Park Row

Sam Fuller is not a name most folks would recognize. However, to film lovers and critics, he's a famous guy--famous for making really good movies that are without the usual clichés and frills as well as with very low budgets. In the case of "Park Row", for instance, he completely financed the movie with his own money! And, it stars Gene Evans--an ordinary looking guy who starred is several Fuller films.

The story is about a guy who is fired from one New York newspaper and decides to start his own. However, the deck is definitely stacked against him and a tough female newspaper owner seems willing to do anything to see his paper fail--and she takes this competition very personally. At first, she laughs off his attempts to put out a paper. But, when he starts seeing success after success, the competition becomes very dirty. In fact, the ugliness of this fight surprised me...it was THAT tough!

The film has some amazingly good camera-work--with great lighting and composition. It never looks cheap. Additionally, Evans is memorable as a tough guy who not only can out-think but out-punch his competition! His intensity is what makes the film. Overall, despite a few rough moments, it's a great textbook example that a film doesn't have to be expensive or filled with mega-stars to be a very good picture.

Sam Fuller was a newspaperman in his younger days. This is his love letter to his earlier craft, with a full dose of Fuller filmmaking prowess.

I doubt that Fuller was ever well-budgeted. He made do, and boy did he.

The office of the paper is a tight web of cubicles (that are torn down at one point) that cast dark shadows and patches of light. Fuller allows his camera to capture repeated black and white shadow portraits of the characters, their emotion forming the full frame of a shot.

At other points, the camera tours the tiny den as characters move through it as if it were dancing a marvelous ballet Outside is a square, statues of Benjamin Franklin and Horace Greeley and a narrow street allegedly populated by newspapers.

This is all Fuller has to work with, but he makes it work so that even though your subconscious is saying, well, that doesn't look quite realistic, your movie viewing buys in and ignores the tells, absorbing the essence of the scene. Terrific film craft, more than just cinematography.

Can't argue the storyline is up to the filmmaking, but there are touches that Fuller sprinkles throughout that are marvelous.

The newly found paper buys its paper from the butcher. On the floor is a box of unsorted type. It took me back to junior high school in upstate New York, where for a marking period, we had print shop and learned to sort our type and grab it to compose a line in a hand-held device.

There's Otto Morgenthaler, a character borrowed from history, who actually did invent the linotype machine and first use it at the New York Tribune, which is referred to as a competing paper in the film.

The statue of Benjamin Franklin is still there, at the end of Park Row. At one time, the street held The New York World in the Pulitzer Building, Greeley's New York Tribune, The New York Times at #41, the Mail and Express, the Recorder, the Morning Advertiser, and the only other survivor, The Daily News at #25.

In the story, set in 1880s, AP is referred to. The concentration of papers eventually led to the Associated Press, located on Park Row, but that wasn't until 1900.

In the next decade, the landscape was dramatically altered with the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. It not only cast its shadow over Park Row, but also caused some of its buildings to be demolished for ramp space to the bridge.

Why were the newspapers all there? Strangely, it's never mentioned in the film. Park Row is right around the corner from City Hall, the NYC Police Headquarters and the financial district. That's a pretty good nexus for news.

This one doesn't pop up very often. If you find it, watch and enjoy.

(My ratings are usually to the next highest star. In this case, about 7.5)

One of my favorites from Samuel Fuller; a frenzied, kinetic melodrama about journalism in the late 1800's. Although the film is laughably unrealistic at times in it's portrayal of two major newspapers competing for more readers, this is no hindrance to one's enjoyment of the film.

Never did Fuller create a film of such sheer energy and nostalgia. The film's tracking shots and frenetically-edited montages seem to get the most attention, but there are also some great monologues and magnificent performances, particularly from Mary Welch as the head of the "evil" newspaper, The Star, and Gene Evans as the leader of their opposing newspaper, The Globe.

The film has it's moments of campiness, but overall it's one of cinema's overlooked classics.

Sam Fuller's brilliant direction combines a tatty set, low watt cast, and potentially preachy and pedantic script into a small masterpiece...seemingly with the sheer electric passion of his film sense. Superb use of camera takes ordinary talking head shots and makes them off kilter peeks into the clash of opposing souls. The passion filled but low key love/hate/love interplay between opposing editors played by Gene Evans and Mary Welch is one of the most adult and genuine dark romances in cinema history (how sad that this was only major appearance for Welch...who died in 1958). Fuller's lauded tracking shots...including some which seem to have the camera being tossed about like a football in an effort to keep up with the action..are very much in evidence...but film is most striking for it's effortless ability to capture the quiet passion and integrity of one mans devotion to the craft of journalism...a devotion so strong that great love for an unscrupulous competitor was no obstacle...a devotion so great that his insight and passion helped transform the press into the behemoth it is today. Any film that can turn the creation of linotype into a miracle of discovery is a wonder. Check out this 83 minute masterwork...rediscover how alive film can be.

Sage old reporter Josiah Davenport says this to crusading editor Phineas Mitchell, but writer/director Sam Fuller might have been speaking to himself when he wrote the line. He is clearly pining for the long-dead old days of newspapers in New York-- and with good reason, check http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/nysnp/history.htm for a brief and amazing history.

The IMDb reviewer, st-shot, who called this movie a "valentine" hit the mark. This valentine has a fair amount going for it, but it's more flawed than faithful. A newspaperman himself (ca. 1930), Fuller prided himself on the historical accuracy of "Park Row" and there is truth behind, if not in, many of the people and events alluded to in the screenplay: The base of the Statue of Liberty, which was unveiled in 1886 when the movie takes place, was indeed partly paid for by a newspaper campaign (Joseph Pulitzer's "New York World"). A Bowery bookie named Steve Brodie did claim to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge that same year, and survived to both acclaim and controversy. Linotype was indeed invented by German immigrant Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1886, but it wasn't for a Park Row newspaper, it was for lawyers wanting a way to get legal papers printed faster. The young political cartoonist called "Thomas Guest" is obviously a thinly veiled Thomas Nast, who would have been in his mid-40s and very famous by 1886.

Much of that cinematic license can be forgiven, because the problem isn't the lack of historical accuracy; it's Fuller's proud claim that it WAS accurate. Perhaps he was referring to the typesetting and printing processes he shows in such loving detail-- which certainly are fun and fascinating to see.

Then there's the plot, another big problem. Melodrama was Fuller's Achilles' heel (see THE NAKED KISS for Fuller at his lawless heights) and he pours it on rather thickly here-- injured towheaded kid, heroic journalists, rival editor and publisher as the Clark Kent & Lois Lane of 1886. But, while the movie is more frenetic than energetic, there's enough camera movement and odd angles to establish this firmly as a Fuller film, and therefore worth seeing. Once.