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.
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.
… or not. Some of the movies I’ve linked to here are decidedly not “Citizen Kane” or “All the President’s Men.”
But students in my “Portrayal of the Journalist in Film, Fiction & Popular Culture” class may be happy to know that YouTube, the Internet Archive, and other sources have trailers, clips and sometimes full-length feature films relevant to their final research projects on Newspaper Movies and related fictions — projects that are due in a couple of weeks after they return from Thanksgiving break.
Of course Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and the local video store can also rent films, but the number of resources available for free online is impressive.
I’ve been collecting links to films available online — not always great films, and certainly not an attempt at a “best” or “complete” list of films with journalists in the plot. For the most complete source I know, see Joe Saltzman’s Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture website and database.
For others, just do a Web search for “best newspaper movies” or “best journalism films” or a variation on that theme. You’ll find scores of newspaper columns, blogs and websites where reporters, editors, critics and fans have compiled their own lists. A few examples, some of which I’ve linked to elsewhere:
I’ve broken my collection of YouTube links by decade or part of a decade, to keep the screen-loading time manageable. (Some pages still may load very slowly.) They are all on the “Video” drop-down/fly-out menu at the top of the page, but here’s a shortcut: Newspaper Films. And here’s the full set, a mini-menu I’ve added to the top of each page:
Note: I don’t maintain any of the uploaded files at YouTube, Vimeo or archive.org. From time to time, those sites discover that some of the videos people post are still under copyright protection and take them down at the “rights” owner’s request. If I have linked to one of those posts, my “player” code will also cease functioning.
Alas, the journalist, “Henrietta Stackpole,” is not the lady of the title, and she doesn’t get much mention in Anthony Lane’s almost 5,000 word article, itself in response to a new book, Michael Gorra’s “Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece” (Liveright).
But Lane’s article may give students some ideas about writing about literature, as well as probably convincing them that Portrait of a Lady would be a lot to bite off as a two-week assignment in the middle of a broader course, even if it might be worth it just to meet Henrietta and ponder the life of a woman correspondent abroad 130 years ago.
They may be intrigued by Lane’s references to the journalist, at first comparing her to Isabel Archer, the title character:
“… her friend Henrietta Stackpole, an American reporter, who nourishes fewer illusions about European allure.”
… and, in a discussion of James’ Victorian sensibilities:
“When Henrietta heads off to see the Paris sights with a jovial bachelor named Bantling, and we hear that ‘they had breakfasted together, dined together, gone to the theatre together, supped together, really in a manner quite lived together,’ it is precisely in not knowing what they did together by night—whether they proceeded to feast in foodless ways upon each other—that one finds, as so often with James, a pleasurable ache of dissatisfaction.”
But if I catch any students turning a phrase like “feast in foodless ways upon each other,” now I’ll know where they stole it.
Lane also quotes Henrietta a trifle enigmatically:
“… consider Henrietta, the journalist in search of a topic, who admits to Isabel that ‘I should have delighted to do your uncle.’”
That tease (words do take on new shades of meaning over the years) may convince students that a 19th century novel might be a bit too risque for classroom discussion. But Henrietta is merely debating issues of privacy and publicity with Isabel, talking about painting word-pictures of people for her article, “Americans and Tudors.” Thanks to the searchable plain-text Project Gutenberg edition of the novel, here’s a more complete quote:
“And I should have delighted to do your uncle, who seems to me a much nobler type — the American faithful still. He’s a grand old man; I don’t see how he can object to my paying him honour.”
Alas, Henrietta was entirely written out of the one radio adaptation of Portrait of a Lady that I’ve found (by NBC University Theater), but here it is, if you want to hear an hour of Jamesian prose…
I also haven’t seen the 1968 TV series or the 1994 film adaptations to see how much attention they paid to Henrietta. Mary-Louise Parker — pre-”Weeds” and “West Wing” — played her in the 1994 Portrait of a Lady, opposite Nicole Kidman as Isabel, but those reportorial spectacles were enough to inspire me to put her picture on this page, along with a YouTube clip of the movie trailer.
Always the fashion plate, Brenda Starr was retired last year after 70 years in newspapers. Click for an ABC feature interviewing author Mary Schmich and others.
When I started looking into the portrayal of journalists in popular culture, I never thought I’d wind up writing about paper dolls.
A Web search inadvertently turned up the fact that both “Brenda Star, Reporter” and the even earlier “Jane Arden” comic strips included a reader-participation gimmick: Fans were invited to send in suggestions for the reporters’ wardrobes, and the designs were published as cut-out paper doll costumes with the Sunday color comics, sometimes reprinted as separate comic books or paper-doll books.
A Chicago teenager — male — was reported to have designed 1,500 dresses for Brenda Star, according to a retrospective in the Chicago Tribune when the strip was cancelled — after 70 years.
Enough of this 1930s and 1940s nostalgia… Here’s something that’s “only” 30 years old, The Roches getting a handle on a seasonal standard. Very, very hard to believe that was so many years ago. But remembering it was enough to get me to visit http://www.roches.com/ to see what the Roches are up to these days.
Now, back to the ’40s…
I haven’t had a lot of luck finding journalism plots that take place on New Year’s Eve for use in my JHeroes podcast, so I’m giving in to late-night nostalgia and posting another piece of the past here: Lux Radio Theater’s production of After the Thin Man, from 1940. No journalism plot… just a classic mystery with a touch of humor and romance.
As much as I like old radio shows, the medium doesn’t do justice to Asta…
Since the movie trailer is on YouTube, I’m including it too.
I’ll teach a class about movie portrayals of journalists this fall, so I’ve been exploring video clip resources at YouTube. I’m also teaching a Web production class, where I talk about screen-capturing and multimedia plug-ins from the likes of YouTube, so this post will function as a demo, as well as an excuse to share a memorable quote or two, along with links to the movie clip and a 60-year-old New York Times review of the film.
Add some recent problems with my hearing, and I couldn’t help noticing that YouTube offers Google voice as a way to create closed-caption transcriptions of film clips. So testing that became the “hook” for this item. For the seriously hearing-impaired, Google does call the technique “better than nothing,” and perhaps it will be improved. For instance, I wonder if the system could use some kind of “contextual dictionary” dealing with the time and place of the video, in this case early-1950s New Mexico. As you’ll see below, a few words don’t fit the time and place… and a couple may fit well enough to be misleading.
“We have a shop rule here,” an editor warns: “No liquor on the premises.” The caption looks like an unrelated policy, “we have a shop rule here electoral promises.”
And the reporter’s quick rejoinder, “How about smoking?” (almost a newsroom requirement in 1951), becomes “how pot-smoking,” making the editor’s “which of course” reply seem quite liberal for its day.
As some of you may have noticed, I tested the transcription feature with a scene from Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole,” one of the darkest movies about reckless, ego-driven journalists. The result was a near-Zen experience, as the “caption” on the picture above/right may indicate. If you watch the film, you will never hear the words: “sure belt and his family’s about that publishes wife i think he should know missus buddhism.” And, while there is some drinking, pot-smoking is never an issue.
Luckily, my hearing problem is clearing up — and there were some amusing ironies in the transcription that I can share here, just for fun.
The scene: Big city reporter Kirk Douglas encounters a small-town editor-in-chief. No buddhism, but still quite a culture-clash. Their job-interview conversation is one my “Portrayal of the Journalist in Film, Fiction & Popular Culture” students should enjoy discussing.
Our Radford University library has the excellent Criterion DVD of Ace in the Hole, but someone has uploaded the movie’s first six minutes to YouTube, which is convenient — and makes my caption experiment possible. You can find the scene under the heading “Meet Chuck Tatum.” It opens as out-of-work reporter Tatum arrives in Albuquerque unannounced.
Proper names are an easy-to-forgive problem for any speech-recognition program, but given the aggressive personality of Douglas’s character, I like the ironies of “Chuck Tatum” being translated as “thrust at him,” a fair description of how the editor may feel. Tatum’s list of past jobs gets a post-modern touch: “New York, Chicago, Detroit” becoming “new york chicago defrauded,” which anticipates a theme of the movie as much as the “Tell the Truth” embroidery on the editor’s wall.
Tatum’s best self-promoting lines are in the left column below. The Google CC version on the right is less memorable.
“I know newspapers backward, forward and sideways. I can write ‘em, edit ‘em, print ‘em, wrap ‘em and sell ‘em…
“…sideways agony right american freedom wrapping himself…
“I can handle big news and little news, and if there’s no news I can go out and bite a dog.”
“the environmental can help big news in a little bit and there’s no notice outlined by dole“
While the reporter isn’t asking for the dole, pay rates do get the voice-to-text robot treatment. Self-described $250-a-week newspaperman Tatum asks for $50, then compromises, “make it $45.” The captioning however, seems more threatening, with an advanced Soviet-bloc weapon: “an a_k_-forty fast.”
Editor and publisher Jacob Q. Boot doesn’t need threats to be more generous than $45, although not as generous as the transcription implies. It turns his “I pay 60 a week in this shop” into “and uh… I’d pay sixty a week and michelle.” Dark though the film is, there is no hint of a “Michelle.”
The women who do feature in the conversation include a previous employer’s wife, with whom Tatum admits to having an affair — one of the reasons he is back on the job market, and the grandmotherly ”Mrs. Boot,” source of that Google captioning garble ending with “missus buddhism.” (Google also turns the careful editor’s symbolic “belt and suspenders” into “belt and his family’s.”)
Earlier, before he gets to see the editor, Tatum does some verbal sparring with Herbie Cook, cub reporter, who eventually becomes his protege. The conversation begins…
Chuck: “I’d like to see the boss. What did you say his name is?”
Herbie: “I didn’t say...”
Chuck: “Cagey, huh?“
Then, a moment later…
Herbie: “What did you say you were selling? Insurance?“
Chuck: “I didn’t say.“
Herbie: “Cagey, huh?“
The lad’s “I didn’t say,” gets a touch of yoga-class greeting, if slightly garbled, emerging as “but uses namaste.” As you can see in the captured frame, the computer’s translation of “cagey” is more sinister, especially in a McCarthy-era film: “k_g_b.”
For the record, “Ace in the Hole” is a fascinating film with plenty of film noir elements and moral lessons about excessive ambition, media exploitation, audience vulgarity, bad marriages, and government corruption. Back in 1951, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it “A sordid and cynical drama of a corrupt newspaper man, set against a grisly panorama of mob morbidity… delivered with all the stinging impact of an angry slap in the face.”
But buddhism and the Soviet secret police are twists that, as far as I know, no one but Google’s text robot has considered adding.
Utterly whimsical coincidence
There are, of course, other text-captioning technologies out there, which can be accomplished with human intervention and video-editing software. I stumbled across a coincidental Kirk Douglas clip where he is cast in the quasi-journalistic role of “troubadour.”
The captions are clearly by Disney, and the “whale of a tale” takes a somewhat more light-hearted (and moist) approach than Chuck Tatum’s desert-cave reporting. If you watch “Ace in the Hole” and come away feeling like Bosley Crowther did, you may want to come back to this bit of silliness.
RT @parisreview: “Along the way accidents happen, detours get taken—the accidents turn out to be some of the best things.”—John Irving http… 1 hour ago
