Deadline – U.S.A. is about half a great movie. Director Brooks fills the film with a superb supporting cast of character actors–Paul Stewart, Audrey Christie and Jim Backus are the standouts–and lets them share the runtime with lead Humphrey Bogart. It’s a newspaper drama… is the paper going to close down? Brooks’s script complicates it with squabbles between the heirs, a gangster (Martin Gabel in the film’s only bad performance), and Bogart’s ex-wife (Kim Hunter) about to remarry.

Brooks takes about twenty-five minutes (of the film’s ninety minute runtime) to get to the gangster story. He’s established the paper’s imminent closing, the cast, then he brings in the “big story.” Bogart and Ed Begley have wonderful scenes where they try to reason out the story. Even when Brooks’s plotting goes wrong, his scenes are extraordinarily strong. But he can never make the gangster story as important as the newspaper’s staff or whether Hunter’s going to fall for Bogart’s wooing.

In a lot of ways, Deadline is a big, glorious mess of a picture. Brooks doesn’t follow through with his initial narrative impulse–Hunter disappears for a while, to let Bogart pursue Gabel–and he plays way too loose with the time. Brooks seems to consciously avoid addressing the time.

Bogart’s fantastic–he and Ethel Barrymore (as the paper’s owner) are excellent together, as are he and Hunter. Awesome photography from Milton R. Krasner makes up for William B. Murphy’s weak editing.

Deadline‘s good, but it should be amazing.

★★

CREDITS

Written and directed by Richard Brooks; director of photography, Milton R. Krasner; edited by William B. Murphy; music by Cyril J. Mockridge; produced by Sol C. Siegel; released by 20th Century Fox.

Starring Humphrey Bogart (Ed Hutcheson), Ethel Barrymore (Margaret Garrison), Kim Hunter (Nora Hutcheson), Ed Begley (Frank Allen), Warren Stevens (George Burrows), Paul Stewart (Harry Thompson), Martin Gabel (Tomas Rienzi), Joe De Santis (Herman Schmidt), Joyce Mackenzie (Katherine Garrison Geary), Audrey Christie (Mrs. Willebrandt), Fay Baker (Alice Garrison Courtney) and Jim Backus (Jim Cleary).