Keep The Presses Rolling-Humphrey Bogart’s “Deadline-USA” (1952)-A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Kenny Jacobs

Deadline-USA, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ethel Barrymore, directed by Richard Brooks, 1952 

I am thrilled to be doing my first review, first film review, in this space of a film, Deadline-USA, starring Humphry Bogart an actor whom my parents would forever be quoting lines from one of his films like “Play it again, Sam,” “We will always have Paris” stuff like that since they had “discovered” him at a second-run artsy theater in Ann Arbor, Michigan where they met and went to school back in the 1980s. Of course Bogie (and his sweetie wife Lauren Bacall) was, is a legend, somebody to watch go through his paces whatever your age. Whenever they got nostalgic for their youth my parents would find some re-run retrospective theater and they would take me in tow to see things like The Big Sleep (which would make me hungry later for everything crime detective novelist Raymond Chandler ever wrote), Dark Passage (a film I never understood what with the face change and all in some back alley with a doctor who looked and acted more like a barber), and To Have And Have Not (where he and Bacall steam up the screen with some of the sexiest stuff with clothes on you will ever see but that observation was not made until much later-post puberty later having seen the film a few more times). Although Deadline is nowhere in the same category as the aforementioned films it nevertheless has a plotline about the fate of the modern newspaper business and freedom of the press that interests me.    

Now freedom of the press as my father, Lester, an editor of the famous These Times when he was in college said the best lesson he ever learned about press freedom  was given to him by an old English professor who had been through the red scare of the 1950s (the time frame of this film although none of those press self-censorship and acting on governmental directives issues were addressed by this film), had been something of a radical and had suffered the fate of plenty of people in those day not being able to find work in newspapers. That professor, I forget his name, told my father that freedom of the press was important to those who owned the presses the rest of us want to defend the freedom of expression part wherever we land. For a long time I thought that myself but this film brought out something else that professor had not mentioned and that was the death of the presses was the death of democracy. Although non-linear social and commercial on-line media is now a primary and growing place for people to get their news and that has dramatically portended the ellipse of the hard-copy versions that point is still worth thinking through.          

Some film critic when I was doing background for this piece, Roger Evans from the American Film Gazette I think, has called Deadline the best film about the inner workings of the hard copy newsprint industry ever made. Maybe he is right although every filmed newspaper story, and that includes sent-ups of front page sensationalism like The Front Page, serious investigative journalism like the Watergate expose All The President’s Men, and the recent The Post about the fight to publish Daniel Ellsberg’s The Pentagon Papers has extolled the notion of the big story which motivates the newsrooms and makes careers driving the plotline to culmination. Deadline is no different in that regard and so maybe that critical remark should be the beginning of further research rather than the last word on this film.

Greg Green, the site manager here, knowing this is my maiden effort has asked me especially when reviewing older films, in this case a film when I wasn’t even born and my parents weren’t  either to give a few details about the film. This is truer still of Deadline which in the great Bogie list of film credits had almost disappeared from sight until last year when it was released on Blu-Ray. A little against type considering such roles as the hard-boiled private detective Phillip Marlowe, the old salt Captain Harry Morgan and the framed-up escaped con Victor Parry Bogie plays the idealistic, if heavy-handed, crusading editor, Hutchison, of a major daily newspaper in what is New York City in the days when there were many newspaper for every taste and readership competing dog eat dog for the public’s acceptance. As stated in one of the dialogues between Hutchison and the hard-pressed owner, played by Ethel Barrymore, he was all newspaperman and would have as she said “married the paper if it had legs” (which is true since he was estranged from his actual wife until late in the film).    

      

That hard-pressed publisher had trouble keeping up with what was needed and so a lot of the story revolves around that aspect of the business and her decision to sell the paper which would be sold to parties who would close it down tight. The other big part, the part that sells newspapers by drawing the public to the headlines created is “the big story.” Here the big story is not the red scare effects like I mentioned above or the world going to hell in a hand-basket but your “bread and butter” crime and corruption story. The crime. A young woman who turns out to be connected to a known mobster, a bad guy to mess with, is found murdered after she would not reveal where the money he had given her to hold to pay off some crooked politicians in her apartment. Hutchison sends out his investigative reporters to sniff around. They make the connections, dot the i’s and cross the t’s and come up with a big story connecting that mobster to the murder and the corruption. That despite all kinds of threats against hard guy Hutchison by him who keeps spouting Fourth of July picnic oratory about the beauties and hard-fought struggles to keep that free press intact against all the pressures to fold up shop and run. A story that seemed very appropriate today what with all the talk about the press being “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” Yeah, very much a film for these times.