Park Row (1952) Reviews

• An engaging and entertaining tribute to American Journalism

  Kalaman2002-06-19

  Before becoming a B-movie specialist and one of American cinema's finest filmmakers, Sam Fuller was a journalist who once worked as a crime reporter for The New York Daily Graphic. He made his great pictures in headlines, something more akin to tabloid journalism and sensationalism. "Every newsman is a potential filmmaker", Fuller once said and explicitly used it in "Park Row", an intensely personal work in which he financed with his own money but unfortunately failed miserably when it came out. "Park Row" is small but an engaging and entertaining tribute to American journalism. Under the opening credits we see a huge rolling title that lists about 2,000 American daily newspapers and this story is dedicated to them. Set in the 1880s New York, the film is about the rivalry between The Globe and The Star. An aspiring newspaper editor (Gene Evans) sets up his own daily The Globe after a man jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge. He struggles to compete with his former employer's (Mary Welch) newspaper The Star, who happens to be in love with him, while the Statue of Liberty is being donated to the U.S. by France. Unlike Fuller's bleak and lurid "Shock Corridor", "Park Row" is full of reverential optimism and is packed with so much gusto and excitement, featuring some terrific tracking shots that will make your head spin. Highly recommended.

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• A poor mans "Citizen Kane"?...low budget homage to early days of american journalism is full of the same electrically vital love of cinemacraft...and is even more honest about the world of new

  martylee13045burlsink3422002-08-13

  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.

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• Fuller's labour of love - repetitious, but sometimes dynamic

  rick_72010-06-11

  Park Row (Samuel Fuller, 1952) – Maverick director and former tabloid hack Sam Fuller made 22 features. This 1952 labour of love remained his favourite: a hymn to the founders of modern American journalism that begins with a long, sentimental speech about the titans of Park Row (America's Fleet Street) and features a great action sequence in which crusading editor Gene Evans repeatedly dashes a low-level gangster's head against a statue of Benjamin Franklin. Nice. Our story proper begins in that most Fuller-ish of places, a saloon. There, a bunch of hacks on New York's bestselling daily, The Star, spends their evenings swilling booze and exchanging dreams and bitter bon mots. When idealistic reporter Gene Evans takes a break from the bar to nail an epitaph to the grave of an executed man that reads 'Murdered by The Star' – an acerbic bolt of pure fury from Fuller that's among the neatest things he ever did – the 'paper's owner (Mary Welch) marches in, sacking him and his chums on the spot. So Evans starts up the 'paper he's always dreamt of – The Globe – and cheery, impressionable young buck George O'Hanlon throws himself off the Brooklyn Bridge for a laugh, giving him a first-rate first splash. But Welch doesn't take such competition lying down, especially not from a man she quite fancies, and so begins a circulation war that spills over into resentment, hatred and good old-fashioned violence. As you would expect, Fuller has a real feel for the material, filling his script with the usual insider terminology and slang. Leaving just enough in his account for some vodka and cigars, the writer-director-producer spent the rest of his savings – some $200,000 accrued making hit war films – on this pet project. Much of the cash went on a fastidiously complete recreation of the Park Row of his memory, including a multitude of four-storey buildings. The film's designers queried his logic, saying the tops of the structures would never be seen on camera. Fuller said he didn't care: "I had to see it all. I had to know everything was there, exact in every detail." The sets are constructed in an ingenious way that allows Fuller's camera to wind his way through the nooks and crannies of the offices, the intensity of the shooting schedule belied by the wealth of innovation behind the camera. The director's crab dolly, a wheeled platform that allowed the camera to move in any direction, aids the spectacular direction, getting us up close and personal during Evans' periodic stomps up and down the titular street, generally looking for someone to thump. Park Row is a punchy, sometimes dynamic blend of heartfelt sentiment and acerbic cynicism that could only have come from one director. Whilst it occasionally appears over-earnest or self-congratulatory, and has too much repetition across its 80 minutes, it's flavourful and immersive, with a no-name cast that ideally suits its ink-stained universe.

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• An overlooked classic

  cereal_112002-07-15

  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.

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• imperfect but one of Fuller's finest feats as a director

  Quinoa19842010-04-18

  Park Row may wear its emotions on its sleeve, for better and on rare occasion for worse (mostly in some sentimental bits involving busts of Benjamin Franklin and others on Park Row, and an ending involving the Statue of Liberty), but it also reveals its filmmaker so personally tapped into its subject that the film transcends its story. It's exhilarating to see director Samuel Fuller working at full capacity, and even with its one or two moments where it could be faulted he still delivers as good as he did with more prestigious films (The Big Red One) or cult classics (Shock Corridor). This was done as an elegy for the days of yore, when people had to find the type-keys to put in so that a printing press could work, writers wrote out everything in longhand (right on the cusp of that newfangled invention the typewriter), and newspapers were tight rivals when one printed facts and the other printed garbage. It's a tough, endearing little gem. Fuller's concerns here are expressed in the character of Phineas Mitchell, a guy who sits at a bar for years saying "If I had my newspaper I'd do so on and so forth," only to find in 1886 that someone who has been listening to him for so long give him an offer: run a newspaper as editor in chief. Mitchell founds The Globe, dedicated to doing real journalism - or whatever could be made up as news but still be fitting and pure - and with a crack staff of foreigners who can't read (and one of them better not!) and kids and old people, he gets to work. But Fuller's antagonist is a little tricker to put a handle on: Charity Hackett (first name means "She doesn't have any"), who runs the well-circulated The Star and sees The Globe as a direct threat, and puts out an order to her underling to get The Globe dismantled. As it is Fuller, not without a fight, of course. But seeing how this dynamic of power plays out is really at the heart of the film, about what it means to be a journalist with integrity, and to give it your all - or to slink out of it and take the easy or ruthless route like Hackett. What's fascinating is also how the two of them (as played by Evans and Welch) have a kind of kinetic connection together, as they could at any moment just fall madly in love with one another... which, thankfully, doesn't quite happen in Fuller's hands, though he does acknowledge their twisted admiration for one another as they practically plot each others' murder. Along the way Fuller provides us with some colorful supporting characters, some hard-rocking front page headlines (with drawings!) and some riveting set pieces and cinematography (best is seeing that tracking shot that goes from the bar, following Mitchell outside, into his printing press, a fight ensues, and then some dialog and ending on a close-up - other great scenes show a masterful use of a gliding camera, as if it's flying, in love with this time and atmosphere and the nature of the people and work. It's also commendable that Fuller even decided to make the 'villain' a woman, and to give her complexity. It would have been an easy route to make this opposing editor a man and make it mano-a-mano, but Fuller's after something else here. I wonder how closely he took it to history, or if he merely wanted to see this power dynamic played out in the year it was set in. It goes without saying he draws from personal experience, as a journalist in his years before being a filmmaker. But he knows such characters so well, the small ones and the major players, that everything feels authentic emotionally even when things get a little sentimental or a little preachy (the way the old guy explains how things work in the printing press to the little kid SPELLS IT OUT in caps like that, which is Fuller's way but a bit much in those short scenes). There's violence, there's passion, there's daring-do and a sense of right and wrong. It's Fuller cinema! 9.5/10

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