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At once the camera takes up the combustion of newsroom bustle, it opens on the choleric editor (Robert Edeson) slamming down the phone receiver and then dollies back to reveal a smoke-filled hangar of gesticulating snoops. The cub reporter (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is stuck doing obits and weather reports, he might be Thoreau's journalistic philosopher (to whom "all news is gossip") offering prose and getting only red ink from the boss. "I'll say this much about your stuff... It's rotten!" Elections and murders are the stuff of headlines, brought together in the scoop the protagonist literally bumps into: A political conspiracy involving one candidate (Edwards Davis) with a daughter packed with incriminating snapshots (Jobyna Ralston) and another (Philo McCullough) with a fur-swathed moll (Mildred Harris) stashed away "like the prisoner of Zenda." Frank Capra's tabloid comedy can stand alongside the "mythical kingdom" of Hecht-MacArthur with its own rhythm. Staccato gags breeze by as if timed to the iambic pentameter of clanking typewriters, plus there's a ferocious car chase on the edge of a precipice and, when he feels like it, Capra slows things down to give a micro-documentary on all the labor that goes into a "stop the presses!" cry. A prescient, whirlwind sketch in which the media swings voters this way and that like a pendulum and even assassins smile for the front-page picture. "I love reporters!" Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe certainly pick up the thread, so does De Palma's Blow Out down the road. With Wheeler Oakman, Dell Henderson, and Spottiswoode Aitken. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |