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When a blind ex-husband wearing a boutonnière shows up late in the evening demanding $1400, a good night is probably not in store. Especially when his former spouse's drunken excuse for not paying is "that sailor" must have stolen it. Thus begins Deadline at Dawn, an early noir that's not only a taut and agreeably complicated little mystery but that also aspires, and largely succeeds, in constructing an urban microcosm.
The sailor (Bill Williams) on shore leave has, as sailors on leave do, drunk too much, gambled away his money, been lured up to a wicked woman's apartment, and fallen into a blackout. (The movie's based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich, writing as William Irish, who knew whereof he wrote.) When he climbs back out, thanks to black coffee supplied by a kindly newsie, $1400 tumbles out of his pocket.
Trying to piece together the evening, he strays into a dime-a-dance palace, where he meets a would-be hard case (Susan Hayward in her 24th movie!). Making small talk with his bored-to-the-bone partner, Williams speculates whether a rainstorm might break the heat wave. "Such things have been known to happen," replies Hayward, thereby lowering the thermometer pronto. (The quirky, bristling dialogue by Clifford Odets is one of the many amenities of Deadline at Dawn.) Of course, Hayward inevitably thaws enough to offer counsel to Williams and serve as sidekick in his quest to make amends (he's a square-rigger right out of one of the square states). They return to the robbed woman's apartment only to find her (Lola Lane) dead. It's unclear to the befuddled Williams, and to Hayward, whether he might indeed have been the culprit. Trouble is, he's taking a 6 a.m. bus back to Norfolk, where he's stationed; there's only a few hours left to clear his conscience or fess up to the police.
An immigrant cabbie (Paul Lukas) improbably volunteers as a third ally, and the three, together and separately, embark on various sleuthing expeditions through the dark and soupy streets of Manhattan. For a movie that clocks in under an hour and a half, Deadline at Dawn boasts a cast just short of epic. Among the principals who intersect are Joseph Calleia, as a ruthless yet debonair gangster; Osa Massen as a lame housewife expelled from the rubble of Europe; and Steven Geray as a well-mannered stalker. Joining them are countless players with brief walk-ons, comic or poignant, of the 8-million-stories-in-the-naked-city variety, giving the movie the sole directorial effort by east-coast theater maven Harold Clurman its distinctive tone and texture. (Jules Dassin must have borrowed greedily from it when he came to film his own The Naked City during the sweltering New York summer of 1947.) Deadline at Dawn falls short of perfection. It's too short for all it contains, it's a bit sooty from all the red herrings, and its way out verges on the-butler-did-it (or maybe Roger Ackroyd). But a lot of RKO talent went into its making (in addition to the above, Nicholas Musuraca photographed it, and Hanns Eisler later to become a serious Leftist composer in East Germany wrote the score). But it has its own sweaty, big-city flavor, a pungent New York Story, and a prototype of many noirish delights yet to come.
The sailor (Bill Williams) on shore leave has, as sailors on leave do, drunk too much, gambled away his money, been lured up to a wicked woman's apartment, and fallen into a blackout. (The movie's based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich, writing as William Irish, who knew whereof he wrote.) When he climbs back out, thanks to black coffee supplied by a kindly newsie, $1400 tumbles out of his pocket.
Trying to piece together the evening, he strays into a dime-a-dance palace, where he meets a would-be hard case (Susan Hayward in her 24th movie!). Making small talk with his bored-to-the-bone partner, Williams speculates whether a rainstorm might break the heat wave. "Such things have been known to happen," replies Hayward, thereby lowering the thermometer pronto. (The quirky, bristling dialogue by Clifford Odets is one of the many amenities of Deadline at Dawn.) Of course, Hayward inevitably thaws enough to offer counsel to Williams and serve as sidekick in his quest to make amends (he's a square-rigger right out of one of the square states). They return to the robbed woman's apartment only to find her (Lola Lane) dead. It's unclear to the befuddled Williams, and to Hayward, whether he might indeed have been the culprit. Trouble is, he's taking a 6 a.m. bus back to Norfolk, where he's stationed; there's only a few hours left to clear his conscience or fess up to the police.
An immigrant cabbie (Paul Lukas) improbably volunteers as a third ally, and the three, together and separately, embark on various sleuthing expeditions through the dark and soupy streets of Manhattan. For a movie that clocks in under an hour and a half, Deadline at Dawn boasts a cast just short of epic. Among the principals who intersect are Joseph Calleia, as a ruthless yet debonair gangster; Osa Massen as a lame housewife expelled from the rubble of Europe; and Steven Geray as a well-mannered stalker. Joining them are countless players with brief walk-ons, comic or poignant, of the 8-million-stories-in-the-naked-city variety, giving the movie the sole directorial effort by east-coast theater maven Harold Clurman its distinctive tone and texture. (Jules Dassin must have borrowed greedily from it when he came to film his own The Naked City during the sweltering New York summer of 1947.) Deadline at Dawn falls short of perfection. It's too short for all it contains, it's a bit sooty from all the red herrings, and its way out verges on the-butler-did-it (or maybe Roger Ackroyd). But a lot of RKO talent went into its making (in addition to the above, Nicholas Musuraca photographed it, and Hanns Eisler later to become a serious Leftist composer in East Germany wrote the score). But it has its own sweaty, big-city flavor, a pungent New York Story, and a prototype of many noirish delights yet to come.
Released in the late '50s when paranoia about thermonuclear annihilation was running rampant through America, Hell's Five Hours looks not at Communist operators but at a disturbed individual with access to one installation of the nation's military-industrial complex. It's set at night, in cozy Meritville, a little town whose chief employer is a huge and ominous rocket-fuel plant (in an expressionist touch, it registers as a looming bank of lights in the dark distance).
When a disgruntled worker (Vic Morrow) gets fired, he straps dynamite around his chest activated by a mercury-switch detonator if he topples over (from a rifle shot, say), the bomb goes off anyway. (It's Morrow's own appropriation of the Doomsday Machine.) His goal (which "voices" told him to accomplish) is nothing less than igniting a catastrophic explosion that will flatten the town and unleash clouds of deadly cyanide gas.
When his first attempt to break into the plant undetected goes awry, Morrow slinging a corn-pone drawl patterned after the late James Dean realizes that he'll need some unwilling accomplices. So he turns up at the house of the plant's chief engineer (Stephen McNally), abducting his wife (Colleen Gray) and son. He then tears back to the plant, with Gray his hostage.
The only movie ever made by Jack L. Copeland (who wrote, produced and directed), Hell's Five Hours is little more than a prolonged standoff between Morrow and McNally's forces, but it abounds with deft touches. Those that aren't so deft leave clues as to how society during the second Eisenhower administration was portrayed on contemporary film. (Atop one of the massive fuel tanks, which supposedly has a weak roof, Morrow orders Gray to test its strength by walking across it; so she does, in the same pair of high heels she had been wearing, late in the evening, at home.) With its premise a deranged terrorist stalking a sleepy, complacent hamlet in dead of night, with plans to kindle Armageddon, Hell's Five Hours stands as an uneasy preview of events that would occur years later: Three Mile Island, Bhopal, even 9/11. In 1958, it may have been received as alarmist; today, we, alas, know better.
When a disgruntled worker (Vic Morrow) gets fired, he straps dynamite around his chest activated by a mercury-switch detonator if he topples over (from a rifle shot, say), the bomb goes off anyway. (It's Morrow's own appropriation of the Doomsday Machine.) His goal (which "voices" told him to accomplish) is nothing less than igniting a catastrophic explosion that will flatten the town and unleash clouds of deadly cyanide gas.
When his first attempt to break into the plant undetected goes awry, Morrow slinging a corn-pone drawl patterned after the late James Dean realizes that he'll need some unwilling accomplices. So he turns up at the house of the plant's chief engineer (Stephen McNally), abducting his wife (Colleen Gray) and son. He then tears back to the plant, with Gray his hostage.
The only movie ever made by Jack L. Copeland (who wrote, produced and directed), Hell's Five Hours is little more than a prolonged standoff between Morrow and McNally's forces, but it abounds with deft touches. Those that aren't so deft leave clues as to how society during the second Eisenhower administration was portrayed on contemporary film. (Atop one of the massive fuel tanks, which supposedly has a weak roof, Morrow orders Gray to test its strength by walking across it; so she does, in the same pair of high heels she had been wearing, late in the evening, at home.) With its premise a deranged terrorist stalking a sleepy, complacent hamlet in dead of night, with plans to kindle Armageddon, Hell's Five Hours stands as an uneasy preview of events that would occur years later: Three Mile Island, Bhopal, even 9/11. In 1958, it may have been received as alarmist; today, we, alas, know better.
The only X-rated movie ever to nab the Academy Award for best picture, Midnight Cowboy plays like a druggy, grind-house remake of 1942's The Big Street, a Damon Runyon vehicle in which endearing simpleton Henry Fonda pushes wheelchair-bound witch Lucille Ball from the cold streets of Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel and all the way to balmy Florida, where she dies.
The Fonda character is taken by Jon Voight as Joe Buck, a six-foot slab of blond beefcake out of Texas (where a dimly referenced past seems to include a history of sexual abuse by a grandmother plus a homosexual gang rape). He rides the Big Dog to New York, where he hopes to cut a wide swath as a swain to wealthy women. Instead, he crosses paths with a "crippled" street-smart street person, played by Dustin Hoffmann as Rico ("Ratzo") Rizzo the Ball part. And the only emotional thrust in the movie lies in their sexless, antagonistic romance (and the heat kindled by its two stars offscreen, two New York actors on the make as single-mindedly as the characters they portray).
Other than that, the movie's off-puttingly chilly, almost repellently misanthropic. Director John Schlesinger turns an avid eye on the grotesques and misfits and just plain wretched of the earth who seem to reach critical mass in a metropolis, but shows scant pity for them they're just dress extras for his soulless carnival. He enlists a whole ladies' auxiliary of over-made-up old Janes gawking at the goings-on, as though it weren't the director himself doing all the gawking.
In scene after scene, shot after shot, he opts for the cheapest gimmick, squelching any hint of complexity in his vast cast of supporting players. John McGiver, for example, may well be a pitiful old queen who got religion once he could no longer score tricks, but the pulsating plastic Jesus behind the bathroom door of his seedy, SRO hotel lingers as a spiteful, unwarranted detail. Just as unconvincingly unworthily staged are Buck's encounters with over-the-hill rich roundheels Sylvia Miles (where she out-hustles the hustler out of 20 bucks), scared-stiff schoolboy Bob Balaban (in the balcony and bathroom of a 42nd Street sex-and-cinema palace), and mama's-boy oldster Barnard Hughes (who gets a telephone receiver crammed into his dentureless mouth instead of what he hoped and paid for).
Schlesinger was good with actors, and was in the vanguard in pushing for edgy material particularly about homosexuality long before it became reasonably mainstream (he was gay himself and open about it in a Hollywood which preferred circumspection, i.e. the closet). Though it may be unchivalrous to speak ill of the recently departed, he was an uneven, almost mediocre director. His work suffered either from suffocatingly stately and prim taste (Far From The Madding Crowd) or catastrophic lapses of it (Day of The Locust). If he made one movie that approaches a masterwork, it's not Midnight Cowboy, it's Sunday, Bloody Sunday. And even there he can't take a lion's share of the credit, which belongs to actors Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson, and most luminously to the writer of its unforgettable script, Penelope Gilliatt.
The Fonda character is taken by Jon Voight as Joe Buck, a six-foot slab of blond beefcake out of Texas (where a dimly referenced past seems to include a history of sexual abuse by a grandmother plus a homosexual gang rape). He rides the Big Dog to New York, where he hopes to cut a wide swath as a swain to wealthy women. Instead, he crosses paths with a "crippled" street-smart street person, played by Dustin Hoffmann as Rico ("Ratzo") Rizzo the Ball part. And the only emotional thrust in the movie lies in their sexless, antagonistic romance (and the heat kindled by its two stars offscreen, two New York actors on the make as single-mindedly as the characters they portray).
Other than that, the movie's off-puttingly chilly, almost repellently misanthropic. Director John Schlesinger turns an avid eye on the grotesques and misfits and just plain wretched of the earth who seem to reach critical mass in a metropolis, but shows scant pity for them they're just dress extras for his soulless carnival. He enlists a whole ladies' auxiliary of over-made-up old Janes gawking at the goings-on, as though it weren't the director himself doing all the gawking.
In scene after scene, shot after shot, he opts for the cheapest gimmick, squelching any hint of complexity in his vast cast of supporting players. John McGiver, for example, may well be a pitiful old queen who got religion once he could no longer score tricks, but the pulsating plastic Jesus behind the bathroom door of his seedy, SRO hotel lingers as a spiteful, unwarranted detail. Just as unconvincingly unworthily staged are Buck's encounters with over-the-hill rich roundheels Sylvia Miles (where she out-hustles the hustler out of 20 bucks), scared-stiff schoolboy Bob Balaban (in the balcony and bathroom of a 42nd Street sex-and-cinema palace), and mama's-boy oldster Barnard Hughes (who gets a telephone receiver crammed into his dentureless mouth instead of what he hoped and paid for).
Schlesinger was good with actors, and was in the vanguard in pushing for edgy material particularly about homosexuality long before it became reasonably mainstream (he was gay himself and open about it in a Hollywood which preferred circumspection, i.e. the closet). Though it may be unchivalrous to speak ill of the recently departed, he was an uneven, almost mediocre director. His work suffered either from suffocatingly stately and prim taste (Far From The Madding Crowd) or catastrophic lapses of it (Day of The Locust). If he made one movie that approaches a masterwork, it's not Midnight Cowboy, it's Sunday, Bloody Sunday. And even there he can't take a lion's share of the credit, which belongs to actors Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson, and most luminously to the writer of its unforgettable script, Penelope Gilliatt.