Cub reporter Clem Rogers (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is stuck writing the weather report and death notices. The editor dismisses him when he asks for something meatier. And then one night the district attorney is murdered in his home and all of the other reporters have gone home for the evening. The city desk editor has no choice but to send Clem out to report on the killing.
Clem loses his press pass, so the police won't let him go inside the DA's home. Thus he's forced to just rummage around outside. While doing so, he sees a girl run past him from the house. She was there when the DA was shot and has since been hiding in a closet. A man sitting in a car nearby ID's her as Jane Atwill (Jobyna Rolston), the daughter of the reform candidate for mayor. Clem turns in his story and it is front page news, sure to kill Atwill's chance for election. Jane is cleared of any involvement in the killing, but still the publicity has done its damage. When she comes to Clem and turns on the water works he agrees to help her find who actually killed the district attorney and thus clear her name and reinvigorate her dad's campaign. Complications ensue.
Fairbanks Jr. Is all of 18 so there is an unexpected bonus of watching the kid take a star turn. There are lots of directorial flourishes from young Capra but the story is just minor league material. The charm is in its performances. It's nice to See Harold Lloyd's former leading lady, Jobyna Ralston, in one of her last films, while Chaplin's ex, Mildred Harris, plays a floozy whose insider knowledge of the gang running the city is key to blowing the DA's murder wide open. Mildred Harris is actually two years younger than Ralston but comes off convincingly as the cynical brassy party girl compared to Ralston's young innocent character.
In the middle of the film there is a montage showing the process of printing a newspaper. I don't know how many times that process has been captured on film, but it is historically important to see how a story made its way from the manual typewriter on the reporter's desk all the way to the newspaper boys hawking the headline on the streets. I thought that sequence was fascinating and very well done.
My title about Wheeler Oakman and Boris Karloff comes from this film being made just three years later as "Graft" with Regis Toomey as the cub reporter. In it, Karloff plays the same part of mob muscle that Oakman plays here. He often played gangster roles before Frankenstein. Also, the sound remake has Toomey playing the cub reporter role as slow-witted instead of just being overlooked as Fairbanks is here.
