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Jul 26, 2016 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay

Ed Hutcheson is the managing editor of The Day, a famously scrupulous newspaper that’s just been sold to its competition. With only three days until the paper folds, Hutcheson and his staff of crusading, hard-drinking reporters set their sights on one last big story: an exposé on a notorious crime boss whose stranglehold on the city is nearly complete.

Shot and released in early 1952, Deadline – U.S.A. is very much a product of its times. Based loosely around the events surrounding the 1931 folding of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and the then recent closing of the New York Sun, the film is both a polemic on the importance of the fourth estate and an allegory for star Humphrey Bogart’s experiences with the House Un-American Activities Committee only several years earlier. Playing like a historical version of the fifth season of The Wire, Deadline – U.S.A. is incredibly unsubtle, even preachy, in its message regarding the dangers of capitalism and sensationalism on the press. That these warnings have gone unheeded in the intervening decades gives what is meant to be a triumphant sermon on ethics in journalism an air of tragedy. Fortunately, the film is tightly plotted and crisply edited, wrangling a number of intertwining subplots and a small army of character actors into a reasonably entertaining and occasionally informative B-film.

The biggest draw of Deadline – U.S.A. for classic film buffs will be the chance to see star Humphrey Bogart in one of his lesser-known roles. Deadline – U.S.A. was the first film Bogart shot after completing work on The African Queen, the film that would net him his first and only Academy Award. His performance as Hutcheson is a quiet prelude to the roles that would define the final stage of his career. Although the character is very much a retread of the noble tough guys that made him a star ten years earlier, Bogart brings a bone-deep weariness to Hutcheson that goes beyond his usual glib cynicism. The Bogart characters of the 1940’s wouldn’t sleep off their hangover on their ex-wife’s couch or be caught bringing down a gangster with words rather than bullets. This slower, sadder version of the Bogart archetype may have come down less to acting choices than art imitating life; Bogart would be dead of esophageal cancer less than five years after the film’s release.

Kino-Lorber’s release of Deadline – U.S.A is predictably crisp and lovely in the visual and audio departments. Other than a few trailers, the only special feature is a particularly engaging and informative commentary track by film noir historian Eddie Muller, who manages to do an excellent job despite admitting in the opening minutes of the commentary that the film is, in fact, not a noir.