not chopped up by commercials on television—not the way that I first saw it, in other words!

Writing about No Way Out and The Big Clock shows me that the outline of the plot in both films is indeed very similar. Many of the specific details are different, but the basic plot outline of a man being framed by another man, his own boss, for the boss’s murder of a lover is the same. I have to confess, however, that I enjoyed No Way Out much more than I enjoyed The Big Clock. I thought that all the cinematic elements—the music, the camera work, the portrayal of the relationships between the different characters—in No Way Out set up the tension and the suspense much more artfully than any of the elements did in The Big Clock. The high-stakes politics in No Way Out was a good choice because it made the intrigue much more believable: It’s political and it’s personal. I have read that The Big Clock follows the book on which it is based much more closely, but the updating for the 1987 remake increases the suspense so much more.