Power of the Press

The Power of the Press is one the many anti-isolationist movies to come out in the year 1943. However when one watches this hard impact melodrama you can help but feel that director Lew Landers put too much propaganda into the film. If handled better it could have been one of the greatest cinema masterpieces of all time. Otto Kruger was so badly panned by critics for his performance in this movie that his career never really recovered.

Capra-esque (in fact, Capra even directed a movie with the same title years earlier) story of a humble small town editor trying to take down a big city isolationist publisher. The plot is fairly engaging and the script has some snappy lines, but it's all so thick with propaganda that it's hard to take seriously. Otto Kruger is so malicious and devious, he might as well be wearing a swastika on his arm. Heck, they practically call him a Nazi in a half dozen different ways anyway. Still, as heavy-handed and hokey as it is, it's kind of fun, and I enjoyed Gloria Dickson's performance as the loyal, brassy secretary (shades of Jean Arthur in MR. SMITH). The best of the three early features in the Sam Fuller box set, even if that's not a tough contest to win.

In this movie written by Samuel Fuller, New York newspaper publisher Minor Watson realizes his isolationist editorial policy is wrong. He is about to change everything about the way he runs his paper..... and is killed, quite obviously by people working for the new publisher, Otto Kruger. But his secretary, Gloria Dickson, shows up in the office of Guy Kibbee, editor, publisher, and everything but press operator of a tiny rural paper, with instructions to take over the big paper and make things right. Kibbee has a lot of opposition, especially from managing editor Lee Tracy, whose attitude is to accuse today and retract tomorrow if necessary; just get the big, circulation-boosting headlines! Kibbee's idea of getting as many facts as possible, especially about Larry Parks, accused of murdering Watson, seems old-fashioned and weak.

Given the news of the past few years, my ear pricked up when Kibbee referred to "fake news". He -- or Fuller -- didn't mean it in the sense of some alternate offering of facts. Fuller was a newspaperman himself, straight out of Park Row and a fan of full-blooded and outright bloody journalism. But he believed in getting his facts straight, and knew that the strength of this country lies not in slogans or strong men, or money, but in ordinary people who when told the truth understand it, and do the right thing.

You know, it sure seems that the more films I see from the 1930s & 40s, the more I'm becoming convinced that this so-called "Golden Age" of movies was, in fact, not as "golden" as some people would like to imagine it to be.

Yes. I'll agree that there were certainly some real gems from that particular era of film-making - But, what I'm beginning to discover is that for every precious gem that is so fondly remembered, there remains a literal quarry full of nothing but ordinary stones and pebbles that would best be ground up into gravel.

In other words - The mediocre & forgettable b-movies of those days of yesteryear definitely out-number the gold by, at least, 10 to 1. I ain't kidding here.

Power Of The Press was, in its own way, something of a dramatic social commentary. Its story concerned the political machinery behind honest, fair-minded news-reporting, as opposed to the denial of freedom of speech through selling the gullible public narrow-minded bias and manipulative propaganda.

Unfortunately, this rather run-of-the-mill picture lacked conviction and a substantial enough bite to its seemingly dire message.

I suppose that a lot of this picture's mediocrity could be rightfully blamed on the "Hayes Code" (which was in full-force at the time). This vicious, self-righteous censor board trampled on hundreds of well-meaning movies from this era and, pretty much, reduced them to their pitiful toothless state.

Power Of The Press (which had a running time of only 64 minutes) was directed by Lew Landers who churned out dozens of low-budget movies throughout the 1930s & 40s.

Landers died in 1962 at the age of 61.

"Power of the Press" is so packed with patriotic pronouncements that any semblance of plot -- and the story isn't all that bad -- gets lost. We know that a free press is vital to a free country; no need to keep drumming it into our thick skulls. The tale starts with the murder of a New York newspaper publisher who bequeaths his controlling interest in the Gazette to an idealistic small-town editor, Scattergood Baines...uh, sorry... Guy Kibbee. Otto Kruger as the paper's other publisher (who seems, in 1943, to be campaigning for Hitler) turns to his favorite hit man, the Shadow...uh, sorry, Victor Jory...to maintain control. Lew Landers directs the proceedings in Capraesque style without much of Capra's spark. If a savvy script editor had cut some of the blathering, this might have been a decent thriller.