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Clifford Odets' script is a solid thriller, but to anyone familiar with Odets' language - its toughness mixed with vulnerability, its street poetry, its idealism struggling to be expressed - will hear the echoes of his famous plays of the 1930s, Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing, Golden Boy. June, the tough girl on her own in the city, has shades of Lorna Moon, from Golden Boy: hard-boiled, uncomfortable with the softness that the sailor brings up in her. In Golden Boy, Lorna says, "You make me feel too human, Joe. All I want is peace and quiet, not love. I'm a tired old lady, Joe, and I don't mind being what you call 'half dead'. In fact it's what I like. The twice I was in love I took an awful beating and I don't want it again!" June is tired, too. Love is not a relief, love is painful, and something to be resisted. The cab driver recognizes this battle in her, and through the course of the night, the two of them manage to have some deep conversations about it, about her world-weary pose and how it is cutting her off from life, and how when love comes knocking - you need to accept it, because it is a rare and beautiful thing. This is classic Odets. You can also hear Odets in lines like, "You sigh like the end of summer. Troubles?", "I work. I'm just a parasite on parasites.", "Don't say 'I hate the sun because it won't light my cigarette.' " Odets was the voice of the working man, the huddled masses trying to better themselves. His plays electrified the audiences in the Great Depression, because they heard their own voices in his work, so startlingly different from the other Broadway fare at that time which focused on the elites. Here, in Deadline at Dawn, Odets adds the necessary noir elements, the complicated plot, but he can't resist putting in some humanistic scenes and moments, fragments of conversation overheard, a split-second of connection in the midst of a world that is frightening and ominous.
My favorite moment in the film is when the guy racing to the pet store opens the box that holds his cat, and he realizes his cat has died. Alex and the cab driver look on, as the man pets the unseen cat, devastated. He says, with real emotion, "My dearest friend ... This is my companion .... She did everything but speak." It is a tiny moment in the film, unrelated to the plot in any way, but it adds texture, depth. The night itself becomes a character in the film. Deadline at Dawn reminded me a lot of The Clock, the wonderful Vincent Minnelli picture starring Judy Garland and Robert Walker. Although The Clock is not a noir but a romantic comedy, it also takes place during the course of one long night, when the two main characters meandering their way through the city, encounter quirky people left and right, people who enter their lives for just a moment and then exit, leaving an impression of whimsy and humanity in their wake.
June's growing love for Alex is the weakest part of the film. Susan Hayward does a lovely job over the course of the movie, showing us the cracking of her veneer. She is a very different girl at the end of the film from the one we first met in the dance hall, but Alex, as played by Bill Williams, seems a bit too much of a rube to be a valid love interest. He is written that way, but it impacts how the audience feels about him. He seems too needy, too helpless, and while that is part of the appeal for June (she says, with tears on her face, deep in thought, "What a baby ..."), it leaves a rather stale impression. It's hard to invest in his happiness. It's hard to believe that these two characters could ever make a go at it.
As 6 a.m. draws closer and closer, the heat turns up, and an unlikely coalition of disparate characters develops, of all of the people who could be suspected of murder, joining forces to find the person who really did it.
True to its nature all along, the plot has tricks up its sleeve, and suspicion moves from one person, to the next, to the next ... and it is not until the final moments when the truth is, at last, revealed.
is a classic of its kind. And although he was talking about directing for the stage in that book, it is obvious here in Deadline at Dawn, his only film, that he was able to translate his technique to the screen. The scenes work. The characters are well-drawn, if broad. The moments that need to soften up and slow down seem to happen organically. 
His understanding of the craft of acting was better than most, and while his could be quite an intellectual approach, that is not always a bad thing. Script analysis is important, making real the who, what, where, why, when ... and even with the deliberately disorienting plot, leading us down countless dead-ends to up the ante, in Deadline at Dawn we never lose sight of where we are. We can feel the clock ticking, and we know that time is passing, irrevocably. The suspense is on a slow and sustained boil. June and Alex stand over the dead body in the empty apartment, the bare light bulb in the one lamp throwing their shadows far back onto the opposite wall like a creepy vision out of De Chirico, and they whisper to one another, trying to tamp down their growing panic. These are good scenes. Melodramatic, but not too much so. Clurman wrote once, in regards to acting students taking classes, "Whether they know it or not, they are looking for someone who is ready to affirm something. They are sick of merely being discontented with a world that, as the saying goes, they never made. The best among them will learn that waiting for Godot need be neither a static position nor a fight. It is a search." The best of Deadline at Dawn is not its plot, or its noir devices, but the characters, all of them lost, lonely, hopeful, looking not just for the real murderer, but their own lives, their own truth. It is a search, too.
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