The Deadline

This moody little western is the first Buck Jones western I've ever seen and portrays him in an interestingly ambivalent light as a man with a quick temper who has been jailed for five years for allegedly accidentally killing a man by a blow to the head. The film opens with him being released on parole after serving a year, and establishes from the outset an element of suspense in that he will have to walk away from any potential confrontation he encounters; a situation he is not temperamentally cut out for.

Writer-director Lambert Hillyer does his usual workmanlike job, assisted in this instance by atmospheric photography by Byron Haskin, notably in a bank robbery staged at night after hours.

I pretty much like this early western,in which the emphasis is on an innocent man's attempt at revenge,and one of the best this guy ever starred in.Unfortunately,I didn't get to see the original opening and closing for this film,but I think Columbia Pictures(the studio that made this film) has the print with the original opening and closing titles.

I haven't seen this picture for over forty years and I was impressed all over again! Certainly this is a lower-budget western, albeit coming from Columbia Studios. The cast is large but populated by names familiar only to B-western fans, and the running time is right around the standard 60 minutes. The story is familiar, too, that of a man wrongly convicted of a crime and sent to prison and ventures to clear his name upon his release. But the film has some veneer of A-picture status, with the direction clean and the dialogue coming off as if some rehearsals had been taken and been taken seriously.

Although not deep, "The Deadline" is a serious and well-developed look at the struggle Jones has in working to clear his name with direction, continuity, and really all phases of the picture a cut or two above expectations. The story is presented in a novel two-part approach. The first part seems as though it could be set in contemporary times (1931), but then the film evolves to become more and more "western" until it seems to quite firmly plant itself in "Old West" times. Nonetheless the movie features effective acting with horseback chases and gunfire at a minimum. Although a hero in the film, Jones' expected cowboy-hero trappings and posturing are held in check in this one. He looks slim and fit and does a solid job at imparting emotion as he moves along in his quest to find the real culprit. This is a highly satisfying film, and for an added bonus look for a sighting and even a few words from an early-in-career acting assignment for Glenn Strange.