Park Row

Sam Fuller's brilliant direction combines a tatty set, low watt cast, and potentially preachy and pedantic script into a small masterpiece...seemingly with the sheer electric passion of his film sense. Superb use of camera takes ordinary talking head shots and makes them off kilter peeks into the clash of opposing souls. The passion filled but low key love/hate/love interplay between opposing editors played by Gene Evans and Mary Welch is one of the most adult and genuine dark romances in cinema history (how sad that this was only major appearance for Welch...who died in 1958). Fuller's lauded tracking shots...including some which seem to have the camera being tossed about like a football in an effort to keep up with the action..are very much in evidence...but film is most striking for it's effortless ability to capture the quiet passion and integrity of one mans devotion to the craft of journalism...a devotion so strong that great love for an unscrupulous competitor was no obstacle...a devotion so great that his insight and passion helped transform the press into the behemoth it is today. Any film that can turn the creation of linotype into a miracle of discovery is a wonder. Check out this 83 minute masterwork...rediscover how alive film can be.

Samuel Fuller was a newspaperman before he was a filmmaker and his passion for journalism and free speech infuses every frame of "Park Row" making this one of his most enjoyable pictures which, for a movie about the printed page, is intensely cinematic. Of course, whether Fuller was a good journalist, a great journalist or even a lousy journalist I can't say but he had one of the great eyes in American cinema and he knew, in movie after movie, how to bombard our senses with a host of images that gave his films, be they westerns, thrillers, war pictures or, in this case, simply a picture about the founding of a newspaper, the feeling they were ripped from today's headlines.

The plot of "Park Row" is relatively thin. Gene Evans is the newspaper man who becomes the editor of a crusading newspaper in opposition to the more powerful paper from which he's just been fired. It is, in other words, a feelgood movie about a David triumphing over a mean old Goliath, (in this case represented by Mary Welch's excellent performance as the owner of the rival paper), but it's a populist picture with none of the sentimentality that Capra would have brought to it. Indeed, being a Sam Fuller picture, there's a fair amount of violence en route to the happy ending. It also has one of Fuller's best scripts; this is a movie full of crisp dialogue that makes great use of factual material. Amazingly, despite it's substantial critical reputation, it's seldom revived. Time, I think, to rectify that.

Sage old reporter Josiah Davenport says this to crusading editor Phineas Mitchell, but writer/director Sam Fuller might have been speaking to himself when he wrote the line. He is clearly pining for the long-dead old days of newspapers in New York-- and with good reason, check http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/nysnp/history.htm for a brief and amazing history.

The IMDb reviewer, st-shot, who called this movie a "valentine" hit the mark. This valentine has a fair amount going for it, but it's more flawed than faithful. A newspaperman himself (ca. 1930), Fuller prided himself on the historical accuracy of "Park Row" and there is truth behind, if not in, many of the people and events alluded to in the screenplay: The base of the Statue of Liberty, which was unveiled in 1886 when the movie takes place, was indeed partly paid for by a newspaper campaign (Joseph Pulitzer's "New York World"). A Bowery bookie named Steve Brodie did claim to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge that same year, and survived to both acclaim and controversy. Linotype was indeed invented by German immigrant Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1886, but it wasn't for a Park Row newspaper, it was for lawyers wanting a way to get legal papers printed faster. The young political cartoonist called "Thomas Guest" is obviously a thinly veiled Thomas Nast, who would have been in his mid-40s and very famous by 1886.

Much of that cinematic license can be forgiven, because the problem isn't the lack of historical accuracy; it's Fuller's proud claim that it WAS accurate. Perhaps he was referring to the typesetting and printing processes he shows in such loving detail-- which certainly are fun and fascinating to see.

Then there's the plot, another big problem. Melodrama was Fuller's Achilles' heel (see THE NAKED KISS for Fuller at his lawless heights) and he pours it on rather thickly here-- injured towheaded kid, heroic journalists, rival editor and publisher as the Clark Kent & Lois Lane of 1886. But, while the movie is more frenetic than energetic, there's enough camera movement and odd angles to establish this firmly as a Fuller film, and therefore worth seeing. Once.

In this day and age where the print media is struggling to survive back in 1886 when this story takes place New York had something like 20 papers all fighting for circulation. A lot of them came and went with great rapidity. Many were backed by the political parties of the day and they sustained them.

Park Row is the street to the east of New York City's City Hall and it only runs three short blocks. But back in 1886 several papers of the tabloid variety had their offices and printing establishments there. This film Park Row is the story of two of them where the feuding got downright personal.

Mary Hackett who is a real queen of mean fires a whole bunch of her staff over editorial policy disagreement including Gene Evans who takes the fired workers and starts his own tabloid. He gets a super big break when George O'Hanlon playing the legendary Steve Brodie makes his famous dive off the Brooklyn Bridge and Evans gets the bead on the story first. After that Hackett fights and fights real dirty. She especially doesn't like the fact that Evans has spurned her.

Samuel Fuller directed this admirable B film with a cast of no real names, but that in itself gives it a realistic look. That look is at an era that is gone, but not forgotten. By the way another look at this same era can be seen in the film Newsies which is currently on Broadway now.

Still without the singing and dancing of Newsies, I think Park Row will give you an idea of what was going on during those times.

Before becoming a B-movie specialist and one of American cinema's finest filmmakers, Sam Fuller was a journalist who once worked as a crime reporter for The New York Daily Graphic. He made his great pictures in headlines, something more akin to tabloid journalism and sensationalism. "Every newsman is a potential filmmaker", Fuller once said and explicitly used it in "Park Row", an intensely personal work in which he financed with his own money but unfortunately failed miserably when it came out.

"Park Row" is small but an engaging and entertaining tribute to American journalism. Under the opening credits we see a huge rolling title that lists about 2,000 American daily newspapers and this story is dedicated to them.

Set in the 1880s New York, the film is about the rivalry between The Globe and The Star. An aspiring newspaper editor (Gene Evans) sets up his own daily The Globe after a man jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge. He struggles to compete with his former employer's (Mary Welch) newspaper The Star, who happens to be in love with him, while the Statue of Liberty is being donated to the U.S. by France.

Unlike Fuller's bleak and lurid "Shock Corridor", "Park Row" is full of reverential optimism and is packed with so much gusto and excitement, featuring some terrific tracking shots that will make your head spin.

Highly recommended.