-30- (released as Deadline Midnight in the UK) is a 1959 film directed by Jack Webb and starring Webb and William Conrad as night managing editor and night city editor, respectively, of a fictional Los Angeles newspaper, loosely based on the real-life (and now defunct) Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.[1]
The title is a reference to -30-, a notation used in journalism to indicate the end of a story or article.
Plot
Managing editor Sam Gatlin and his staff assemble the early edition of the Examiner, a morning newspaper in Los Angeles. During a particularly active news night, Gatlin and his wife Peggy disagree about adopting a child, as Peggy is infertile. Gatlin is hesitant to adopt because his young son from his first marriage had been killed several years before, presumably in some sort of accident.
Longtime reporter Lady Wilson's grandson pilots a military bomber from Honolulu to New York, intending to set a speed record. A child is lost and feared drowned in the L.A. sewers during a torrential rainstorm, and Gatlin composes a provocative headline for the news story. Copy boy Earl Collins considers quitting after failing to place a $1 bet for city editor Jim Bathgate about how many babies a pregnant Italian actress will birth. Bathgate would have won $50, so he demands an IOU from Collins but then tears it into pieces, smiling to himself on his way out of the newsroom.
In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Howard Thompson wrote: "[T]he picture sorely lacks the pounding, graphic drive of Mr. Webb's previous directional efforts. Even worse, about 80 per cent of the dialogue is a wearying exchange of stale wise-cracking—the kind of sophomoric newspaper lingo that went out with prohibition. It is Mr. Webb who outcracks everyone. And somehow, with all the crass yammering, a paper actually emerges, headlining a child's rescue from a sewer. ... Mr. Webb has used for his title the traditional newsman's sign-off symbol. But his picture, crammed with so much smart-alec nonsense, is rarely as authentic."[2]
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