The story of why I love this picture starts when I was about 12 years old back in the late 1960's or early in 1970 my parents took my brother and I to the local thrift store, because I was crazy about buying and playing 78rpm records from the 1940's! I loved the big bands, and this particular second hand store sold 78rpm records for a nickle each! So for a buck or two I could walk out of there was a stack of 78rpm records and I was the happiest kid in town! I remember this night like it was yesterday because I found a 78 of The Ink Spots "I Don't Want To Set The World On Fire" and the flip side was "Hey Doc!" loved that record! That night I also went through the books, some of which were 25 cents! It was there that I found a hard cover copy of William Irish's "Deadline At Dawn" it was missing the dust jacket, but when I opened the book up and saw a still from the RKO picture, I knew I would love it! I was a 1940's kid at heart! I would read that book from cover to cover, over and over again! I never saw the picture until November of 2017 when a guy who lived in North Ridgeville Ohio was selling his fathers 16mm film collection, and he had a 1956 C&C Movietime Television exchange print! He told me it was his dad's favorite film, and he would project the print every year for many years until his passing. I was so thrilled to buy it, and during that month in 2017 I finally got to see a picture of a book that I loved when I was 12 years old! It was a million times better than I expected! Since 2017 I have projected the print twice a year, and last night I projected it again for December 2020! I love this picture! The films director Harold Clurman made this one and only feature picture and that was it! What a masterpiece it is! Susan Hayward was a babe! Paul Lukas "statistics tell us he was a fine actor!"
Bill Williams - Non compos mentis! Joseph Calleia, what a hard ass! The entire cast was top notch! Nicholas Musuraca was a bad-ass camera operator and PD! The coolest thing is that this print was struck on DuPont Safety film in 1956 / 57 right after C&C television corp bought the entire RKO Radio Pictures film library, so the print quality is outstanding! There is not a bad scene in the picture! It's everything about the 1940's that I loved! You can keep all of the films made after 1980 with few exceptions, stack them all up and start a huge bonfire! Beautiful black and white pictures from the 1940's are the best! So here we are in hell in almost the end of 2020, maybe the worst year of our lives!
Now where did I put that Covid-19 mask?????
Review of Deadline at Dawn
