Chicago Deadline is one of those films noir where it really pays to follow the narrative and the visual clues because they are all there. I saw the film three or four times, and I was still discovering new details each time. Alan Ladd plays Ed Adams, an investigative reporter who tracks down leads about a young woman found dead in a cheap hotel room and manages to uncover corruption by the time he is finished. The dead woman is Rosita, played by Donna Reed. Reed’s first appearance in the film is as Rosita Jean d’Ur’s corpse lying on a bed in the hotel room.
You can find Chicago Deadline online. Click here to see it free at the Internet Archive, which has two prints of the film. One is English language only; the other is English language with Spanish subtitles. The sound and picture quality of both prints is not great, but they are still watchable. You will probably enjoy watching the film more on the Blu-ray published by Kino Lorber as part of its Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema series. The Blu-ray comes with English-language subtitles and an audio commentary by film historian Alan K. Rode.
Many scenes in Chicago Deadline were filmed on location, and this is established with a pan shot of the Chicago skyline behind the opening credits. Ed Adams arrives by cab at the front door of the Rialto. He is at the hotel to find a young woman called Minerva. While he is talking to her, he hears a scream. One of the housekeepers has found a young woman, Rosita Jean d’Ur, dead in her bed. Just in case this discovery could turn into a newspaper story, Ed looks through the dead woman’s possessions. He finds a diary in her handbag and pockets it. Then he leaves with Minerva.
Before Ed can get Minerva home, he returns to Rosita’s room. Detective Lieutenant Jack Anstruder has arrived to investigate the woman’s death, and Ed is curious about Rosita’s story. Detective Anstruder says that it looks like she died of hemorrhaging from something like tuberculosis. He suspects that Adams knows more than he is willing to admit. The two know each other, and there seems to be a bit of professional antagonism between the them.
Ed Adams returns to his offices at a newspaper called The Journal and starts his own investigation by calling the numbers in Rosita’s diary. This diary is what ties so much of the narrative together, and viewers follow along as Ed learns more and more about Rosita. Her diary includes several names and details that Ed uses to piece together the mystery surrounding her death. The first person he calls is listed by his initials only: G. G. T. On the phone, G. G. T. wonders how Ed got his private number, but Ed won’t say, not without some information in return. G. G. T. denies knowing Rosita at all. But clearly she knew him, so it seems like G. G. T. is lying, and that intrigues Ed. Pig, one of the other reporters, speculates that G. G. T. could be G. G. Temple, vice president of Iroquois Trust. Ed impersonates a district attorney to call G. G. Temple again and find out more, but G. G. Temple hangs up on him.
(This article about Chicago Deadline contains some spoilers.)
The next number that Ed Adams calls belongs to Tommy Ditman, who is shocked by the news of Rosita Jean d’Ur’s death. He is her brother, and he is willing to talk to Ed Adams, at least at first. They do eventually meet at the morgue, where Tommy identifies the body, and then go out for a drink. In a flashback (one of the hallmarks of noir), Tommy is able to fill in a lot of background on Rosita’s personal life, but he becomes disillusioned with Ed and his intentions when the bartender arrives at their table to announce a phone call that promises “juicy” details about Rosita.
From the newspaper offices, Pig and Ed calls a number belonging to Belle, who turns out to be Belle Dorset. She is shocked by the news of Rosita’s death, but she suddenly refuses to talk to Ed and hangs up on him. When he arrives at her place of residence, the Mandor Hotel, he learns that Belle lived in the hotel for about a year but moved out right after his phone call.
Ed Adams next crashes a party and meets someone named Leona Purdy. They are immediately attracted to one another, but Leona lies to Ed and tells him that she met Rosita two or three times at parties. But she has already had a lot to drink at the party before they go out to a bar, where Ed wants her to sober up. He doesn’t really give Leona a chance to go into any more detail because he is intent on pursuing other leads. When he finally takes a moment to visit her, he learns that Leona and Rosita were once roommates, and she tells her part in Rosita’s story in another flashback.
Ed’s next stop is Solly Wellman’s apartment. Solly Wellman remembers Rosita fondly at first, but he clams up when Ed presses for more information. Now, Wellman denies ever knowing Rosita. He is so angry about Ed’s insistence that they get into a fistfight, and Ed is shown the door more confused than ever. Rosita knew several people, but they either deny knowing her or disappear before Ed can find out anything more about Rosita.
Ed has barely started using Rosita’s diary as a source for leads, but he has already tracked down several people connected to her. What follows is a complicated search for the truth about her and the details of her life. He inadvertently uncovers corruption, mob connections, murder, blackmail, domestic violence, and more. Ed Adams himself is threatened for pursuing the story, and he is beaten and left in an empty city lot because he refuses to stop. What started as a possible news story turns into a personal crusade for Ed. He hasn’t written his own newspaper story yet, and he starts to dislike how Rosita is presented in the papers by other journalists, even some on his own staff.
I read online that many compared Chicago Deadline to Laura (1944). It’s true that an investigative reporter finds a dead body and becomes obsessed with her story in Chicago Deadline, and a police detective becomes obsessed with a murder victim and her story in Laura, but that was the end of the connection for me. I never really felt that Ed Adams had fallen in love with Rosita Jean d’Ur. At the end of the film, he burns Rosita’s diary and leaves with Leona Purdy. He has found his story (although he leaves it with her brother Tommy instead of publishing it) and moves on. Detective Mark McPherson learns that his murder victim, Laura Hunt, is actually very much alive, and the two of them fall in love. I think the comparison was made mostly to ride the success of Laura.
I enjoyed Chicago Deadline more and more with each viewing. I’m sure that I would find more details in the story if I watched it just one more time. It’s a short tight story that works really well. Alan Ladd and Donna Reed were already big stars when the film was produced, especially Ladd, so it is a bit surprising that the film isn’t more well known.
For present-day viewers, smudgy dark prints were all that were available until recently, and they don’t provide a very pleasant viewing experience. But Kino Lorber released Chicago Deadline on Blu-ray in January 2024 (see my note above). I would definitely go with the Blu-ray version over the prints at the Internet Archive. But the subtitles on the Blu-ray aren’t always accurate, so don’t rely on them only. Trust your ears, too! For example, it’s Aunt Maggie, not Miss Maggie, that the housekeeper cries out when she discovers Rosita’s body, and G. G. Temple is an executive with power at Iroquois Trust, not Aykroyd Trust.
The audio commentary provided by film historian Alan K. Rode on the Blu-ray is filled with great details. Here is a short list of some of them:
◊ Donna Reed makes her film entrance as a sheet-covered corpse, which was unusual at the time.
◊ The implication that Rosita, Leona, and other female characters were prostitutes was eliminated because of Joseph Breen and the production code. The diary was almost eliminated for the same reason (why would any woman have so many names listed?), but it was retained after all because Paramount overrode Breen’s objections to it.
◊ The newspaper reporter role of Ed Adams is tailored for Alan Ladd’s noir persona. Ed Adams is a working-class reporter.
◊ Alan Ladd and Donna Reed never appear on-screen together.
Rode also mentions that Celia Lovsky plays Mrs. Scheffler, the owner of the pawnshop that Ed Adams during his investigation in to Rosita’s life and death. She is in an uncredited role, and Rode says something about her skill in dragging out the scene to increase her time on-screen, but he missed the point of this scene. Mrs. Scheffler counts the bills, the change, slowly because she is hiding Rosita’s diary, which is on the counter. Adams had left it there during his discussion with Mrs. Scheffler about Rosita when Detective Anstruder and one of his men enters the pawnshop looking for Adams. Mrs. Scheffler is inclined to help Adams because he has grown fond of Rosita, even though he has never met her and because Mrs. Scheffler liked her, too. So she hides the diary with the bills and hands it back to him with his change.
But Rode’s mistake simply illustrates what I have said before about many films noir and about Chicago Deadline, too: Details mean everything in these short, black-and-white films. And now that I think about it, maybe those details were a lot easier to spot on the large screens that were the norm in theaters in the 1940s. We present-day viewers should be more visually oriented with all our screen time, but it may also be true that some films are sophisticated enough to make watching them again and again a real pleasure. Chicago Deadline is one of those films.
November 3, 1949, release date • Directed by Lewis Allen • Screenplay by Warren Duff • Based on the novel One Woman by Tiffany Thayer • Music by Victor Young • Edited by LeRoy Stone • Cinematography by John F. Seitz
Alan Ladd as Ed Adams • Donna Reed as Rosita Jean d’Ur • June Havoc as Leona Purdy • Irene Hervey as Belle Dorset • Arthur Kennedy as Tommy Ditman • Berry Kroeger as Solly Wellman • Harold Vermilyea as Detective Lieutenant Jack Anstruder • Shepperd Strudwick as Blacky Frenchot • Dave Willock as Pig, newspaper reporter • Gavin Muir as G. G. Temple • John Beal as Paul Jean d’Ur • Tom Powers as Glenn Howard • Howard Freeman as Hotspur Shaner • Paul Lees as Bat Bennett • Margaret Field as Minerva • Harry Antrim as George Gribbe • Roy Roberts as Jerry Cavanaugh • Marietta Canty as Hazel • Celia Lovsky as Mrs. Scheffler
Distributed by Paramount Pictures • Produced by Paramount Pictures
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