"Chicago Deadline" (1949)

On the surface, Chicago Deadline (1949) feels rather akin to Laura (1944).  In Laura, a police detective becomes obsessed with learning everything he can about a beautiful dead woman and the people who were part of her life.  In Chicago Deadline, a newspaper reporter becomes obsessed with the same basic thing.  The ending goes quite differently from Laura, and I think that the newspaper reporter keeps in better mental health during the movie, but in a broad way, there are definite similarities.

Cynical yet compassionate reporter Ed Adams (Alan Ladd) has tracked down a random runaway girl whose parents called his newspaper in hopes of finding their daughter.  It's never specified if finding runaway girls is a hobby of Ed's, or if he just drew the short straw that day and got sent out on this little errand, or what.  He's certainly good at tracking people down from very slim clues, so maybe he gets assigned these sorts of jobs regularly.  He cracks wise with the landlady and the runaway girl, but you can see he is genuinely glad the girl will be going home safely before anything untoward happened to her in the big city.

He's just told the runaway to pack her things when a cleaning woman down the hall screams in terror.  Ed rushes over there and discovers a dead woman lying in bed.  He peers at her face and diagnoses her as having died of a "hemorrhage," probably from tuberculosis.  The audience only gets to see people's reaction to her, not her face or anything more than the back of her head and the vague shape of her body under the covers.

Ed quickly goes through the dead woman's belongings, starting with her mostly unpacked suitcase and proceeding to her handbag.  There, he finds her datebook, which he pockets.  I suppose, since she appears to have died of natural causes, he isn't actually removing or withholding evidence from a crime scene, but it's definitely not a particularly honest thing to do.  Ed also drags that runaway girl into the bedroom and shows her the dead woman, warning her that she could have ended up dying alone in an anonymous bedroom too, if she didn't have parents who called the police and the newspapers and everyone else they could think of to try to find her.  The girl is suitably chastised and subdued.

Ed asks the landlady who the dead woman was.  She says she was named Rosita Jean d'Ur (Donna Reed), and she'd rented the room less than a week earlier.  Ed tells the landlady to call the police, then leaves with the runaway girl in tow, bound for the train station so he can send her back home where she belongs.

Ed goes back to the newspaper office where he belongs and starts flipping through the dead woman's date book.  It appears Rosita had a lot of friends, but she didn't supply full names for most of them, only first names or initials.  Ed starts calling the numbers, figuring if he learns a bit about Rosita, he can write a human interest piece about her and why she died all alone.

But everyone he calls has very odd reactions to his asking if they knew her.  Several deny knowing who she was.  One person checks out of her hotel an hour after speaking with him.  Others demand he explain how he got their phone number.  Ed's newshound nose smells a much bigger story, and he starts digging deeper and deeper into Rosita's past.

By the time he's unraveled the story of her life, he's had run-ins with gangsters and crooks, brushed shoulders with wealthy financiers, interviewed a wheelchair-bound recluse, and gotten tangled up romantically with a lonely socialite.

Ed meets the socialite, Leona Purdy (June Havoc), at a party thrown by someone whose number is in Rosita's book.  Leona knew Rosita for a while, and she liked her a lot, so she starts helping Ed try to piece together the story of Rosita's life.  Before long, they're doing a little kissing once in a while, too.

I wish June Havoc had made more movies with Alan Ladd because I like her a lot opposite him.  They trade quips really well, and they have lovely chemistry.  They have a kind of comfortable rapport that I liked very much.

As a bit of a random aside before I resume relating the plot here, one of the reasons I like this movie so much is that Alan Ladd isn't playing a world-weary loner who gradually regains his own humanity after encountering genuinely nice people who help him rediscover his soul.  I'm not saying he played that character in all his other film noir outings... but it feels like it.  Some of his westerns go that way too.  But his character in this has friends, colleagues, and a steady girlfriend.  It's really refreshing.

Anyway, Ed is also aided by his friend and fellow reporter, Pig (Dave Willock), who tracks down leads for him offscreen and provides backup during a shoot-out in a parking garage.  Have I ever mentioned that I find parking garages very scary?  They always make me feel both trapped and exposed at the same time, and that is probably because I have watched so many movies where people get into shoot-outs in parking garages.  There's only one parking garage where I don't feel even a little bit creeped out, and that's the one at Colonial Williamsburg because it is bright and light and airy, and it has openings everywhere on the ground and second floor, all the way around, so you can get out literally anywhere you want.

Anyway, Ed tracks down Rosita's brother Tommy (Arthur Kennedy), who is deeply saddened to learn Rosita has died.  He fills in a lot of gaps in her life story for Ed, but can't really shed light on why other people keep behaving so peculiarly when Ed mentions her name.  

I'm afraid I don't have any shots of Kennedy to add here -- this movie isn't available on DVD.  It has recently been released to Blu-Ray by Kino Lorber, which is absolutely wonderful!  I've watched it twice this month, and it's been such a delight to have a crisp and clear copy.  I watched it once a few years ago, when all that was available was a murky version that looked like (and probably was) someone aiming their laptop webcam at a TV playing an old VHS tape that had been recorded off cable TV.  So, I'm really excited that this movie is available legitimately on Blu-Ray now... but I can't get screencaps from a Blu-Ray because my laptop only plays DVDs.  Which is why we have this random collection of production stills and lobby cards here.  And no pictures of Arthur Kennedy because they don't appear to exist anywhere.

Skip down to below the next lobby card if you don't want SPOILERS because I am going to explain the plot here.

Unlike the detective in Laura, Ed Adams does not develop an unhealthy obsession with the dead woman.  He does become pretty obsessive about figuring out why people keep trying to stop him from talking about her, though.  It turns out that, after her husband left her in New York City, she returned to Chicago, where she became a small-time gangster's girlfriend, then caught the eye of a wealthy and crooked financier.  The latter paid a big-time gangster to rough up her boyfriend until he promised to break up with her so the financier could become her sugar daddy.  But the big-time gangster liked holding the leverage of what the financier did to get Rosita over said financier's head, so the financier decided she needed to disappear permanently so she couldn't be used against him anymore.  Except the hitman who was supposed to kill her liked her, so he disappeared her instead and told everyone he'd killed her and dumped her body where she couldn't be found.

That's why, when Ed Ames finds her dead in a flophouse and her brother identifies her positively, suddenly creeps are crawling out of the woodwork and shooting each other and committing suicide and shooting at Ed.  Because suddenly, the girl who was supposed to be dead already turns out to have been alive and only died just now, and (almost) nobody knows why.  Everyone assumes someone else is lying and blabbing secrets, and fireworks commence.

It only took me three viewings of this movie to figure out what is actually going on in it.  The whole thing is very convoluted and told in circular flashbacks, basically.  But it does eventually make sense.

END OF SPOILERS.

Don't believe the above lobby card, by the way.  Like the song says, Rosita is not merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead.  Donna Reed never shares the screen with Alan Ladd at all in this -- she only appears in flashbacks.  But Reed and Ladd had co-starred the previous year in Beyond Glory (which I haven't seen yet), and I guess the publicity folks wanted audiences to think they had another Ladd-Reed love story in the works.  Or something. 

Is this a great noir film?  No.  Is it a thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable and rewatchable movie?  Yup.  I like it a lot.

But, is this movie family friendly?  Basically, yes.  Rosita's obviously sleeping with the financier, if not with her previous boyfriend, but that's very vaguely implied.  Her brother may be incestuously attracted to her, but that's also vaguely implied, and it's possible he never revealed his interest to her.  You can kind of read their relationship however you like.  Rosita gets slapped offscreen at one point.  Alan Ladd gets into a fistfight, and there's the gunfight in the parking garage that I mentioned earlier.  And someone commits suicide.  But, despite the ominous warning on some of the lobby cards and posters for the film, it's really not particularly unsuitable for children.  It's also not intended for kids, though -- I can't see most youngsters being interested in it.  Teens, sure.

Today is my 8th Alaniversary!  Eight whole years devoted to Alan Ladd... and counting :-D