NR | 1h 27m | Drama | 1952
Is journalism just another career or, in fact, a calling? This film poses that question, then answers unequivocally: Journalism is nothing less than a noble vocation.
For 47 years, New York’s The Day has been the newspaper of record. Now it’s about to fold. Bold founder-publisher John Garrison, who died 11 years before, isn’t around to protect it from predatory, pecuniary interests. His aging widow Margaret Garrison (Ethel Barrymore) and adult daughter (Fay Baker) have lost interest in remaining publishers. They’d rather sell to rival publisher Lawrence White (Raymond Greenleaf), who owns a tabloid, The Standard.
Caught in the middle are Mrs. Garrison’s courageous, conscientious editor, Ed Hutcheson (Humphrey Bogart) and 1,500 knowledgeable, skilled, and resourceful newspaper women and men.
Widely feared mob boss Tomas Rienzi (Martin Gabel) demands that Hutcheson drop a story that implicates Rienzi in political-economic racketeering. But the story may be what saves the paper. With help from lenders and new patrons, revived circulation and ad revenues may keep the paper afloat. If not, at least it’ll be a fitting last hurrah for a masthead that set the bar on investigative stories.
Decision Makers
Writer-director Richard Brooks studied journalism as a young man and was a print and radio journalist for years. It shows. To viewers, outdated typewriters and teletype machines, pads and pencils, files and filing cabinets, and unwieldy, printer-sized cameras fill his newsroom scenes. Unashamedly, though, he foregrounds those frames with people.
People, not products, make decisions; they make judgements grounded in their values as individuals and as an institution: Should a story appear higher up or lower down in print copy? What’s the best headline? Should it be on page one or elsewhere? Does it need a photograph? What sort of a photograph? Or is a photograph best avoided? Will a clever cartoon be more discreet, or have more punch? Should a story run now or later? Does it merit a follow-up story, after reader reactions are in?
Bogart’s brilliant as the hard-nosed editor. Barrymore shines as the publisher, forced to ask herself if a grand-old newspaper like hers should be allowed to die at all, or resuscitated at all costs.
Journalism as a Journey
Hutcheson’s character arc juxtaposes two competing philosophies about journalism’s purpose. First, he warns reporters never to adjudicate on the guilt or innocence of the subjects of their interviews or stories, “We’re not detectives. … We’re not in the crusading business.”Later, he’s the one goading them to go after Rienzi, “We want to convict him of every known crime.” Together, Hutcheson and his team have journeyed from being mere witnesses to the truth to being its champions.
Hutcheson’s saying that when influential people are honorable and faithful to the mandate that the public has vested in them, journalistic antagonism is misplaced. Witness the paparazzi, or newshounds, who are more interested in hounding than in the news. In the past, Hutcheson himself has sportingly spotlighted senators who’d advocated for ordinary citizens. But if elected officials end up advocating only for themselves, he wants to be the one to spotlight that, too.
What of Rienzi’s orchestrated attacks on The Day and its journalists? Brooks is saying that if newspapers are never threatened, let alone attacked, they must ask themselves if they’re speaking truth to power or merely self-servingly conveying both sides of a story.
To Brooks, great newspapers don’t follow the news cycle, they lead it. In times of great moral crisis, sanctimonious neutrality is a greater crime than crime as defined by the law.
No. To Hutcheson, journalism isn’t just another job like repairing watches, it is “performance for public good,” as he says.
Rienzi tells his hoodlums not to panic. After all, he and his gangs have seen news stories like this before but his thugs are still around and still in business. If a story appears today, it’s old news tomorrow; as he says, “next week, people forget.”
One hoodlum persists, “But if they keep printing?” Rienzi sneers, “They won’t.” He’s counting on Hutcheson or his newspaper folding. It’s why, for all his money and muscle, Rienzi fears The Day, not The Standard.
There’s the rub. A mere reporter conveys the truth; his job is done and he’s on to the next job. A journalist, however, crusades for the truth. His job isn’t done until the truth has had its day.
