Deadline at Dawn (RKO, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The third film I watched last night (Saturday, January 11) on Turner Classic Movies was Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” presentation of the 1946 RKO film Deadline at Dawn, It was based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich, who was easily the most prolific of the major noir writers – he published more full-length novels than Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler combined – and on the strength of an early sale to Hollywood in 1929 he moved there and married Violet Virginia Blackton, daughter of pioneering silent-era producer J. Stuart Blackton. Unfortunately, Violet discovered Woolrich was Gay when she found a diary of his detailing his sexual exploits with sailors he’d picked up around L.A. She had the marriage annulled and Woolrich moved back to New York and lived for decades with his mother Claire. RKO assigned Clifford Odets, a much more prestigious writer, to adapt Woolrich’s novel and another Group Theatre affiliate, Harold Clurman, to direct. Deadline at Dawn is the story of a young sailor named Alex Winkler (Bill Williams). He was Barbara Hale’s husband; the two made The Clay Pigeon in 1949 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/09/clay-pigeon-rko-1949.html), and of them I wrote, “[T]here’s utterly no charisma between them on screen even though they were a real-life couple; Bogart and Bacall these two are not!” Alex pretty much sleepwalks through this entire movie and even describes himself as non compos mentis during the time between his leaving the apartment of femme fatale Edna Bartelli (Lola Lane) and the time he went to a newsstand and noticed he had $1,400 in cash on him with no idea how he got it.

We’d already seen Edna being confronted in her apartment by her ex-husband, blind piano player Sleepy Parsons (the marvelous character actor Marvin Miller), who demanded the $1,400 from her and was understandably angry when she looked for it and didn’t have it. Alex ultimately hooks up with dance-hall girl June Goffe (the young Susan Hayward) and philosophical cabdriver Gus Hoffman (Paul Lukas) when he learns that Edna Bartelli was murdered during the night and he’s the number one suspect. The titular “deadline at dawn” refers to Alex’s status as an active-duty Navy servicemember who’s supposed to take a bus to Norfolk, Virginia at 6 a.m. to report for his next duty assignment, and he and his friends need to find Edna’s real killer before then. June acknowledges that she herself is from Norfolk and she’d like to return home to her mother, since her dreams of stardom as a New York dancer never went anywhere. Along the way they meet an unusually large set of supporting characters, including Edna’s brother, Val Bartelli (Joseph Calleia); Lester Brady (the always wonderful Jerome Cowan), his unlikely partner in a musical show; Edward Honig (Steven Geray), who hit on June at the dance hall where she worked (so this one time “dance-hall girl” means what it says and isn’t a Production Code-safe euphemism for prostitute); burned-out baseball player Babe Dooley (Joe Sawyer), one of Edna’s former amours; Nan Raymond (Constance Moore) and her neurotically jealous husband, who’ve had a baby together; and an apartment superintendent who works four buildings and laments how little he gets paid. (Well, it’s a Clifford Odets script directed by Harold Clurman, so there had to be at least one proletarian character bitching about capitalism somewhere.)

The finale is one of Cornell Woolrich’s typically head-snapping denouements: Edna’s real killer is [spoiler alert!] that nice philosophical cabdriver, Gus Hoffman, who’s been driving them around all movie and who killed Edna because Nan Raymond was Gus’s daughter and Edna had got her hooks in on Nan’s husband. My husband Charles, who joined me after work and watched all but the first 20 minutes of Deadline at Dawn with me, asked if there’s a name for the sub-genre of mystery fiction in which the crime has to be solved in a quite limited period of time to avoid an irreversible consequence for the protagonist, though I don’t know of one. Usually it’s because someone innocent is about to be executed and with only hours, or even minutes, to spare before the switch is to be pulled, the good guys have to reach the governor in time to issue a pardon, as in the marvelous 1944 PRC “B” Lady in the Death House (in which the heroine’s executioner is also her boyfriend, and he locks himself in the control room so she can’t be executed until they either break the door down or the governor’s stay comes through). In this case it’s because our slow-witted sailor, whose justification for taking Edna’s money was because her brother had cheated him out of an equivalent amount in a card game, has to return to duty within six hours. The film suffers from Odets’s typically pretentious writing, though it has great noir atmospherics from cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca. Reportedly the film’s art director, William Cameron Menzies, co-directed when Clurman proved not sufficiently skilled to transfer his skills as a stage director to film. According to Eddie Muller, Menzies was offered co-director credit but refused, on the basis that he hated Clurman so much he didn’t want to do anything that would make Clurman look good!