–30– : “Deadline – U.S.A.” (1952)

By Scott Ross

The writer-director Richard Brooks’ paean to something we once knew as the American free press in the form of a melodrama about, as Pete Hamill phrased it in his splendid broadside News is a Verb, “a dying (of course!) newspaper.” Humphrey Bogart plays Ed Hutcheson, the smart, crusading managing editor and he’s wonderfully matched by Kim Hunter as his conflicted ex-wife, Martin Gabel as the mafioso who becomes his especial target and Ethel Barrymore as the publisher’s widow trying to hold on to her husband’s legacy. As a newspaper saga it has its flaws: Too many florid speeches about the nobility of the press accompanied by Cyril Mockridge’s sanctimonious “Battle Hymn of the Republic” arrangements, and a city room that when you stop to ponder its layout makes no sense whatsoever. In addition, calling his fictional paper The Day permits Brooks to put out the lights on the building’s logo at the end, a risibly heavy-handed metaphor. (“The Day is over! Get it? No more daylight! Get it?“) At its best, however, it’s swift and engaging and, when you consider how over the past quarter-century the Fourth Estate in America allowed itself through consolidation and CIA coercion to become a corporate/governmental Fifth Column, enough to make you weep for what has been lost. At least Bogart’s paper goes down fighting, not the people, but their would-be oppressors. Today, of course, the exact reverse is the case.

Bogart, on the cusp of the career boost of an Academy Award for his performance in The African Queen, approaches his role not as a kind of print media superman but as a complete professional, a quality Brooks appreciated so much he titled one of his best movies after the concept. This editor loves every aspect of the newspaper game, and is so assured in his sense both of justice and of the power of journalism for positive effect on the public weal that he barely reacts when, in a reversal of the usual Bogartian role, he’s slapped in the face by Gabel in the back seat of a sedan. The scene itself anticipates the beautiful sequence between Brando and Rod Steiger two years later in On the Waterfront, but it also makes you think with a smile of Bogie’s Sam Spade snarling to Peter Lorre, “When you’re slapped, you’ll take it, and like it.” As Ed Hutcheson, he seems to do just that, smiling at the gangster as if to say, “Go ahead. Slap me. A lot worse than a slap is headed your way.” Despite the fact that the newspaper to which Ed has given his life’s blood is being shut down and sold by its late publisher’s rapacious offspring, Bogart never plays for pity, just as Ed never acknowledges (although he is passionately angry about it) just how much the paper’s imminent death wounds him. That restraint makes the movie’s narrative all the more affecting.*

Barrymore is her usual miraculous self, undercutting sentimentality with dry wit and a wry smile; her scenes with Bogart are like safe flirtations but it’s a love affair of shared senses of social responsibility. Hunter captures the ambivalence of a woman who still loves her ex but is exhausted by what the press demands of them both, and as the gangster, Gabel is astonishing. If you know his deep, resonant voice through recordings of Orson Welles’ “Campbell Playhouse” shows and Norman Corwin’s verbally dazzling VE-Day radio special “On a Note of Triumph,” which Gabel narrated and whose repeated phrase, “Take a bow, G.I. — take a bow, little guy” becomes both a stirring tribute and a moving threnody, you’re probably predisposed to be impressed. (I was introduced to Gabel on the cast recording of the Sherlock Holmes musical Baker Street when I was in early adolescence and I still treasure the way while explicating for Holmes and Watson the elaborate bomb he’s set up to extinguish them he speaks the lines, “Observe von Herder’s masterpiece… A fantastic chronometer of death… which once begun… cannot be touched… without producing… detonation.”) Yet even if you know Gabel’s voice you may be bowled over by his physical assurance in this movie; although in moments of stress he bellows, the actor also understands (as Brando did on The Godfather) that a truly dangerous man does not have to bark constantly to be obeyed.

The supporting cast lays out a veritable feast enacting Brooks’ marvelous gallery of types snapping out his razor-sharp dialogue: Ed Begley and Joseph Crehan as editors; Warren Stevens, Paul Stewart, Jim Backus and the wonderful Audrey Christie as reporters; Tom Powers as an oddly sympathetic philanderer; Phillip Terry as Hunter’s fiancé; Parley Baer as a congenial headwaiter; the radio actor Lawrence Dobkin as Gabel’s consigliere; Joseph De Santis as a pathetic rat of an informer; Florence Shirley as the Day‘s chief researcher; and Kasia Orzazewski, beautifully effective as the elderly mother of a murder victim, a woman who bears certain resemblances to the filmmaker’s own immigrant mom. (If you know to look for him, you can also spot James Dean, briefly, as a copy-boy.) Although occasionally hampered by poor back projection of the paper’s press plant, Milton R. Krasner’s cinematography, which know-nothings would doubtless peg as “noir,” is luminous in a way only black-and-white photography can be.

Brooks, who before he drifted into screenwriting was a novelist and newspaper man, blended his New York news history in an entertaining fashion, basing his paper on the New York Sun and naming it for that publication’s editor, Benjamin Day, but taking his narrative from the sale of the New York World by Pulitzer’s heirs and its folding into the Evening Telegram, to form the World-Telegram. (The filmmaker worked briefly for the latter.) While he could be bombastic — in this picture and others he is far cruder and blunter than that other reporter-turned-writer/director, Samuel Fuller, who is often accused of both (and by his defenders!) ever was — Brooks is also eloquent, and intelligent. The dialogue in Deadline — USA hums like an electric wire, and crackles too. And he gets the details exactly right, such as the largely jolly wake the Day‘s staff attends for their paper in their local bar.

Brooks’ warnings in 1952 about the danger of losing a free press were prescient. Thirty years later, in his terrific satire Wrong is Right (which would make an excellent double-feature with Deadline — USA) he saw how out-of-control things were becoming.

He hadn’t lived.

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*Bogart was reportedly a pain to work with during the shoot, and not (at least as far as Ethel Barrymore was concerned) very professional. Billy Wilder’s experience with the actor two years later on Sabrina wasn’t much better. I hate to play speculation games with a man’s life but Bogart’s alcoholism might have been to blame; he may also have been worried about his health generally: He would die of cancer within four years of filming Deadline — U.S.A.

Text copyright 2021 by Scott Ross