Deadline at Dawn

Deadline At Dawn (Harold Clurman, William Cameron Menzies , 1946) One of those movies that, I'm sure, grows on you over time, once all the shocks have worn off.

 

But, if you're peeping at it in for the first time...well, all I can say, pally, is it's a lot to take in. Oh, it's got a lot of familiar tropes of the noir-type: everything takes place at night, shadows seem to be the popular decor, there's good people and bad people, good people get accused of doing bad things, there are a couple of desperate chases between desperate people, and it's entirely black-and-white, the only color being the complications along the way which are, more times than not, red herrings. And if you can't follow it too well, that's understandable because it starts getting confusing with in the first ten minutes. Watching it drunk or sober won't help you with the film's terrain—you're going to be bumping into walls either way. Oh, and don't get attached to characters because most of them will disappear before the sun comes up. It's not that they die or anything, it's just that they have their fifteen seconds in what passes for a spotlight in a film-noir and then they just go away, never to be seen again. That's life in the big city.

Enough with the opening narration (there isn't any, that would be too helpful). A sailor-boy (Bill Williams) is gonna be shipped off to his next hell-hole and he spends the eve of it getting black-out drunk. He wakes up at a newsie's where he's been sleeping it off with no idea where he's been or what he's been doing. All he knows is that he's got $1400 bucks he didn't know he had. "Found money" is always a nice surprise, but not when there's four hours to kill and you're a possiible target. What better thing to do than hide in the arms of a frail (you could always use her for cover!), so he goes to a dance club and ends up with a handful of a hostess named June Goffe (Susan Hayward) who's dead-on-her-feet and doesn't get interested until sailor-boy shows her his $1400 wad. Naturally, she invites him over to her place for a sobering sandwich and the story of how he got it...if he can remember.

Pretty soon, things start going "Hayward". The sailor isn't as much of a shoe-cruncher as she thought he was but insists on thinking of him as "a baby." But, he had managed to crawl to a drinks-provided poker game (not sure if that's a euphemism or not) at the apartment of Edna Bartelli (Lola Lane), who, with her brother (Joseph Calleia) regularly ran a scam of luring rubes off the street and then robbing them of their wits and their bankroll. Somehow, he'd gotten the better end of the deal with more money than he could spend in four hours. But, he's "a baby" and he wants to return the money because it's the right thing to do (even to people who'd rolled you) and he doesn't want to spend his last four hours of furlough looking over his duffel bag to see if the cops are looking to pick him up for theft. He is in uniform, after all.

Yeah, well, no good deed goes unpunished and sometimes you get exactly what you're trying to avoid, especially in noir movies. June and Alex ('the baby") go over to the address and instead of finding the woman dead-drunk (like he left her), they find her just plain old dead. Like he left her? Well, that's the question. Either June's running around with a killer or there's a killer somewhere else running around after them. That's the question. And they only have a shrinking four hours before Alex gets deployed.

"I hear a whistle blowing" says June, metaphorically

...or is that "Odetically"?

It has the simple par-boiled "jeopardy" plot one comes to associate with its original author Cornell Woolrich (he wrote the original stories for Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, The Window, Mississippi Mermaid and Phantom Lady) where "trust" (or lack of it) is the one thing drum-soloing through the characters' minds as they try to unravel the plot. But, Deadline at Dawn doesn't so much provoke a sense of associative paranoia as "what in the black-and-blue-blazes are you talking about?" It's scripted by Clifford Odets, who wrote it as a favor to his old Group Theater pal, director Harold Clurman, and it is Odets at his Fink-iest, feeding lines to the cast that are all starch and pepper. Odets took theater out of the drawing-room and into the tenements—and a lot of Deadline at Dawn takes place on the streets and back-alleys of early-hours New York.

Oh, it begins interestingly enough, as we watch a blind ex-husband (Marvin Miller) of future murder-victim Edna Bartelli hammer on her door to collect the $1400 she promised she had for him (the very money the sailor-boy had made off with)—and our introduction to her is properly sordid for the "Code" days where she's so stinking drunk that a fly is pirouetting around on her face. The ex is blind-mad: "You'll never change, Edna. You're bad. I loved you very much. But you're bad." 

But, once we leave the place for the murder to happen, "Golly, the misery that walks around in this pretty, quiet night." Everybody's kvetching, philosophizing, giving you their dime's worth when all you wanted was a nickel. And complaining about the heat even though nobody's sweating much. Everybody's an overripe wise-guy even the cabbie (Paul Lukas) who hears June's "misery" comment replies with "the logic you are looking for... the logic is that there is no logic. The horror and terror you feel, my dear, comes from being alive. Die, and there is no trouble. Live, and you struggle." I don't know that she was searching for any "logic" there, just making idle conversation. But, everybody's over-explaining in Odets-burg, like when another cabbie bleats "Listen, I don't wanna get in no trouble. I work. I'm just a parasite on parasites." TMI, buddy! Especially with a paying customer in your hack.

Deadline at Dawn is filled with such distractions and so many blind-alleys that you can get lost very easily, but despite the density of the population on display, the solution returns you to the same bubble-world that feels a little too neat for all the obfuscation of the community-building going on. Maybe that was to enrich the plot, but it does nothing to ramp up the tension or unease one usually finds from Woolrich. One shouldn't substitute "overwritten" for "overwrought."

After the Thin Man

After the Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1936) Follow-up to the popular The Thin Man, which took the Dashiell Hammett novel and characters and ramped up the entertainment value.  Although it has become the most popular of the series over the years (which might be due to the fact that the young and future star, but at the time MGM contract-player James Stewart is featured prominently in the cast), it suffers from a slight case of "sequelitis," with more arbitrary schtick—songs and production numbers that stick out like a milk-shake served in a speakeasy, much more attention and comic anthropomorphism attached to the dog, Asta—as well as making detective Nick Charles a perpetual lush (although there are flashes of the character's talents, as when after avoiding a low-life that has been tumbled down the stairs, he casually mentions "He has a gun under his left arm"). William Powell is an unsung, perhaps merely undersung, master of the throw-away and even though the performance is an amusing "drunk act," he manages to keep the character's thin veneer of dignity intact throughout the shenanigans, and the prim and unproper Myrna Loy lends enormous support in that regard by the obvious affection her character affords her husband.

But, still...we're talking Hammett here. Sure, "The Thin Man," the author's last novel, was lighter than the mystery-master's "The Maltese Falcon," or "The Glass Key," but the screenplay's authors, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett* seem to have lost some of the original's dark roots, trading mystery for naughtiness, wit for "cute." I quibble here—after all, the movie-James Bond isn't really Ian Fleming's character, either—for the movie's a solid romp—Nick and Nora investigate another disappearance,** this time the disappearance of Nora's cousin Selma's good-for-nothing husband, which not only involves low-life's, but the other end of the spectrum in Nora's unproperly prim side of the family. 

Hi-jinks ensue, bullets fly (and complicate things while simplifying the cast), and it all ends with the "reveal" in a room full of suspects. Van Dyke keeps the thing moving by staying out of the way—there are long, long takes where the actors do such involved business and are merely cramming as much fun into the scene as possible that they make the current cut-and-snip style of acting and film-making appear stodgy (compare this to The Tourist,*** for instance).  

It's a fine time—save for some Asian racism that curdles the proceedings for a time—and another example of showing why "they don't make 'em like they used to" is a valid argument when it comes to movie-making quality.

* The pair also worked on the screenplays of Father of the Bride, Easter Parade, The Diary of Anne Frank, and It's a Wondeful Life—which, is extraordinarily impressive—all classics, all great, dense scripts.

** The first movie's disappearance was of "the thin man" of the novel's title, it didn't refer to the character of Nick Charles, at all.

*** Speaking of which, Johnny Depp and Rob Marshall are planning their own version of The Thin Man. One hopes that Depp doesn't overdo the drunk bit (as he is wont to do), and the casting of Nora will be absolutely critical.