Deadline at Dawn (1946)

I really enjoyed this film. Deadline at Dawn is the film adaptation of the novel by Cornell Woolrich, which I also enjoyed. The film makes so many changes to the plot in the novel that I can’t even say it’s helpful to read the novel before seeing the film!

Click here to read my article about the novel, which has the same title as the film, by Cornell Woolrich.

Deadline at Dawn opens with a hallway and the stairs leading up to it. The credits start quickly while the camera stays on this shot. A blind man taps his way up the stairs toward the camera, turns, walks down the hall away from the camera, and knocks on the door farthest from the camera: a great introduction that could be missed if viewers are paying more attention to the credits than to the action. The blind man could be a metaphor for the film’s viewers, who will be following the plot blindly, without knowing where it will lead. I didn't know what to expect the first time that I saw it.

As soon as the credits finish, the camera is close to the blind man knocking. He awakens a woman, Edna Bartelli, who opens the door and lets him into her apartment. She calls the man Sleepy Parsons. He’s her ex-husband, and he wants the $1,400 that she owes him. But she says that she doesn’t have it, that the sailor she met earlier must have stolen it. Sleepy Parsons doesn’t believe her and sits down on her bed.

After the sequence between the blind man and a woman named Edna, the camera dissolves from Sleepy Parson’s boutonniere to a sailor’s hat. What’s missing in between? Viewers have no idea, and they won’t find out until all the plot details are woven together at the end.

Alex Winkler, a sailor, is recovering from a drinking bout in a newspaper kiosk on a city street. Ray, the newspaper vendor, is allowing him to stay until he can get back on his feet. When Alex gets up and decides to leave, he accidentally drops a wad of bills, and Ray returns it to him. The sailor doesn’t recognize it, but he takes it because he thinks getting so drunk made him forgetful. Ray also reminds Alex to take his radio; it is part of his military gear because he is a radio technician. Alex does remember that he has seven hours before his bus leaves for Norfolk, Virginia, where he must report for duty.

Alex is planning on getting some fresh air, but the crowds on the New York City sidewalks surround and sweep him along until he decides to enter a dance hall, where he meets June Goffe. She is comfortable enough with him to invite him up to her apartment for sandwiches (and nothing else, she tells him). Alex tells June about the money he has and how he got it now that his memory is much clearer. He got drunk at a restaurant where he met Edna Bartelli. Edna’s brother cheated Alex when they started gambling together. Edna wanted Alex to come to her apartment and fix her radio, but she refused to pay him for this work, and he passed out from drinking too much. When he came to, he took the money because he felt that Edna and her brother owed it to him.

June convinces Alex to return the money. Alex in turn convinces June to accompany him. They arrive together at Edna Bartelli’s apartment building, and Alex goes upstairs to the apartment while June plays lookout. She promises to turn on Alex’s radio as a warning if anyone enters the apartment building. When Alex returns, he tells June that he found the woman dead. June goes up to see for herself, with Alex racing up behind her.

Alex and June decide that they must find Edna Bartelli’s killer. They must do it before dawn, when her body will probably be discovered, and they must do it before Alex must board his bus and report for duty in Virginia. They will follow different leads, each on their own to make better use of the time remaining to them. They leave Edna’s apartment with two different missions and a common goal.

(This article about Deadline at Dawn contains spoilers for both the film and the novel.)

Neither one of them is successful with their slim clues, and both return to Edna’s apartment. A cab driver, Gus Hoffman, who drove Alex and takes him back to where they started, waits behind and sees that Alex is returning to Edna Bartelli’s apartment; he waits long enough to see June return to the same place. He comes up after Alex and June and knocks on Edna Bartelli’s front door. June answers and says that she is Edna Bartelli, but Gus knows this isn’t true. He doesn’t explain how he knows this, and June and Alex are too nervous to ask him questions.

Gus inserts himself into the investigation and finds letters that Edna had written to blackmail several men, including her own brother. He helps June and Alex out of the kindness of his heart. He sees that they are falling in love and wants them to stay together. From this point onward, three people—June, Alex, and Gus—are looking for clues and following up leads, which is a departure from the novel, in which only two people are involved. The cab driver Gus has a very important role in the film adaptation. There are several cab drivers in the novel, but none of them are even given a name and none of them do any investigating to help the main characters.

In the novel, Alex Winkler is Quinn Williams, an out-of-work electrician’s assistant who is desperate for cash. The story still takes place in New York City, but the year is 1939, when the United States is still in the grip of the Great Depression and has not yet become involved in World War II. The addition of Gus Hoffman as a main character and the name and occupation changes aren’t the only differences between the novel and the film. Stephen Graves is the murder victim in the novel, and the murderer is a different character altogether in the film.

At one point, June becomes frustrated about the lack of progress in the investigation because she wants to see Alex cleared of any wrongdoing. She and Gus, the cab driver, are on one part of the search for clues in the murder investigation, and Gus can see what June doesn’t realize quite yet: that she is falling in love with Alex. Gus tells her, “The logic you are looking for, the logic is that there is no logic. The horror and terror you feel, my dear, come from being alive. Die, and there is no trouble. Live, and you struggle . . .” Gus’s speech to June about the meaning of life, love, and logic seems to explain existential angst in general (the underlying premise for almost all film noir) and the human condition. His words don’t come from the novel, of course, because his character doesn’t exist in it, but they seem to replace the views expressed by Bricky Coleman, the name of the main female character in the novel: that the city, New York City, is an evil place that defies logic, and if you stay in it too long, it is almost impossible to escape.

By the end of Deadline at Dawn, viewers see the logic to the film’s plot. They (and the characters) are given a very satisfying ending that may not appeal to fans of Woolrich’s novel, but it explains everything. The novel does the same, but its conclusion and many of the details leading up to it are so different. Both the film and the novel are wonderful on their own merits. I am finding this true more and more often about film noir adaptations. I usually enjoy a novel so much more, but the film noir genre seems to have made adaptations a real art form. I enjoyed the changes in the film version of Deadline at Dawn as much as the plot in the novel.

Release dates: March 18, 1946 (Sweden), April 3, 1946 (United States)  •  Directed by Harold Clurman  •  Screenplay by Clifford Odets  •  Based on the novel Deadline at Dawn by Cornell Woolrich  •  Music by Hanns Eisler, C. Bakaleinikoff  •  Edited by Roland Gross  •  Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca

Susan Hayward as June Goffe  •  Paul Lukas as Gus Hoffman  •  Bill Williams as Alex Winkler  •  Joseph Calleia as Val Bartelli  •  Osa Massen as Helen Robinson  •  Phil Warren as Jerry Robinson  •  Lola Lane as Edna Bartelli  •  Jerome Cowan as Lester Brady  •  Marvin Miller as Sleepy Parsons  •  Roman Bohnen as the man with the injured cat  •  Steven Geray as Edward Honig  •  Joe Sawyer as Babe Dooley  •  Constance Worth as Nan Raymond  •  Joseph Crehan as Lieutenant Kane  •  Byron Foulger as the night attendant  •  Eugene Pallette as a man in the crowd  •  Jason Robards Sr. as a police officer

Distributed by RKO Radio Pictures  •  Produced by RKO Radio Pictures

Deadline at Dawn (Book) (1944)

The setting for Deadline at Dawn is New York City. The time is 1939, when the United States is still in the grip of the Great Depression, and the country has not yet become involved in World War II. The setting and the place are revealed naturally in the course of the narrative, but both are important for readers, especially contemporary readers, because life was so different then. Forget the Internet; forget smartphones. The two main characters don’t have access to either type of technology.

Readers meet the taxi dancer first, and she is nameless at first. Her job is an anachronism: Dance halls don’t exist anymore. On one particular night at work, she meets a man, a dance partner, who gives his name as Quinn Williams. To her, he is just another face, another problem looking to make more out of a dance, but he fights off a masher outside the dance hall when she gets off work. He walks her home to help keep her safe, and she still won’t tell him her name. She does notice that he seems nervous. He keeps looking over his shoulder as though someone is following him or her—or them. She tells him that the masher won’t come back, but he insists that it’s not the masher that is on his mind.

The dancer and Quinn Williams part ways at the front entrance to her apartment building. Once she is inside her apartment, the dancer can see, from one of her windows, Quinn outside on the sidewalk, and she watches as he hides from a patrol car. After that, he disappears from view because he has chosen to hide inside the stairwell of her apartment building. She waits for him to return to the street and to leave forever, but he never does. Against her better judgment, she invites him in for a cup of coffee, nothing more.

On a table, Quinn Williams finds a letter that the dancer is still in the middle of writing. The envelope is addressed to Glen Falls, Iowa, which astounds him because that is his hometown. They quickly learn that both are from Glen Falls: He lived on Anderson Avenue; she lived on the next street over, on Emmet Road. She finally tells him her name: Bricky Coleman. Her real first name is Ruth, but people started calling her Bricky because of the color of her hair.

The chapters in the novel are not numbered. Instead, each one starts with a clockface. And here readers face another anachronism: The clockfaces are analog, not digital. Bricky first meets Quinn at 12:50 a.m. in the dance hall, and the analog clockface starts the novel at that point. The last one in the novel reads 5:45 a.m., and the novel ends just ten or fifteen minutes later. The entire novel occurs over a span of five hours and approximately five minutes.

Bricky holds a very dim view of urban living and of living in New York City in particular. She tells Quinn what she thinks of living in the city and why she has so much trouble going back home to Iowa.

                “. . . I don’t know fancy language. I only know there’s an intelligence of its own hanging over this place. Coming up from it. It’s mean and bad and evil, and when you breathe too much of it for too long, it gets under your skin, it gets into you—and you’re sunk, the city’s got you . . . Then it’s too late. Then you can go anywhere—home or anywhere else—and you just keep on being what it made you from then on.” (page 43)

Bricky knows Quinn is hiding something; she knew that he was worried about something even as he walked her to the front door of her apartment building. Quinn finally admits that he is carrying a lot of money. He doesn’t say so; he just takes money—$2,500.00 minus what little he has spent so far—out of the lining of his coat. Things are tough in 1939 for Quinn Williams. He was an electrician’s assistant until the business owner had a heart attack and closed the business. But Quinn still had the front door key to the last job that they did, at the home of the Graves family. He doesn’t know how the key ended up in his toolkit, but that’s where he found it. He went back to the Graves home intending to return the key, but he was desperate for cash, and he stole some money from the safe in the Graves home. Quinn explains to Bricky how taking the money from the Graves safe has affected him.

. . . “And right away, I started to pay for it; boy, how I paid for it. Before I spent a nickel of it or got a block away, I was already paying for it through the nose. Until now, I’d owned the streets. That was about all I’d had, but I’d had them, at least. I was hungry and broke and jobless, but I looked everyone square in the face, I went anywhere I damn pleased on them, the streets were mine. Now all of a sudden, the streets were taken away from me, to stay on them too long became dangerous . . .” (pages 56–57)

Bricky convinces Quinn to go back to the Graves home and return the money. She offers to go with him, and then she and Quinn can go back home to Iowa. Quinn and Bricky go to the Graves’s house to return the money, but Quinn finds one of the Graves family, a man, dead inside. Bricky convinces him to go back inside with her so they can find out what they can about the death. She is convinced that she will never have the strength to return to Iowa if Quinn doesn’t go back with her on the very next bus, which leaves at 6 a.m. Both are convinced that Quinn looks like the guilty party, that he will be arrested for the suspicious death inside the Graves house, and both become detectives to find the truth and spare Quinn.

Their decision alone seems improbable. Both are young and inexperienced. How will they ever find out what they need to know? But that’s what both of them set out to do, and readers have to be willing to go along and experience it with them. It takes a certain kind of person to take on this much responsibility, but Bricky and Quinn are equal to the task. They have more motivation than any reader: Bricky and Quinn are falling in love. Quinn, for instance, has second thoughts, but he decides that he cannot stop now because he doesn’t want to let Bricky down.

So he left her, and he struck out down the night-charred street, thinking: Oh, this is hopeless. It’s no use. Why not admit it, why not recognize it? If he’d been alone in it, he would have gone over to the park and planked down on a bench and waited for the daylight to come around, and for it to end that way. Or maybe he would have even beat the daylight to it by . . . walking around to the nearest police station and marching himself in.

                But she was in it now, so he didn’t. She was in it now, so he kept going . . . (page 110)

I enjoyed Bricky and Quinn’s amateur investigation. It was difficult not to root for them. I wanted them to return to Iowa and build a life together.

Cornell Woolrich has a writing style that is clipped and bare bones; sometimes it seems that he purposely dropped words and telescoped his prose so that readers stumble a bit, which I found very distracting. But not all of that is the fault of the writer. I found five typos in three short paragraphs early in this particular edition of the novel. If readers are lucky, however, this series of mystery and pulp novels—American Mystery Classics from Penzler Publishers—will be a commercial success and all typos will be fixed in subsequent printings.

I saw the film noir based on Woolrich’s novel (it goes by the same title: Deadline at Dawn) many years ago, and I was looking forward to seeing it again now that I had read the book. The film is very different from the novel in some ways, and I had forgotten some great plot twists that are not part of the novel. The film and the novel stand well on their own merits, which I am finding true more and more often of novels and the films noir adapted from them.

Deadline at Dawn, by Cornell Woolrich  •  New York: Penzler Publishers, 2022  •  Originally published in 1944  •  Introduction by David Gordon

List of main characters:  Bricky Coleman, taxi dancer  •  Quinn Williams, unemployed electrician’s assistant  •  Stephen Graves, oldest son in the Graves family  •  Roger Graves, Stephen’s younger brother  •  Harriet Graves, the matriarch  •  Mr. Carter, new father  •  Helen Kirsch  •  Harry Kirsch, Helen’s husband  •  Barbara, Stephen’s fiancée  •  Arthur Holmes, stockbroker  •  Joan Bristol, vaudevillian  •  Griff, Joan’s boyfriend

The image of the front cover is from the 2022 edition from Penzler Publishers. The page references in this article refer to the Penzler 2022 edition listed above.