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Deadline at Dawn Intro by Soheil Rezayazdi, Columbia University

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Deadline at Dawn Intro by Soheil Rezayazdi, Columbia University Deadline at Dawn Intro By Soheil Rezayazdi, Columbia University I want to thank you for joining us tonight for our film noir double feature ofDeadline at Dawn and Nightmare. This event marks the first night of screenings at the Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival. I’m here to speak briefly about our first film tonight,Deadline at Dawn. I’m going to keep it brief because, like most films adapted from work by Cornell Woolrich, I think it’s fun to go in blind and let the narrative turns just take you. Deadline at Dawn is the first of 12 Cornell Woolrich adaptations we’ll be showing from now through Sunday night. The novel Deadline at Dawn was published in 1944 by the now-defunct publisher J.B. Lippincott & Company. RKO Pictures picked up the rights to the story and released the film you’re about to see two years later, in 1946. The novel was adapted for the screen by Clifford Odets, the celebrated playwright who would later go on to write one of my absolute favorite noir films:The Sweet Smell of Success. And Odets isn’t the only connection to the theater here: The film was the sole film credit for director Harold Clurman. Clurman was a theater director primarily and one of the founders of The Group Theatre in New York, which played a key role in popularizing what we now call Method acting. In terms of the narrative, Deadline at Dawn is a classic example of the one-crazy-night movie, and specifically the one-crazy-night-in-New-York movie. A number of films have since followed this format:American Graffiti is often thought of as the quintessential one-crazy-night film, and in New York specifically we’ve seen everything from Scorsese’s After Hours to Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut to the Safdie brothers’ Good Time. Like most classical noirs it plays with the sinister mood of a metropolitan city at night, where anything and anyone can come out of the shadows. And like Odets’ Sweet Smell of Success, the film is propelled by the playwright’s dialogue, which is so full of acidic wit and gruff, big-city rudeness. Woolrich’s novel would go on to be adapted again in 1948 as an hour-long radio drama for the very popular CBS radio series Suspense. You may have heard what sounded like a man screaming or a dramatic music cue in the lobbies on the 2nd and 3rd floors – those are samples of Woolrich radio plays we’ll be playing throughout the festival. All told, between 1940 and 1954, Hollywood made 18 film adaptations from Woolrich’s fiction, and his work was adapted into more than 70 radio dramas. You’ll hear more about Woolrich’s impact on noir cinema and radio throughout this festival from our guest speakers. As a final note, I wanted to mention the film’s connection to the Coen brothers’Barton Fink, which I’m guessing some of you have seen. That noir-infused film from 1990 was loosely based on the life of Clifford Odets. The film includes a plot point lifted directly fromDeadline at Dawn. I don’t think this is too much of a spoiler to say that the plot point involves sex and murder..
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