Deadline At Dawn (1946)

A sailor (the bland Bill Williams) on leave finds himself with over a thousand dollars in his pocket and an hour the night before which he can't remember. When he and a dance hall hostess (Susan Hayward) return to the last place he remembers being, a woman's apartment, they find her dead body. From there, they attempt to find the killer but not without gathering a handful of suspects along the way. This film noir has quite a pedigree behind the camera. It's the only film directed by the legendary theatre director, teacher and critic Harold Clurman who along with Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg founded the Group Theatre in the 1930s. The screenplay is by Clifford Odets (GOLDEN BOY, WAITING FOR LEFTY) and based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich upon whose work sprung Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW and Truffaut's THE BRIDE WORE BLACK among many other films. With a legacy like that, you'd expect a corker of a thriller but it doesn't happen. The film is convoluted and contrived with odd little touches (like a cat dead from choking on a chicken bone) that have nothing to do with the narrative. Odets' dialogue too often seems ill at ease and doesn't come naturally from the actors. The hero (Williams) comes across as a simple minded child though the film offers a flimsy explanation: he was pronounced dead for two hours as a child which might have affected his brain but the film doesn't explore it any further. Even the mystery of whodunit is given away when one of the characters makes an offhanded statement that gives a major clue to the killer. With Paul Lukas, Osa Massen, Joseph Calleia, Lola Lane (as the murder victim), Jerome Cowan and Steven Geray.