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Chicago Deadline

1949, Movie, NR, 86 mins

Chicago Deadline: Review

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Ladd is as hardboiled as ever in this minor film noir classic. He is a tough reporter in Chicago (though he is never shown working at a typewriter) who first appears at a run-down south side rooming house, attempting to talk a runaway girl into returning home. In the next room he finds the emaciated but beautiful body of a girl who has died of tuberculosis (Reed). Before the police arrive Ladd pockets her address book and then systematically begins to look up the various venal people in her life who tell her story in flashbacks. There is Kroeger, a vicious gangster; Muir, a nervous banker; Freeman, an invalid writer; Lees, an addled boxer; Havoc, a call girl; Hervey, a gangster's moll; and, in a startling performance, Strudwick, as a melancholy mobster. Each tells a tale about Reed as Ladd reconstructs her life, encountering several murders and blackmail victims along the way, finally shooting it out with culprit Kroeger, killing him and being wounded himself. Ladd is so enraptured with the dead girl (not unlike Dana Andrews in LAURA) that he leaves his hospital bed to attend her funeral, where he burns her address book to protect her memory, a gallant beau geste. Seeing this, Kennedy, portraying the dead girl's brother, tells Ladd that he knew her best of all. Based on a roughhouse 1933 novel, it's a sad, sometimes morose film, but it's told with great pace and power, most of it steel gray, full of soot and grime and struggle, like Chicago itself, where the exterior shots were done. Ladd is superb as the callous reporter with a soft heart for Reed's memory. (This was Ladd and Reed's second film together after BEYOND GLORY, although they do not appear in any scene as a twosome.) CHICAGO DEADLINE is typical of the hard-hitting, well-made crime films that were hallmarks of the late 1940s, and Ladd is the epitome of the shadowy hero, the man from the other side of the tracks who didn't give a damn ... except that he did. (Remade as "Fame Is the Name of the Game" for TV.) leave a comment
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