A seriously undercover reporter: Lee Tracy vs. Dr. X

An old-time-film blogger’s Twitter feed (Nitrate Diva) just alerted me that the original “Dr. X” is now available on YouTube at full-length, so here it is. I had hoped to show it to my “Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture” course last semester, but couldn’t get my hands anything as good as this copy — now online, presumably because it is sufficiently out of copyright for YouTube to allow it.

(You Tube has quite a few classic “newspaper” movies.)

Maybe some of the students are still following this blog to see what they missed: A reporter versus a serial killer in a horror/comedy with hints of secret high-tech (for 1932) medical research, madness, sadism and cannibalism. The title character, Dr. Xavier, is the head of a medical lab at the center of the murder investigation, while his daughter is the reporter’s romantic interest — played by Fay Wray, a year before she was carried up the Empire State Building by King Kong.

Filmed in an early color process in 1932, “Dr. X” features Hollywood’s leading “rascal” reporter, Lee Tracy, the original actor to play star journalist Hildy Johnson in “The Front Page” on Broadway in the 1920s.

Tracy wasn’t chosen to play that role in the 1931 film, which cast Pat O’Brien as Hildy, but Tracy had a wisecracking style that kept him playing reporters and publicity men for more than a decade.

In addition to “Dr. X,” he was a tough Broadway gossip in “Blessed Event” (also 1932), a Miss Lonelyhearts columnist in “Advice to the Lovelorn” (1933), a press agent in “Bombshell” (1933), a foreign correspondent in “Clear All Wires” (1933) and a tough city editor in Samuel Fuller’s “Power of the Press” in 1943… and probably other reporters in between.

“Dr. X” is a Lee Tracy classic — in fact, the character is given the name Lee Taylor, suggesting how close the actor and this type of role were identified. As a Daily World reporter, he hides under a shroud at the morgue to get literally undercover information,  slips into a whore house to borrow the phone, startles a beat cop with a handshake buzzer, misrepresents himself as a policeman using a press-credential badge, climbs a drainpipe to sneak into a second-story window, steals pictures from someone’s parlor, hides in a closet during the scientist’s secret investigation, and ultimately solves the murder and gets the girl.

The film was popular enough to rate a sequel in 1939, “The Return of Dr. X,” which has no Lee Tracy and none of the original characters, but a similar plot. In that movie, Humphrey Bogart plays one of the suspicious characters, while Wayne Morris plays another scrappy reporter investigating horrific murders.

Fictional journalists behaving badly on old time radio

I’ve been doing more posting at Newspaper Heroes on the Air (jheroes.com) than here lately, so a cross-reference seems in order. If you haven’t visited that site, please do.

On the weekends, I’ve been commenting on an “Adventures of Superman” storyline that includes some disturbing behavior by Clark Kent. Maybe in the first year or two of the series the writers hadn’t quite faced the moral or ethical issues of being a super-powerful being — or of writing about one for an audience of children.

In the last few episodes, we’ve heard Kent (as Superman) terrorize an admittedly annoying lawyer to get the names of the alternate beneficiaries in a will — because Kent suspects one of them is sabotaging the primary beneficiary, Metropolis University. The university needs the money to fund polio research, which seems to justify any sort of behavior to Kent. Without even switching to his costume, he also tailed and knocked-out a man he suspected of being part of the plot. While the man was unconscious, Kent became Superman to whisk him back to the city, only to be told the kidnapped man was completely innocent. At least Kent admitted his mistake.

At midweek, I’ve been commenting on a more adult serial — a soap opera called “Betty & Bob,” about a married couple who publish a crusading newspaper while also facing all the usual soap-opera issues of love, marriage, family, evil conspiracies, mental and physical illness. (Actually, “Betty & Bob” helped establish those soap-opera standards, being one of the first series by the soap-opera industry’s most prolific producers and writer, all of whom were former newspaper reporters. See my more general essay on the subject.)

Betty and Bob have also faced a troubling ethical decision: Just as they began investigating a new city manager, his daughter was arrested for drunken driving. They suppressed the story, which they saw as giving the new city manager a fair chance — but it also helped them get closer to the man. Then the troubled daughter was arrested again — this time after injuring a child.

In between the soap opera and Superman episodes, I’ve added JHeroes items for both St. Patrick’s Day and women’s history month, and updated my page about “newspaper movies” that were adapted for radio. In the fall I plan to make some use of those pages in a course on the Portrayal of Journalists in Popular Culture — including novels, films and radio.