By Michael Bayer
Even when reportage isn’t germane to the plot, the gaggle of journos is a steady presence in many noirs, often showing up like a Greek chorus to record events and wrest information from the key players. The news media symbolize the noir protagonist’s battle for reality; the private facts tangle with the public façade, and the ambiguous noir world often teeters somewhere in between.
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World War II had elevated the stature of journalism in the public consciousness: wire service reporters, stringers, correspondents, and photographers credentialed by the War Department had been sent overseas to cover combat, tag along on military vehicles, and sometimes lose their lives. News reels featuring the fruits of their wartime sacrifices had informed – and sometimes horrified — moviegoers before every theater feature. Journalism’s pursuit of truth was widely perceived as nothing short of heroic.
Within this historical setting, two types of journalists seemed to work in film noir. First, we have the noble, dutiful reporter who doggedly pursues the truth despite threats on his or her life from ruthless gangsters or corrupt politicians; sometimes a muckraker on a mission, sometimes a victim of circumstance, this intrepid figure is a journalistic stand-in for the detective. The prime example is Jimmy Stewart’s P.J. McNeal in Call Northside 777 (1948). Then we have the immoral, venal scandalmonger who uses his or her gatekeeping position to achieve status and profit, even if it means destroying many lives along the way. Think of Burt Lancaster’s J.J. Hunsecker, the omnipotent gossip columnist in Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Whether used for good or evil, the media have always been a coveted source of power, which, of course, made journalism indispensable to many noir plots.
In film noir, however, the Hunseckers tended to outnumber the McNeals. While courageous war reporters were winning Pulitzer Prizes, tabloid journalism, which emphasizes scandal, sensationalism, gossip, and crime, had found a dedicated delivery vehicle in the New York Daily News, launched in 1919 and reaching its highest circulation of 2.4 million in 1947, just as film noir was in full swing. The Daily News was marketed with the tagline “New York’s Picture Newspaper” because the extra-large format accommodated much more photography. With advances like flash bulbs and faster shutters, photographers were now able to shoot more freely, to capture sleazy exchanges in dark corners. New York photographer Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, became famous for recording crime scenes and corpses on film. This same obsession with photographing luridness for profit leads Howard Duff’s Jack Early to ruin in Joseph Pevney’s Shakedown (1950).
Sensationalism in journalism predated the New York Daily News, of course. The derogatory term “yellow press” stems from the legendary competition for readership between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. In the 1890’s, both papers ran a comic strip called “Yellow Kid” which came to symbolize their increasingly desperate efforts to embellish and exaggerate in their circulation dogfight. The competition became so intense that the papers were accused of exaggerating the negative conditions in Cuba and sparking the commencement of the Spanish-American War. (Perhaps not surprisingly, the film that had the single greatest influence on film noir despite not being a noir itself, Orson Welles’ 1941 Citizen Kane, gave us the life story of newspaper baron Charles Foster Kane, a character based on Hearst.)
The journalistic stakes in film noir didn’t typically jeopardize geopolitical stability, but the capitalist drive to outperform the competition produced plenty of wreckage. You can almost smell the corruption. Perhaps the most putrid example is Billy Wilder’s dark masterpiece, Ace in the Hole (1951), in which Kirk Douglas plays an ambitious small-town reporter who manipulates local officials to delay the rescue of a dying man trapped in the rubble of a cliff dwelling collapse so that he can file more exclusive stories. In Phil Karlson’s Scandal Sheet (1952), Broderick Crawford plays a brutally despicable newspaper editor who kills his estranged wife and then kills a reporter whose investigation of the murder is about to reach the truth.
Some noirs took a somewhat neutral stance on the news business, presenting ink-stained wretches as neither heroes nor hellions. Film noir’s most prolific director, Fritz Lang, concluded his American career in the 1950’s with what’s often called his Newspaper Noir trilogy, comprising The Blue Gardenia (1953), While the City Sleeps (1956), and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956). These films do a nice job exposing the inner workings of newsrooms, including the fedoras and Underwood typewriters, the pneumatic tubes and city block-sized printing press in the basement, the regular back-stabbing and betrayals, and the fickle collaboration with police, but ultimately paint the press as exposing truth and restoring order to the world, however reluctantly.
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