Deadline U.S.A.
This is one of the best of Humphrey Bogart’s later films. He plays a newspaper editor working for a serious New York newspaper, not a screaming tabloid. And as the movie begins, we learn that the family that owns the paper is thinking of selling it to the owners of the competing newspaper, who plan to shut down Bogart’s newspaper to give themselves something of a clear field.
The old woman (Ethel Barrymore) whose husband founded the paper is against the sale, but her grown children are all for it. Meanwhile, rumors are ripping through the newsroom, and Bogart still has deadlines to meet and a paper to put out. So there’s a sort of double story. There’s the business side — all the employees are anticipating being out of a job — and then there’s the daily news side, involving a gangster that the paper may be able to put behind bars.
At the time the movie was made, in 1952, newspapers in New York were beginning to consolidate or disappear. PM, an evening paper, had stopped publishing in 1948. The Sun, whose demise inspired the film, stopped publishing in 1950. In 1955, the Brooklyn Eagle would go dark, followed by the Daily Mirror in 1963, followed by — this was unthinkable to people of the time — the closing of the New York Herald-Tribune in 1964.
The movie captures the surreal atmosphere that descends when business concerns rattle a staff. It was written by Richard Brooks, who worked for two newspapers at the start of his career, and his experience shows. Most movies about newspapers are laughably inaccurate. This one gets it right. — Mick LaSalle