Deadline - U.S.A.

A film about the last days of a newspaper. The owner of The Day has died and the heirs decide to sell the paper to a rival. When the sale goes through the paper will close and the staff will be out of work. There are three days left. The managing editor, Ed Hutcheson, gives those three days to one story: he will write about the man who runs organised crime in the city. He has no proof, the witnesses will not talk and the lawyers are threatening to sue. What the film describes is what following a story is like as work: phone calls, going through the files, court records and a press running through the night. The second line is Hutcheson's private life. He is still involved with his former wife, who understands his commitment to the job but cannot carry it. The line he says on the telephone at the close became one of the most quoted in American films about the press. Humphrey Bogart plays Hutcheson, Ethel Barrymore the widow who owns the paper and Kim Hunter his former wife. Richard Brooks directed; he came out of journalism and that knowledge shows here. Part of the filming was done in a real newspaper building. A solid choice for anyone who likes press films and the studio dramas of the 1950s. For a viewer expecting action, the film is built almost entirely on talk.