Il nome dell'amore

A young sailor on leave wakes up at midnight in a newsstand with bundles of money in his pockets and no recollection of his time spent with the wrong woman. Of course she turns out to be dead and he has until a bus leaves at 6am to discover the culprit or he gets the rap.

I like films with concentrated wandering, this one has it, the entire film like a slow ride across New York after hours in the backseat of a cab with windows rolled down, it's the middle of August, the macadam breathing out the day's heat again, or like lounging by the open window of your apartment with lights turned off, glimpses of strange figures stalking the empty and sweltering streets below and imagining mischief from them.

It has mood above all, latenight paranoia being sweated out from pores in the skin. Everything looks a bit unhinged in that magic-desolate way that is summer in the big city.

But this is deeply noirish in a key way, the way of the dumb guy's dream that crystallizes the essence of noir. Our man was out at night dreaming but has no recollection what about, except it involved offers of sex and illicit money. We presume he's innocent because of his naive blond looks and because he's the one telling the story, and is bewildered as he does, because more likely suspects are paraded, stories are piled, testimonies, conjecture, a drunk man uncovers hidden truth, a cab driver reflects about love, but the puzzle persists, the puzzle that is the night of life; we cannot really know, there is a blank spot at the center. Emptiness behind the stories that we make up to narrate our private worlds.

You will need no more eloquent parallel about what this is all about than a blind pianist among the suspects and being - mistakenly - sussed from his melodramatic reaction.

So we have sinister happenings back in the waking world, itself rendered as something you wake up from. Then our film as a dream attempting inner balance, so of course thick in coincidence, in strange but kind souls assisting, capped off with a miraculous revelation in the end that absolves guilt.

This is truly wonderful stuff that has burned itself into my visual imagination. It's clean and dark both, the shadows all in having traveled, having dreamed the night away.

A decent story based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich, good performances, and snappy dialogue by Clifford Odets elevate "Deadline at Dawn" from 1946. A small film, clocking in at 83 minutes, it packs in a lot of drama.

The film begins with a blind man (Marvin Miller, Mr. Anthony from "The Millionaire") visiting a young woman and demanding $1400 that he is owed. Next thing you know, she's dead.

A young sailor on leave, Alex, (Bill Williams) sobers up after a blackout and sees that he has a lot of money that belonged to one Edna Bartelli (Lola Lane), a girl who invited him to her home to "fix her radio."

Alex has the radio, and at a dime a dance place, he asks for help from June Goth (Susan Hayward) to help him return it. When they get to Edna's, she's dead. Alex is afraid that he did it, but he can't remember.

His leave ends in four hours, so that's all they have to find out what happened. They team up with a friendly cab driver (Paul Lukas). In their investigation, they meet a bunch of low-lifes and it becomes apparent that Edna had a few enemies.

Both Hayward and Williams give delightful performances. Hayward vacillates from the tough girl she is at the dance hall and softness as she gets to know Alex. Williams, who was TV's Kit Carson is the dad of actor William Katt ("Greatest American Hero") and the husband of Perry Mason's Barbara Hale.

True to its New York City wee small hours of the morning scenario, the film is peppered with various actors, each with his or her own story: Joseph Calleia, Osa Massen, Stephen Geray, Roman Bohen, and Constance Worth.

Harold Clurman, a theater director, directed this with an excellent idea of what it's like to be in New York City in the summer - hot, and the weirdos who come out at night.

Very entertaining, though probably too ambitious given the budget and time frame. The ending is a little convoluted.

When a blind ex-husband wearing a boutonnière shows up late in the evening demanding $1400, a good night is probably not in store. Especially when his former spouse's drunken excuse for not paying is "that sailor" must have stolen it. Thus begins Deadline at Dawn, an early noir that's not only a taut and agreeably complicated little mystery but that also aspires, and largely succeeds, in constructing an urban microcosm.

The sailor (Bill Williams) on shore leave has, as sailors on leave do, drunk too much, gambled away his money, been lured up to a wicked woman's apartment, and fallen into a blackout. (The movie's based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich, writing as William Irish, who knew whereof he wrote.) When he climbs back out, thanks to black coffee supplied by a kindly newsie, $1400 tumbles out of his pocket.

Trying to piece together the evening, he strays into a dime-a-dance palace, where he meets a would-be hard case (Susan Hayward – in her 24th movie!). Making small talk with his bored-to-the-bone partner, Williams speculates whether a rainstorm might break the heat wave. "Such things have been known to happen," replies Hayward, thereby lowering the thermometer pronto. (The quirky, bristling dialogue by Clifford Odets is one of the many amenities of Deadline at Dawn.) Of course, Hayward inevitably thaws enough to offer counsel to Williams and serve as sidekick in his quest to make amends (he's a square-rigger right out of one of the square states). They return to the robbed woman's apartment only to find her (Lola Lane) – dead. It's unclear to the befuddled Williams, and to Hayward, whether he might indeed have been the culprit. Trouble is, he's taking a 6 a.m. bus back to Norfolk, where he's stationed; there's only a few hours left to clear his conscience – or fess up to the police.

An immigrant cabbie (Paul Lukas) improbably volunteers as a third ally, and the three, together and separately, embark on various sleuthing expeditions through the dark and soupy streets of Manhattan. For a movie that clocks in under an hour and a half, Deadline at Dawn boasts a cast just short of epic. Among the principals who intersect are Joseph Calleia, as a ruthless yet debonair gangster; Osa Massen as a lame housewife expelled from the rubble of Europe; and Steven Geray as a well-mannered stalker. Joining them are countless players with brief walk-ons, comic or poignant, of the 8-million-stories-in-the-naked-city variety, giving the movie – the sole directorial effort by east-coast theater maven Harold Clurman – its distinctive tone and texture. (Jules Dassin must have borrowed greedily from it when he came to film his own The Naked City during the sweltering New York summer of 1947.) Deadline at Dawn falls short of perfection. It's too short for all it contains, it's a bit sooty from all the red herrings, and its way out verges on the-butler-did-it (or maybe Roger Ackroyd). But a lot of RKO talent went into its making (in addition to the above, Nicholas Musuraca photographed it, and Hanns Eisler – later to become a serious Leftist composer in East Germany – wrote the score). But it has its own sweaty, big-city flavor, a pungent New York Story, and a prototype of many noirish delights yet to come.

Explosive lighting by cinematographer Nick Murasaca; a twisty, turning plot by mystery writer Cornell Woolrich; literate dialogue with heart from playwright Clifford Odets; and an estimable ensemble cast of fine character actors, plus a young, beautiful, and surprisingly effective Susan Hayward -- it all adds up to make this a little film noir gem.

It's a very New York piece, though it's also an example of RKO Pictures at its Hollywood best. And yet, for a film noir, there's a surprising sweetness, a current of innocence personified by the sailor boy accused of murder in a nocturnal urban jungle of violence, betrayal and corruption.

Highly recommended.

Deadline at Dawn (1946)

If you can overcome, or overlook, the slightly stilted plot and the improbability of the events (in an O'Henry kind of way, if you know his clever short stories, though the actual writer is Clifford Odets, whose politics are not very visible), you'll be able to catch the really fine acting and directing here. And the nicely felt night crime drama that is really just a beautiful sappy love story (the best kind). The cast is small, the plot twists unreasonable but still enchanting, and the effect, in the end, is tightly wound.

While you might think the murder is the central premise (and it's key, for sure), or the sailor's blackout is the main event (and it isn't, really), you will eventually see it's the sailor himself, his utter innocence, that is both the core of the film and the driving force. This is the Odets part of the writing, character driven, and the sailor, through some effect of drinking we assume, has had a brief blackout, and he comes to his senses on the streets of New York with a lot of cash in his pocket. He's troubled, but we sympathize. Then a woman he was with is found dead. Still, this sailor is such the definition of innocence, there's no doubt--almost no doubt--that someone else did it. But who? And how can he defend himself?

Enter Susan Hayward, playing at first a kind of professional dance companion (the innocent side of prostitution, and a good match for our man). After work, she wants to help him because he's so clearly a good person, and then a cabbie strangely gets involved, too, sucked into the idea that justice will go wrong if the real killer can't be found. The dead woman had a couple of unsavory friends, and these two get into the plot in stages, and what we end up with is half a dozen clearly defined people all fighting for some small piece of personal clarity and internal well being.

It helps that all the actors are first rate small time contributors (Hayward is the one star, and is terrific). It also helps that the whole scenario is limited in time and space, so we get to feel like we are there, in New York, in this small neighborhood at night. It's great stuff on that level alone. The director? It's his one and only film. But the cinematographer was an old pro at the peak of his career, Nicholas Musuraca, who did a whole slew of noirs and dramas, some worth seeing just for the photography ("Spiral Staircase" comes to mind, but see the IMDb list). So whatever the small time credentials of much of the cast, there is some seriousness here that won't let go.

If the plot is a little preposterous, it's only because it's trying to package things too neatly. The writing is first rate, beyond plot structure, with some classic quotable lines that are either film noir staples or philosophical nuggets (the latter from the cabby, in particular). A film that would reward a second viewing just for the details of dialog and camera-work.