PARK ROW ***

Samuel Fuller was a newspaperman before he was a filmmaker and his passion for journalism and free speech infuses every frame of "Park Row" making this one of his most enjoyable pictures which, for a movie about the printed page, is intensely cinematic. Of course, whether Fuller was a good journalist, a great journalist or even a lousy journalist I can't say but he had one of the great eyes in American cinema and he knew, in movie after movie, how to bombard our senses with a host of images that gave his films, be they westerns, thrillers, war pictures or, in this case, simply a picture about the founding of a newspaper, the feeling they were ripped from today's headlines.

The plot of "Park Row" is relatively thin. Gene Evans is the newspaper man who becomes the editor of a crusading newspaper in opposition to the more powerful paper from which he's just been fired. It is, in other words, a feelgood movie about a David triumphing over a mean old Goliath, (in this case represented by Mary Welch's excellent performance as the owner of the rival paper), but it's a populist picture with none of the sentimentality that Capra would have brought to it. Indeed, being a Sam Fuller picture, there's a fair amount of violence en route to the happy ending. It also has one of Fuller's best scripts; this is a movie full of crisp dialogue that makes great use of factual material. Amazingly, despite it's substantial critical reputation, it's seldom revived. Time, I think, to rectify that.