Enraged, he stabs her with the sundial, killing her. When Janoth insults her, Pauline cruelly declares that women only go out with him for his power and position.

Pauline tells Janoth she spent the evening with a man named Jefferson Randolph.

Before reaching Pauline's door, Janoth catches a glimpse of a man catching the elevator, and he and Pauline then quarrel about their respective infidelities. Around one-thirty in the morning, Pauline sees Janoth arriving and rushes George out the door with his painting. Eventually, George takes Pauline home and collapses in a drunken stupor on her couch. Playfully fulfilling their quest for a green clock, Burt gives George and Pauline a sundial, then adorns it with a green ribbon. Later, they visit Burt's Sports Bar, which George frequents, and George introduces Pauline to McKinley, a radio actor friend whose roles have included President McKinley and Jefferson Randolph. While in an antique shop, George and Pauline out-bid a middle-aged woman for a Patterson painting, unaware that she is the eccentric Louise Patterson herself. After George tells Pauline that Janoth fired a man earlier in the day for choosing red ink over Janoth's preferred green, they go on a drunken search for a green clock as a 'present' for Janoth, who is obsessed with time.

Pauline, also tired of Janoth's egocentric manipulations, offers to help George humiliate Janoth by writing a torrid biography of him. He then joins Janoth's mistress, Pauline York, in a bar and misses his honeymoon train while drowning his sorrows. Fed up with being loyal to a firm that is jeopardizing his family life, George quits. As George Stroud, editor-in-chief of Crimeways magazine, hides from security guards in the clock tower of the Janoth Publications building in New York City, he reflects on the fact that thirty-six hours before, he was leading a normal life as a Janoth employee: George, who is finally about to go on his honeymoon after seven years of marriage, is ordered by his tyrannical boss, Earl Janoth, to go on assignment or be fired.

The big clock cast