Conquer by the Clock

CinemaSerf5/10

Mar 5, 2025

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I’m not sure the clock actually manufactures time nor am I sure that the overly laboured message here would achieve much more than a society of exhausted, nervous wrecks. The premise is that every second counts, and so if you sneak out for a cigarette or go to a ball game on your day off, or even go to the toilet, then you are essentially a saboteur! Yes, the message is ridiculously over-delivered and actually quite dangerous as many of the tasks it uses as examples could not be safely carried out by people who are seeing double whilst standing for hours on end with sore feet and fatigue. There is plenty of industrial archive included to illustrate just how joined up everything is, and just how inter-dependant production and distribution can be, but a couple of folks dying because their lifeboat didn’t have enough tins of corned beef seems to put the blame a little disproportionally on the stockist rather than the Nazi with his finger on the torpedo. Still, it does remind us all that time wasted helps no one. Just be thankful they didn’t extend that philosophy to this film, else we might still be watching it live!