Picture Snatcher

I'd like to recommend this to you for a couple reasons.

I'm right now doing a survey of films that feature newsrooms. Its a simple sort of fold that wouldn't work today. Amazingly, right after seeing this, I saw the new "Superman Returns." Horrid little move, but it reminded me that Superman was invented in the 30s and that's why we have Lois as a reporter.

In the 30s there were hundreds of movies set in newsrooms. Its roughly the same as a movie about the movie business, since the creation of stories and modeling of life was essentially a writer's game in that era. And the newsroom was one of the few places where women could be strong, sexy and articulate. And wow is this dripping with sex.

In those days, women could be nurses, teachers, secretaries or whores. Or if they were particularly clever, they were reporters. It was a sort of shorthand, lost today. If your movie put you in a newsroom, it was a stage where stories were made. And to have a woman weave stories and in some way control the world. That was something.

The story here is Cagney's typical gangster, head of a gang but imprisoned. He gets out and instead of returning to his gang, takes a job as a reporter. Actually — to make the folding good — as a photographer, hence the title. You can pretty much guess the story, knowing that he is both ruthless in invading lives and sweet on the daughter of the cop who "sent him up."

Here's the really interesting part: the sexy, precode blond is a reporter in the same pool. She's the girl of Cagney's boss but hot for Cagney. He's being chased by another broad too. To both he's mean, but the encounters with them are directly sexual.

Its odd. We see her as distinctly available, a silly blond. But we also know she is a crackerjack mind underneath. One scene: Cagney by subterfuge has obtained a picture of the execution of a murderess. He is chased all over town but makes it to the newsroom just under deadline. Breathlessly, he dictates the story to our sexy blond to type. He speaks in blunt gangster slang and we laugh at the notion that such a description would appear in the paper.

She types furiously, then the editor reads it aloud and it is three times as long, cleverly and articulately written. Big joke. No one notices. Bigger joke.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.