Word: ladd
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Chicago Deadline (Paramount) is a lagging, maudlin movie with a tricky plot that never quite gets untangled. A sentimental reporter (Alan Ladd) who finds a pretty corpse in a cheap hotel is moved to track down the people in her fat address book and find out how she came to her sordid end. After Reporter Ladd finally "winds up the case," there are at least two unexplained murders and a heroine whose life story is still pretty much of a mystery. The journalistic technique constantly threatens to make the movie a good study of sleazy big-city life...
...anti-male message-that the city is a jungle of ravening wolves-is hackneyed, but the heroine (Donna Reed) is original and haunting: she is a sweet girl who simply wanders changelessly and sadly through assorted jobs, cities, and love affairs. All that Ladd manages to discover is that she was a much-dated girl who always remembered to bake a birthday cake for her brother. Also, it seems that she took up with almost anybody who made a pass at her because she "felt sorry for people...
...words, throw their eyes around as though they were at a tennis match. All the same, the film has moments of hard cynicism. The credibly forlorn scenes between the heroine and her brother (Arthur Kennedy) barely suggest a relationship that the Johnston Office might have scrutinized more closely. And Ladd's scenes with a cold and seedy blonde (June Havoc) show a consistent disconcern with what Hollywood knows as real love. Trying for and missing the punch of Double Indemnity, waltz-paced Deadline is further debilitated by Ladd's paralyzed imitation of Alan Ladd...
...Chicago Deadline" has flashbacks galore, in which we see the girl, played by Miss Reed, as Life strikes her one blow after another. She gets mixed up with gangsters and a corrupt bank president, until she finally meets her untimely end in the fly-blown rooming house where reporter Ladd first sees...
June Havoc is surprisingly good as the dead girl's showgirl friend; Alan Ladd and Donna Reed are unsurprisingly mediocre, but no one would go to the movies to see them, anyhow. "Chicago Deadline" is not the sort of picture you'd go out of your way to see; but once inside, you won't walk out, either...