A genre began in 1931 with the classic The Front Page which was a big influence, and not just on other newspaper films. The attitude, the machine-gun dialogue. After that, reporters start showing up in pretty much every movie, it seems, and they’re interesting types A's. They’re outlaws, outsiders. Their editors’ grouchiness hid a slightly bruised idealism. Their boozy heroes. And, often, newsmen became screenwriters.
Herman Mankiewicz was one of the first, a reporter who abandoned the Algonquin Round Table for a Paramount contract in 1926. Within a decade, the busiest screenwriters were recovering journalists.
There were, basically, two kinds of newspaper films. In the first, the story was all about The Story — and how one dogged newshound got it. The methods were hardly pretty. The newspaper business was seen as exciting, important and fun.
The second kind of film used the reporter as a type. Clark Gable in “It Happened One Night,” Jean Arthur in “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” Barbara Stanwyck in “Meet John Doe” Rediscovering their idealism, these were comic fables in which the newspaper business was presented as slightly suspect, a metaphor for cynicism.
In 1941’s “Citizen Kane,” offered lofty tones of social reform and the sharp elbows of an all-out circulation war.
But “Kane's obituary is written not by a print journalist, but by a newsreel reporter. A decade later, “Deadline U.S.A” told a smaller, sadder story, as editor Humphrey Bogart oversees an investigative project even as his struggling paper is being sold.
“It’s not enough any more to give ‘em just news,” Bogart snarls at one point. “They want comics, contests, puzzles. They want to know how to bake a cake, win friends and influence the future. Ergo, horoscopes, tips on the horses, interpretation of dreams so they can win on the numbers lottery. And, if they accidentally stumble on the first page, news!” He is a dinosaur and the tar pits are just around the corner. He believes in newspapering as a calling, a vocation, a service for the public good.
In Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole,” Kirk Douglas is a former star reporter who gets a break — a mining disaster. And Douglas happily exploits the tragedy (and endangers one man’s life) so he can sell papers, sell himself, make a buck.
In “Sweet Smell of Success,” Burt Lancaster is J.J. Hunsecker, a dead-eyed New York gossip columnist, using his newspaper like a razor to mutilate the reputations of anyone who stands in his way.
Film like “All the President’s Men” cast reporters as crusaders.
But then that began to change. In “Absence of Malice,” the reporter isn’t the hero but the problem, with an untrue story making a man “guilty until proven innocent.” In succeeding films, reporters are pushed to the sidelines, existing only as gossip-obsessed nuisances (a reflection not only of the tabloidization of news but Hollywood’s own increasingly antagonistic relationship with the press).
There are some modern newspaper films that get the new world right. “The Paper” caught the working-parents workplace stress; “State of Play,” a bit of the tension from internet innovations. But most, like “Sex and the City” seem to see print journalism only as a job that pays large sums of money to very attractive people for minimal amounts of work.
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