A curious subgenre of noir is that where the investigation is to find carriers of a disease before it can spread into an epidemic. A couple of such films I have seen before include Panic in the Streets and The Killer that Stalked New York. 1949’s Chicago Deadline is in a similar vein as those, but the discovery of a dead woman who had tuberculosis is only the entry point into a labyrinth tale.
The corpse is that of Donna Reed as the improbably named Rosita Jean d’Ur. I like that last name, and I really wish people would have kept talking about her but only using her surname, so that a bunch of people would look like idiots always going “duhrrr…” No such luck, but what does make his film interesting is our central character is already deceased at the start, and we learn about her through the flashbacks of various characters, each of whom has a slightly different take on her. Yes, I know that was previously done in Citizen Kane, but it is still a good framing device when done well.
Alan Ladd stars as the reporter who happened upon the corpse. Using numbers from a book he steals from her purse, he starts randomly calling those people in hopes of finding a big story. The VP of a company (Gavin Muir) is one of those who answers a phone. Another person called is Arthur Kennedy, who agrees to come identify the body. Another recipient of a call is Irene Hervey, who immediately flees. One person he just drops in on is Berry Kroeger, with whom he exchanges a few punches before the man pulls a gun on him. Odd reaction to being informed a woman he might know died of T.B. If only the Van Morrison song “TB Sheets” had a line about how nobody is going to take them alive.
The trail to the truth is long and complicated. The investigation reveals Kennedy is her brother, and he was concerned by how hard she was falling for John Beal, who claims to be an architect. They marry, and take off on the honeymoon in his junker of a car. I liked how their diminishing funds from one year to the next is conveyed by a crossfade from the previous year’s birthday cake to much smaller one the next year. Beal was killed in a car crash four years prior to the present day in the film, but Kennedy believes something happened between the couple before then.
All this is just a fraction of the plot, which is overstuffed with characters and plot developments. I know detective noir tends to be excessively convoluted, but this film is almost at the level of The Big Sleep in that regard and, while this is a good picture, it ain’t exactly The Big Sleep, either.
I loved an odd scene where Ladd crashes a formal party at a suburban house in the middle of the day. I kept expecting Harvey Keitel to wander through the scene in a tux, as I thought this might be the party he was attending in Pulp Fiction. Typical of the crisp dialogue of this picture, he suggests to June Havoc she should sober up, to which she replies, “I have been misinformed about newspaper men.” Another line that stuck with me is when the police pressure Ladd to divulge his sources and he flippantly informs them he gets visions.
Chicago Deadline isn’t anything amazing, but it is solid noir that, if I had to rank such films, I would put in the top half of those I have seen. It tries just hard enough, and is just weird enough, to be more memorable than many other such movies I have watched since I first saw this. Besides, how can one not like a film where a smartass reporter rhetorically asks, “What do you do with a man like that, who has so much money he files it away under M”?
Dir: Lewis Allen
Starring Alan Ladd, Donna Reed, June Havoc
Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XVI box set