Anthony Bushell – Movie Musings

Overlooked gutter press drama, a bit melodramatic, but with strong performances

Director: Mervyn LeRoy

Cast: Edward G. Robinson (Joseph W Randall), Marian Marsh (Jenny Townsend), HB Warner (Michael Townsend), Anthony Bushell (Philip Weeks), George E. Stone (Ziggie Feinstein), Frances Starr (Nancy (Voorhees) Townsend), Ona Munson (Kitty Carmody), Boris Karloff (T Vernon Isopod), Aline MacMahon (Miss Taylor), Oscar Apfel (Bernard Hinchecliffe), Purnell Pratt (French), Robert Elliott (Brannegan)

The cynical newspaperman was a popular genre of the 1930s, most famously The Front Page (largely due to its wildly popular offspring His Girl Friday). Five Star Final (the title refers to a famous gutter press font), adapted from Louis Weitzenkorn’s hit Broadway play. Weitzenkorn was a former editor of New York Evening Graphic, a paper so prurient it was known as the “porno-Graphic”. Proving no one is more keen on their work than a poacher turned gamekeeper, Weitzenkorn’s play is a vicious attack on a newspaper industry that couldn’t give a hoot about the impact of its actions so long as its selling hundreds of thousands of copies daily into the hands of a muck-raking public.

Five Star Final’s hero feels like an idealised self-portrait of Weitzenkorn. Joseph W Randall (Edward G. Robinson) is editor of the New York Evening Gazette, a gutter-press rag which, with weary baby-steps, he has tried to drag up market for years much to the objection of publisher Bernard Hinchecliffe (Oscar Apfel), who firmly believes that salacious stories (with dubious, hypocritical moral angles) about sex and violence is what the people really want. Randall agrees to go muck-raking, dragging back into the limelight Nancy Voorhees (Frances Starr), a stenographer acquitted twenty years ago of killing the no-good boss who impregnated her. Nancy is now married to Townsend (HB Warner), who has raised her daughter Jenny (Marian Marsh) as his own. Jenny is about to marry scion of wealth Philip (Anthony Bushell) and is utterly unaware of the time bomb Randall is about to explode in their lives – with tragic consequences.

Five Star Final is, in many ways, interesting and engaging than The Front Page, even if it takes its story of journalistic ethics relentlessly seriously. It’s view of the newspaper industry is devoid of any hope for journalistic ethics. The paper reports events with a devil-may-care salaciousness using splashes sensationalist headlines without any care for their impact. Hinchecliffe and his staff are utterly unconcerned about morality, or indeed any higher calling to their trade: their focus is solely on circulation. They’re not alone in this – their rival papers have taken to literally launching oil-chucking assaults on newsstands selling the Gazette and countless other outlets climb on board the Voorhees story the second the paper drags it back to life.

The staff are, almost to a man, utterly devoid of any sense of shame. Recent recruit, femme fatale turned journalist Kitty Carmody (Ona Munson, on fine morally ambivalent form) is happy to use any wiles to pursue a story, her first instinct when confronting tragedy to demand a photo. She’s but a beginner compared to Boris Karloff’s reprehensible Isopod, his genteel manner the only thing left of his past as a defrocked priest (for seducing various women), now a tipsy sewer-rat who thinks nothing of dressing as a priest to wean embarrassing facts out of the Townsends and barely shrugs at the impact of his actions. The reporters are without any decency. They don’t even have the crack-a-jack wit of their compatriots in Front Page: you don’t enjoy spending time with them you just want to shower afterwards.

But perhaps even worse, in a way, is Robinson’s Randall – because he knows what he is doing is wrong, wrong, wrong (in case we miss this, we are repeatedly shown Randall washing his hand’s Pilate-like, in sudsy guilt-shedding). In one of his finest performances, Robinson nails the acid-sharp patter, but also his self-destructive embracing of his trade’s worst aspects: his arrogance and ability to beat down his own conscience being his Achilles heels. Robinson’s complex performance implies Randall so disgusted with Hinchecliffe and his ilk, he wants to demonstrate their moral vileness by spinning the paper even deeper. And he does it all from a position of believing he’s better than everyone around him (“put me on a cigar box and I’d be above our readers”), while his actions show him as morally bankrupt as the rest.

The moral cut-and-thrust of the newspaper world dominates the film. LeRoy gives it some real visual interest, from the opening shots of the phone operators taken from ‘inside’ the exchange (their bodies framed through wires) to the skilful split-screen effect used for later phone calls. By comparison, it’s very easy to see the domestic bliss-turned-tragedy in the Townsend home as from a far more theatrical, melodramatic film. Much of this is shot and played with a slightly hokey, home-spun sentimentality – while Frances Starr, in particular, is prone to the sort of middle-distance starring that wouldn’t seem out of place in a matinee.

But you can excuse it for the surprising power of the restraint LeRoy stages a late-act tragedy in the Townsend home, all filmed with use of shadows, implication and shots of agonised hands clutching door frames. HB Warner finds an emotional depth in a man forced to spin personal anguish while Marian Marsh and Anthony Bushell break out of otherwise thankless parts as oblivious lovers to lend real moral force to late outbursts.

But it’s the assault on the gutter press – literally so in the final image of the film, that sees a copy of the Gazette, smeared with mud, washed down a drain – that powers the film. It’s done with a real outrage, that you feel stemmed from Weitzenkorn’s self-loathing. The film relies on the excellence of Robinson’s restrained performance of moral ambiguity (he also has a lovely interplay with his Jiminy Cricket, Aline MacMahon’s secretary) to stop it being a little too shrill and insistent (which it still is at points), but as an impassioned cry for some sort of decency in the media you can see the roots of films like Network in it. Definitely worth uncovering.

Early talkie gives a melodramatic insight into a Victorian stateman, with an Oscar-winning star turn

Director: Alfred E. Green

Cast: George Arliss (Benjamin Disraeli), Doris Lloyd (Mrs Travers), David Torrance (Lord Probert), Joan Bennett (Lady Clarissa Pevensey), Florence Arliss (Lady Beaconsfield), Anthony Bushell (Lord Charles Deeford), Michael Simeon Viscoff (Count Borsinov)

Based on an Edwardian melodrama, Disraeli was the sound debut of George Arliss, a highly acclaimed British actor with a successful silent career. Unlike other silent actors, Arliss’ theatre training made him ready made to have his voice be heard around the world and his Oscar for Best Actor saw him ride the crest of the sound wave. Today, the film looks inevitably quite primitive, so careful to get the sound recorded that its camera barely moves from its fixed position in the ceiling-free sets. But Disraeli, for all this, is rather entertaining if you settle down to it despite its stodgy set-up still deeply rooted in its Edwardian melodrama roots.

It’s odd to read some reviewers describing Disraeli as a dry history lesson: there is almost nothing historical about the plot of Disraeli. While Disraeli did arrange the purchase of a controlling share in the Suez Canal, I can assure you he did not do it while dodging Russian spies in his own home, balancing a series of daring financial moves, laying cunning traps for scheming Russian agents or playing match-maker for his young protégé. Far from a history lesson, Disraeli is really a sort of Sherlock Holmesish thriller, with Disraeli recast as a twinkly wise-cracker constantly several steps ahead of everyone else. It’s a playfully silly set-up rather disconnected from history – and certainly far more fun than the actual dry history of financial and diplomatic negotiations.

Disraeli is a surprisingly well-scripted (as far as these things go) play, which mixes some decent jokes and creative set-ups with a liberal use of phrases from the eminently quotable Disraeli himself. You can’t argue with the wit of Disraeli (the man famously had dozens of entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) and the film bounces several bon mots around (‘That’s good. Perhaps I’ll use it with Gladstone’ Disraeli even comments on one of his own lines). There is wit in other moments, not least Lord Charles’s (Anthony Bushell) proposal to Lady Clarissa (Joan Bennett) which dwells so much on his charitable good works rather than any affections that Lady Clarissa is moved to comment she expected a proposal “not an essay on political economy”.

You can see its melodramatic roots all the way through. Secret talks about the canal are held in Disraeli’s house, in open earshot of a Russian spy Lady Travers (Doris Llloyd), who we later discover Disraeli is carefully leading on. Like a cunning Edwardian detective, Disraeli role-plays illness at one point to delay Lady Travers and resolves a last minute disastrous collapse in his payment scheme for the Suez shares with a swaggering bluff that he delightedly tells his amazed allies about the moment the duped Governor of the Bank of England (forced against his will to back the scheme) leaves the room. All this in a largely single-room setting: this is pure Edwardian theatrical melodrama bought to screen, not history.

It’s similar in its picture of history, here re-worked to position Disraeli as the sort of maverick hero we can immediately recognise from films. Disraeli is established as an outsider who no one in the establishment trusts (never mind he was the leader of the firmly establishment Conservative party, or that his rival Gladstone was seen by the crusty banker types in this film not as their saviour but as a dangerous radical). Despite being referred to as Lord Beaconsfield several times, he sits in the commons to face down Gladstone (an uninspired cameo by an unbilled actor). He is displayed as the sort of negotiating and diplomatic genius whose insights can only be responded to in wonder by Lord Charles, his dim Watson.

Like Sherlock Holmes, he lavishes Charles with backhanded compliments (specifically that his rigid honesty makes him the perfect agency for a secret mission because no one could believe he was up to lying). Like many Edwardian theatrical leads, he’s also an intense romantic. Not only deeply in love with his wife (played by Arliss’ wife Florence) but also at least as interested in making sure Charles and Clarissa end up happily married. Arguably none of that relates to the real Disraeli, a largely scruple and principle free opportunist with more than a few similarities to Boris Johnson (but with a sense of personal honesty and decency, Boris can only dream of).

The main point of interest today is George Arliss’ performance. For all its clearly a version of his stage performance, it’s still very engaging and charismatic. Arliss may deliver some of his lines like they are theatrical asides, and his mugging to a non-existent audience in Disraeli’s fake fitness is (while funny) clearly something that worked much better on stage. But he is twinkly, captures the shrewd intelligence of Disraeli and utterly convinces as a man who could run circles around everyone else. Arliss invests both the speeches and the dialogue with a genuine playful wit and a heartfelt honesty which works very well.

It’s entertaining and he looks very comfortable in front of the camera and he’s head and shoulders above the rest of the cast in terms of the light-and-shade he gives the dialogue. While the rest of the cast deliver their lines with the sort of forced formality that focuses on making sure the mic picks up every word, Arliss performs his lines. He’s got a sharp sense of comic timing, wheedles and boasts with real energy and isn’t afraid to chuck the odd line away. It’s a sound performance probably years ahead of its time.

The rest of the film is very much of its era. Green’s direction is incredibly uninspired. The camera set ups are very basic. The problems of sound can be seen throughout: from the awkward positions and formality of the camerawork to the occasional line flub that creeps into the soundtrack. Disraeli can look a lot like a filmed play, largely because it’s been set-up with such little focus on visuals. It’s reliance on title cards between scenes shows how fixed it still is on the clumsier parts of silent film-making. You could say, without Arliss, there would be very little to actually recommend it, for all there is the odd good line. But with him, it manages to be a little bit more than just a historical curiosity.