After leaving boarding school, Allen stayed intermittently with her mother, and they bonded through their love of film by attending the local movie theater frequently.
When not with her mother, Allen attended College Preparatory School and befriended a teacher named Ruthie Jones, who encouraged her liberal politics and acted as a maternal figure.
[5] In 1943, in the summer after her sophomore year of college, Allen’s grandfather secured her a job with Elliot Nugent Sr. at Columbia Pictures, which had just started hiring women because of the shortage of available male employees during World War II.
While working at Columbia, Allen took classes at The Actor’s Lab in California in acting, directing, and stage managing, which helped her master the importance of proper timing in a scene.
"[9] Much like the raw editing of dadaist filmmaking (an approach followed by René Clair early in his career) or perhaps akin to that of the French New Wave, Allen pioneered the use of audio overlaps and utilized emotional jump cuts, stylistic flourishes that brought energy and realism to characters that until that point had not been a part of classic Hollywood film editing technique.
Continuity editing and screen direction (being tied to the constraints of place and time) became the low priority, while using cutting to express the micro-cultural body language of the characters and moving the plot along in an artistic, almost three-dimensional manner became her modus operandi.
[11] Variety's Eileen Kowalski notes that, "Indeed, many of the editorial greats have been women: Dede Allen, Verna Fields, Thelma Schoonmaker, Anne V. Coates and Dorothy Spencer.