Hold the Press

Tim McCoy was an actor well known for his westerns during, mostly, the 1930s. However, I recently discovered four of his films on YouTube which were NOT westerns...and all made by Columbia Pictures. Some of them are quite good ("Police Car 17") and some, like "Hold the Press", which definitely are not.

In this film, Tim plays a crusading reporter...a really stupid one, actually. Why do I say that? Because he wants to get the goods on a mob and gets himself arrested for drunk driving in order to get thrown into prison!! Now I've seen similar films where the reporter makes a deal with the prosecutor's office to PRETEND to have broken the law and go undercover, but not here...he has a prison record now because of his dopey plan! In the end, he learns that the mobsters have an in with some folks on the parole board...but by then I'd already checked out due to the dumb plot and overall dullness of the film. It clearly could have used the excitement, shooting and fighting you'd normally see in a Tim McCoy western. A major misfire...mostly due to lousy writing.

Tim McCoy was a big western star at Columbia - that's the kind of film in which people were accustomed to seeing him. Here he's playing a gentleman of the press. Lauded by his boss in the morning for bringing in a great scoop, he's almost fired by that same boss in the afternoon for making a fool out of the paper. What happened is that he went to check out the shooting of a well known gangster. The police had corralled a girl found at the scene who will tell them nothing, and they really don't think she did it, but they think she knows who did. Tim looks around the house and, lo and behold, the shooter is still inside, knocks Tim out cold, steals his press pass, and goes right past the police. A rival paper plays up the angle of Tim's press pass being the key to the suspect's escape, thus drawing his boss' ire. Tim vows to get the scoop on who the killer is, job or no job, since this has become personal.

What Tim runs into is bigger than just a gangster shooting. What he uncovers is a "pay to play" scheme involving the parole system. Tim does get sent to prison, but it is done intentionally by him faking a drunk driving accident. The judge was in on the scheme, knowing that Tim needs to get close to certain convicts to figure out what is going on, and basically "helps" Tim by giving him the sentence he wants.

Once back on the street, Tim closes in on the corrupt officials involved and the gangsters. The hilarious results I talked about is when Tim is chasing one of the gangsters across some city roofs and shooting it out with him while the police look on, obviously OK with a civilian turning a crowded city street into a shooting gallery. Later, when the car he is riding in is ambushed by the gangsters, he jumps on back of one of the police motorcycles that come upon the scene and is, once again, shooting it out with the gangsters as they go on a wild chase.

These shoot-outs, accepted by the police, can only be a homage to Tim's Western fans who came to watch Tim McCoy shoot it out with outlaws, and the fact that it is modern times and Tim has a press pass not a badge is not going to prevent Columbia from giving the public what it wants.

Recommended for fans of Tim McCoy and of the old 30's newspaper caper films.