The Finger Points

Finger Points, The (1931)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Static but entertaining gangster picture has a wet-nosed reporter (Richard Barthelmess) from the South going to the big city to become a star but he soon learns that nothing is easy. After busting a gambling operation and getting nothing out of it, the reporter decides to partner up with a racketeer (Clark Gable) but soon the reporter gets too big for his current situation. This film is based on the life of Chicago Tribute reporter Jake Lingle who got involved with Al Capone and the rest is history. This film version is pretty good, although it's a bit slugish at time but this is due mostly to just how movies were during this early sound era. Barthelmess is hit and miss in his role. He's somewhat shaky during the nervous reporter segments but he settles down once he starts to enter the big shot period. Gable steals the show with his supporting performance and Fay Wray plays the love interest.

After talkies came in, Warner Brothers didn't really seem to know what to do with Richard Barthelmess, but he hung around in starring roles quite a bit longer than most of his silent counterparts - from 1929 to 1934.

Normally Barthelmess played thoughtful guys put into tight circumstances, and this was probably supposed to be one of those roles, but it doesn't' quite come across right. Breckenridge Lee (Richard Barthelmess) starts out as a totally green and conscientious reporter up from a Savannah paper into a press room of the big city. When the editor announces a campaign against the mob, Lee is the only reporter that takes his assignment seriously. He even walks right up to a speakeasy and asks probing questions to the mobster in charge. Unable to be bribed he writes an expose on the place and it is thus raided by the police. The mob then beats him up one night in retaliation, badly enough that he needs hospitalization and his medical bills pile up. He is surprised when the city editor balks at helping him financially, as he denies that Lee's beating had anything to do with the paper at all and hints that Lee's injuries probably had something to do with him drinking and hanging around unsavory people after work.

Now this is where things get a bit unrealistic. Lee instantly turns from green honest reporter to money hungry and corrupt. He figures if you can't beat them, join them. He takes money from the mob and in return agrees to keep the paper and thus the cops off of their backs. He justifies this by saying that the only way that the mob will ever pay is with money to him - but he's not exactly giving the loot away to charity.

Fay Wray plays Lee's love interest as fellow reporter Marcia who at first suspects then knows the truth and loves him just the same. Regis Toomey plays a supporting role as someone who would like to win Marcia's heart but knows when he's beat. Robert Elliot is the gruff tough city editor who often played a cop in the early talkies. Of course, most notable here is Clark Gable, sitting in the palm of Jack Warner's hand, and not being recognized by him as a star in the making. Gable is impressive here as a spats-wearing charming sinner, the gangster who sees Lee as a useful idiot - for awhile anyways.

This is typical of the social dramas, or hollywood gangster films of the thirties, except its protagonist is a newsman, who gets no thanks for being a good reporter, (he gets beat up, and his bosses refuse to foot the hospital bills) and thus decides to be a finger pointer for the mob, while being fed stories by one mob to knock off the operations of its rival mobs. Certain scenes are overplayed and dreary while others are quiet with a lot of pathos to it. The once great star of silent cinema, Richard Barthelmess, was not great at delivering dialogue and is much the same here. But you've got Gable playing a gangster and a last fifteen minutes where given no dialogue, Bartelmess gets to shine and show us the actor he was. Overall, a good gangster flick dealing with the stories of the time that the press had been infiltrated by the mob to withhold harmful stories against them. It also was a hit, if that's a plus.

Socially-conscious Warners/First National delivered a corker of a newspaper melodrama in 1931, but this wasn't it: It was "Five Star Final." This fast-moving but muddled early talkie shares the crowded city desk with editors yelling "stop the presses!" and a cursory examination of the process of putting out a news daily. But here, the paper is genuinely excellent and socially responsible, not a muckraking tabloid. And the idealistic cub reporter (Barthelmess, who looks far too old to be a cub reporter) turns rotten awfully quickly, becoming a yes-man to a mobster (Gable in a typical early role, and effortlessly natural and likeable). It drains audience sympathy for our hero, and we don't see why his journalistically wise, sob-sister colleague (Wray, who looks too young to have Seen It All) would stick around with him, or take him back without his having really reformed. The motivations are confused throughout, and when our hero meets an unhappy fate, the movie seems to mourn him, but we don't. It's like a morality tale without a clear moral. Warners got better at its social realism quickly, and Barthelmess went from this comparative potboiler to the far more interesting "Cabin in the Cotton" -- again playing an idealistic sap, albeit one with more consistency.

This is another film I had to see in my unhealthy quest to see all of the available Fay Wray films out there. However, this film surprised me, as it was a pretty good story. It also has a young Clark Gable as a gangster in a scene stealing role that demonstrates his star power very early in his career.

The plot has been covered in other reviews, so I'll keep my review short.

The pluses: Fay looks great, Clark Gable is good, and the story is solid and interesting.

The minuses: Richard Barthelmess is fine, but being from the south, he shouldn't have even tried the accent.

Overall a fine film and definitely worth a viewing.