Chicago Deadline (1949)

On Chicago's South Side reporter Ed Ames finds the body of a dead girl. Her address book leads to a host of names of men frightened by her death but claiming never to have known her. Ames comes to know quite a lot, dangerously so.

Director:

Lewis Allen

Writers:

Warren Duff (screenplay), Tiffany Thayer (novel)

Stars:

Alan Ladd, Donna Reed, June Havoc

1 nomination.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Alan Ladd	...	Ed Adams
Donna Reed	...	Rosita Jean d'Ur
June Havoc	...	Leona Purdy
Irene Hervey	...	Belle Dorset
Arthur Kennedy	...	Tommy Ditman
Berry Kroeger	...	Solly Wellman
Harold Vermilyea	...	Jack Anstruder
Shepperd Strudwick	...	Edgar 'Blacky' Franchot
Dave Willock	...	Pig
Gavin Muir	...	G.G. Temple
John Beal	...	Paul Jean d'Ur
Tom Powers	...	Glenn Howard
Howard Freeman	...	Hotspur Shaner
Paul Lees	...	Bat Bennett
Margaret Field	...	Minerva

Storyline

On Chicago's South Side reporter Ed Ames finds the body of a dead girl. Her address book leads to a host of names of men frightened by her death but claiming never to have known her. Ames comes to know quite a lot, dangerously so.

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Plot Keywords:

address book | reporter | place name in title | dead woman | city name in title | 

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Taglines:

Ladd pays off for a wronged girl who was a "right guy!".

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Genres:

Drama | Film-Noir

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Certificate:

Approved

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

17 October 1949 (Sweden)

Also Known As:

One Woman

Filming Locations:

Chicago, Illinois, USA

Company Credits

Production Co:

Paramount Pictures

Technical Specs

Runtime:

86 min

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Recording)

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

One of over 700 Paramount Productions, filmed between 1929 and 1949, which were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and controlled by MCA ever since.

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Quotes

Leona: What did you take as a seditive before you met me?

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Connections

Referenced in El crimen del cine Oriente (1997)

User Reviews

Brooding quest for dead girl can't quite redeem its promise

Reporter Alan Ladd stumbles across a strange woman, dead of tuberculosis in a seedy Southside hotel. Her address book, however, hints at a wild and well-connected past. (The girl, with the improbable moniker of Rosita Jean D'Ur, is played in flashback by the improbable Donna Reed.) Ladd's quest, as any noir quest should, takes him up and down the intricate layers of Chicago society, through some of which his tour guide is society dame June Havoc, who plays it with panache. This downfall of a good kid with some bad breaks begins to obsess Ladd, and Chicago Deadline (it's been remarked) could almost have been a grittier Laura set not in high society but on cusp where shabby respectability meets the demimonde. But the cunning Vera Caspary (who wrote the novel Laura) is alas nowhere in evidence, so Chicago Deadline becomes almost an object lesson in Edmund Wilson's dictum that the heavy atmospherics in detective fiction are rarely justified by the conclusion. Nonetheless, for most of its running time, Chicago Deadline is a dark and haunting ride.