The Power of the Press

Frank Capra follows up a well-made but misguided naval thriller with another thriller, this one centered around a young reporter trying to uncover some corruption and crime at the highest levels of his unnamed city, and its right back to feeling like a Capra film. It doesn't have the same warmth as some of his better-known films, but it's got that little guy standing up alone against the big guy dynamic, all while Capra shows surprising affinity with thriller mechanics. It's a surprisingly effective little film.

Clem (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is the newest man at the newspaper, given the task of writing weather reports while his editor (Robert Edeson) cuts out all of the florid language he adds in while he dreams of breaking the big story that will make his career, much to the derision of Johnson (Dell Henderson), a senior reporter who laughs at his dreams. Luck comes when Clem is the only one around as the editor receives news that the district attorney has been murdered, sending Clem to the scene to pick up what news he has. He stumbles across a young woman, Jane Atwill (Jobyna Ralston) fleeing the scene, given the scoop by the nearby Van (Wheeler Oakman) that she had something to do with the murder. Clem has made his mark, his editor accepting the story and putting it on the front page in a huge headline.

Now, there's a small thing that films occasionally do, that I find to be more prominent in silent films than sound ones, where we get montages of "how things work", and Capra offers us a quick montage of how the newspaper press works mechanically. We watch Clem write the article, the papers go to the layout men, the layout men hammering the new plates into place, the new mold getting made, and the new printing plate getting put on the roller. It's quickly paced, doesn't get bogged down in the details, has no intertitle to explain what's going on, and it's informative while being germane to the plot, if not entirely necessary. It's a good little interlude that's well handled in its place.

The plot ends up turning when Jane shows up, demanding that Clem retract the story because it's not true, she's the daughter of the leading candidate for mayor, and the story is tanking his chances of winning. Clem goes to his editor demanding it to be retracted, a demand that leads to him being fired. Clem and Jane end up following the trail they pick up that takes them into the corruption of the other candidate, Robert Blake (Philo McCullough), and his band of crooks defending his secret past that involves the hidden dame Marie (Mildred Harris). The specifics of the actual history aren't that detailed (it's a MacGuffin, in the style of Hitchcock, so fine), but the trail of getting to that secret is detailed (a bit silly in a couple of respects, to be honest) and straightforward, making Clem into a real reporter who wears out his leather soles to get the story.

There's fun to be had in this film, and part of it is the winning performance from Fairbanks Jr., having adopted some of his father's charm and applying it as liberally as he could to this brash, young reporter. He's not swashbuckling, but he's adventuring anyway. It's a very plot heavy film, not allowing much in the way for character exploration, so charming is the right way to go for a lead. His supporting cast is the result of strong typecasting, especially with Oakman as the violent gangster who pops in and out of the story.

In a curious note, the print I saw seemed to be missing a brief section of the exciting climax where Clem gets a gun away from Van, the sort of plot mechanics that matter in some small manner, the movement of people from one place to the next is important to make sense, but ultimately don't matter that much for meaning and intention of the overall piece. I only bring it up because it was jarring but didn't affect my appreciation for the film. It's not like Capra left it out on purpose, it was just lost to some projectionist or other over the course of the previous 95 years.

Anyway, The Power of the Press is a demonstration of Capra's ability to move in and out of genre like any good studio director of the era. He was making films his own within them, the little guy who gets fired from the newspaper being the only one to continue the fight against the corruption of city hall (well, sort of, just a guy who wants the position) is purely the sort of thing that Capra would get known for, in particular films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. His storytelling is rougher, but his technical skills are surprisingly adept (there are some tracking shots in here that are really quite fun). It's him in proto-form, and it's nice to see him continue to change and grow as an artist.

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.

This is a Capra film that I have always wanted to see and finally had the opportunity when it was released by Grapevine Video (www.grapevinevideo.com) in 2010. This was Frank Capra's final silent film. Hereafter they would at least be "Part-Talking". Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. proves to be a chip off the old block. He has the same kind of charm that made his father world famous and is even more striking in the looks department. It's also a pleasure to see Jobyna Ralston, the girl who was so wonderful in six of Harold Lloyd's very best features (including The Freshman, Girl Shy, Why Worry? and The Kid Brother) in a drama. She is also excellent in the 1927 Best Picture winner "Wings". As has been noted it is Charlie Chaplin's ex-wife Mildred Harris who is the BIG surprise. She turns in a very nice performance. THE POWER OF THE PRESS does a credible job of capturing the feel of the newspaper world. One of my favorite parts is the documentary-like scene of showing the procedure that takes place to get a story from notes to the printed page. Setting up the type and the running of the large presses is well captured. Worth taking a look at if your are a Frank Capra fan.

19-year-old Douglas Fairbanks Jr plays a cub reporter who stumbles upon Jobyna Ralston as she exits the house of a recently violently deceased DA by the window. A snappy little drama from Frank Capra with welcome touches of humour to paper over the thin plot.

Frank Capra's fast-paced "The Power of the Press" is even more dazzling in its 66-minutes (cut from 72) Kodascope version. Young Douglas Fairbanks plays it just right as the go-getter hero, taking care that his brashness is always cleverly tempered. His delightful interpretation of an always-laughing bootlegger is highly amusing. It's also good to see Jobyna Ralston as the in-peril heroine, Robert Edeson as the cigar-chewing editor, Dell Henderson as a blob of a reporter and Wheeler Oakman as the crook's chief accomplice, but it's blonde Mildred Harris who manages to steal the movie from all of them – and that's before you realize who she actually is, none other than the Mildred Harris who married Chaplin and then flitted around high society after her divorce in 1921, had a running affair for years with the Prince of Wales, married a gent named Everett McGovern, divorced him in 1930, and that some year introduced the Prince to another high-flying socialite, Mrs Wallis Simpson. She was only 42 when she died of pneumonia in Hollywood in 1944. Of her 134 movies, only a few survive. "The Power of the Press" was her last starring role. But what a role!