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Samuel Fuller's Belle Époque, etched lovingly in "blood and ink." Guttenberg and Benjamin Franklin are the presiding deities in 1880s New York, brass effigies wobbling on pedestals while newshounds scuttle and collide in the streets below. The pursuit of the almighty headline costs innocent lives, the gruffly principled journalist (Gene Evans) accuses the newspaper of "contempt by publication" and sets out to create his own daily. The elderly snoop (Herbert Hayes), the cartoonist who can sketch on beer foam (Neyle Morrow), the typesetter who can't read (Don Orlando) and the shoeshine tyke (Dee Pollock), everyone watches in awe as a rusty print machine comes to steaming, clanking life. Strolling by to check out the competition, the rival editor (Mary Welch) promptly locks horns with Evans and kicks off the corkscrew courtship: "Pretty as a perfect front page! Still, you remind me of the obituary column." A heartfelt portrait of the artist as choleric muckraker, a brawling camera pushing across cobblestone boulevards and inside saloons. The circulation wars are real wars, explosions and maimed kids and all, and yet the film bubbles with optimism: In a shoestring set with the Brooklyn Bridge painted on the background, it envisions a raw America of fast-talkers and immigrants, juveniles and geezers, builders and shake-up visionaries. (What is the protagonist's unkempt, butcher paper-printed tabloid, if not a boisterously transparent stand-in for independent filmmaking?) "Make it fresh" as the byword for journalism and cinema alike, a close-up of the warring couple harmonized at last dissolves to nothing less than Lady Liberty herself. Losey is concurrent with The Lawless, though it's with the Twain of Roughing It that Fuller's spirit belongs. With Bela Kovacs, Tina Pine, J.M. Kerrigan, George O'Hanlon, Forrest Taylor, Dick Elliott, and Stuart Randall. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |