“More suspects than a baseball team”: TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Cornell Woolrich (as William Irish), Clifford Odets, Harold Clurman and William Cameron Menzies’ Deadline at Dawn (1946), Starring Brooklyn’s Own Bill “Willie” Williams and Susie Hayward, Paul Lukas, and a gaggle of wonderful character actors

By David in TN
friday, january 10, 2025 at 5:02:00 p.m. est

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Harold Clurman’s Deadline at Dawn (1946) with Susan Hayward, Paul Lukas, Bill Williams, Lola Lane, Marvin Miller, Joseph Calleia, Steven Geray, Joe Sawyer and Osa Massen.

Deadline at Dawn was previously on Noir Alley in 2017. Eddie Muller said it “had more suspects than a baseball team.”

A sailor on shore in New York wonders if he killed a woman while drunk. A taxi dancer (Hayward; “taxi dancers” existed, but in pictures they were often a euphemism for prostitutes) and a philosophical cab driver (Lukas) help him search for the real killer. Not realistic but fun to watch.


N.S. Steven Geray was a Hungarian character actor (as was Paul Lukas) who had a brief moment in the sun (Spellbound, 1945; Unfaithful, 1947; In a Lonely Place, 1950; All about Eve), particularly in Charles Vidor’s murderous, twisted romantic triangle of a Columbia masterpiece, Gilda (1946), starring frequent on-screen and in-bed partners, Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. However, he almost never played hungarians. His roles were brief, but Steve Geray was a perfect dictum of the adage, “There are no small roles, only small actors.” And then it was off to TV for Geray, as for legions of great character actors.

And lest I forget, a Susie Hayward story. No, two. In 1956, John Wayne made both his best and his worst pictures: The Searchers and The Conqueror. About The Searchers, I can’t say enough, but not today.

[“Was John Wayne a Better Actor than Marlon Brando? One Brilliant Movie Historian Thinks so”] Regarding The Conqueror, Michael Munn tells two juicy stories in his biography, John Wayne: The Man behind the Myth. The problem with Munn was that he was not a very good writer, and so he would tell over-the-top stories that would set off my b.s. detector.

One of his Susie Hayward stories did not set off my b.s. detector.

Genhis Khan tells his comely captive, “I am going to marry [rape] you.” He kisses her, but Hayward stuck her tongue down Wayne’s throat, to which he responds, “Don’t ever do that again!”

In the other story, Susie got herself good and liquored up one night, stood in front of the house that the star and Pilar Wayne were staying in, and demanded that Pilar come and duke it with her! (Pilar ignored her.)

I took it for granted that that was one of Munn’s fairy tales, but the other day, I looked up “Susan Hayward” in Scott Eyman’s John Wayne biography, which is not only monumental, but a beautiful piece of literature, and found the exact same story about Hayward.

Hayward was clearly unaware that Wayne didn’t go for that. Maybe, that was due to his longtime affair with Dietrich.