Chicago Deadline (1949)

Wonderfully offbeat film!

The Worst Film Ever

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Reporter Alan Ladd (Ed Adams) outrageously interferes with things when he steals an address book from the room in which Donna Reed (Rosita) is found dead. He retraces her life by contacting the people in this address book and a few people get bumped off along the way.Unfortunately Donna Reed hasn't led a very interesting life so God knows why anyone would show any interest in pursuing her address book, especially as her death is not at all suspicious. Alan Ladd is obviously a weirdo.A lot of time is spent on the telephone in this film. It's just blah blah blah on the blower! Still, the film is OK even if you can't follow the cast of thousands. Alan Ladd sums things up for you at the end with a synopsis of what has just happened. But he delivers it at breakneck speed so it doesn't really help. It's a vehicle for Alan Ladd and it's all a bit pointless.

When a reporter finds a beautiful girl dead of tuberculosis in a cheap hotel room, he pockets her little black book to learn more about her... but no one's talking, and the ones that try to have a nasty habit of getting killed. The basic detective story template in the Hammett vein with a touch of CITIZEN KANE and LAURA as Rosita's life is revealed through flashbacks. Alan Ladd is fun to watch, and there's some pretty good supporting parts. Donna Reed gets second billing, but she only appears in snippets for maybe about 10 minutes total. The film has good atmosphere and makes nice use of locations, but is so convoluted that it can be tough to follow. The lousy copy I watched didn't help. I'd like to see it again in a decent presentation. A solid and moody film but a little too confusing.

Chicago Deadline finds reporter Alan Ladd uncovering the body of beautiful Donna Reed at a cheap boarding house in the Windy City. She's dead of natural causes, untreated tuberculosis which was quite common back in the day. Like Laura her beauty haunts Ladd, but what really intrigues him is her address book with one eclectic set of addresses and phone numbers. Something in his reporter's instinct tells him there's a story here and as he starts snooping, turns out there is one.Reed was a beautiful woman used and abused by any number of people, high and low. The only one who genuinely seems to be mourning her passing is brother Arthur Kennedy. Helping Ladd along with background is society woman June Havoc. The whole picture eventually does come together and it turns out Reed was into quite a few shady things. Naturally it all makes sense by the time the film is over.Alan Ladd's greatest screen credit might be in Citizen Kane where he curiously enough has a bit role as a reporter. Chicago Deadline like Kane is a jigsaw puzzle where the bits of Donna Reed's character Rosita D'Ur is put together the way Charles Foster Kane's is. Berry Kroeger who just does not play good guys on the screen is a malevolent gangster who is marvelously sinister as always. Another performance to note is Irene Hervey as Kroeger's moll who naturally resented Reed and anything about her.Another good film for Alan Ladd in his Paramount salad days.

Reporter Alan Ladd stumbles across a strange woman, dead of tuberculosis in a seedy Southside hotel. Her address book, however, hints at a wild and well-connected past. (The girl, with the improbable moniker of Rosita Jean D'Ur, is played in flashback by the improbable Donna Reed.) Ladd's quest, as any noir quest should, takes him up and down the intricate layers of Chicago society, through some of which his tour guide is society dame June Havoc, who plays it with panache. This downfall of a good kid with some bad breaks begins to obsess Ladd, and Chicago Deadline (it's been remarked) could almost have been a grittier Laura set not in high society but on cusp where shabby respectability meets the demimonde. But the cunning Vera Caspary (who wrote the novel Laura) is alas nowhere in evidence, so Chicago Deadline becomes almost an object lesson in Edmund Wilson's dictum that the heavy atmospherics in detective fiction are rarely justified by the conclusion. Nonetheless, for most of its running time, Chicago Deadline is a dark and haunting ride.