A romance, a noir and a whodunit all in one, Deadline at Dawn is the only film Harold Clurman ever directed. A theatre director by background, Clurman wisely keeps it between the rails here with solid functionality. He shows us the stuff we need to see and nothing more. There’s no flash, no tricksiness.
The same cannot be said for the timeline, which is jumbled about a fair bit. A smalltown soldier boy on leave in the big city wakes up with the mother of all hangovers and a pocketful of money. He has no idea where the loot came from, nor what he was doing the night before, beyond a hazy memory of meeting a floozie called Edna and having a good time at her place.
Still troubled, but killing time until his bus back to base leaves in seven hours, Alex goes dancing and strikes up a friendship with a taxi dancer sick to death of being pawed by boring and garrulous men. She finds Alex’s hick naivety and concern about the mystery money refreshing. After a bit of havering about, she decides to help him.
Susan Hayward plays the smart, wisecracking, seen-it-all June. Bill Williams is the usefully stupid Alex, who discovers after not much more time has elapsed that the money did indeed belong to Edna and that she is now dead.
From here a Holmes and Watson relationship. Alex doesn’t think he killed Edna but maybe the case is as open and shut as it looks. Piqued by curiosity and touched by Alex’s simple decency, June starts piecing together what really happened as this unlikely detective duo go to work.
The film is constructed as a series of meetings with forthright New Yorkers – a guy selling orangeade, a talkative cabbie, an apartment supervisor, an arguing couple. There’s a gangster, Edna’s brother Val, who opens a door on a much darker side of New York. Plus, in the shadows and following June and Alex all night, a mystery man whose identity is held in reserve until the closing moments.
Writer Clifford Odets was known for his wiseass dialogue and there’s plenty of it in his screenplay. At first it’s just June dishing it out, but once Val (Joseph Calleia) has ushered in the subterranean gangster world of Lester Brady (Jerome Cowan), femme fatale Nan Raymond (Constance Worth) and crew, everyone seems to be at it.
Hayward’s playing of June is subtle and clever – always the intrigued amateur, never the professional sleuth – which makes up for Williams’s playing of Alex as a man several sandwiches short of the proverbial.
If Clurman keeps it simple, it gives rein to director of photography Nicholas Musuraca, who goes to town on the noir lighting, experimenting with massively high-key effects – like the opening shot, a huge close-up of Edna with a fly walking on her face. Musuraca repeatedly sets himself little lighting challenges, deploys unusual lighting effects and does things lighting cameramen are not meant to do, like having light sources in shot.
It’s all shot on the cheap on the studio backlot – this is one from RKO’s B Picture unit – and there is a propulsive quality that bounces it over several glaring unlikelihoods – like cab driver Gus Hoffman’s (Paul Lukas) sudden fatherly interest in Alex.
Nor, particularly, is there a real deadline at dawn – that’s when Alex’s bus leaves for the base, not when the police are due to arrest him for the murder of Edna.
Quibbles aside, it’s a good, solid entertainment, lifted into the realm of the worthwhile by Hayward’s excellent performance.
Deadline at Dawn – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
