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.
