Park Row may wear its emotions on its sleeve, for better and on rare occasion for worse (mostly in some sentimental bits involving busts of Benjamin Franklin and others on Park Row, and an ending involving the Statue of Liberty), but it also reveals its filmmaker so personally tapped into its subject that the film transcends its story. It's exhilarating to see director Samuel Fuller working at full capacity, and even with its one or two moments where it could be faulted he still delivers as good as he did with more prestigious films (The Big Red One) or cult classics (Shock Corridor). This was done as an elegy for the days of yore, when people had to find the type-keys to put in so that a printing press could work, writers wrote out everything in longhand (right on the cusp of that newfangled invention the typewriter), and newspapers were tight rivals when one printed facts and the other printed garbage. It's a tough, endearing little gem.
Fuller's concerns here are expressed in the character of Phineas Mitchell, a guy who sits at a bar for years saying "If I had my newspaper I'd do so on and so forth," only to find in 1886 that someone who has been listening to him for so long give him an offer: run a newspaper as editor in chief. Mitchell founds The Globe, dedicated to doing real journalism - or whatever could be made up as news but still be fitting and pure - and with a crack staff of foreigners who can't read (and one of them better not!) and kids and old people, he gets to work. But Fuller's antagonist is a little tricker to put a handle on: Charity Hackett (first name means "She doesn't have any"), who runs the well-circulated The Star and sees The Globe as a direct threat, and puts out an order to her underling to get The Globe dismantled.
As it is Fuller, not without a fight, of course. But seeing how this dynamic of power plays out is really at the heart of the film, about what it means to be a journalist with integrity, and to give it your all - or to slink out of it and take the easy or ruthless route like Hackett. What's fascinating is also how the two of them (as played by Evans and Welch) have a kind of kinetic connection together, as they could at any moment just fall madly in love with one another... which, thankfully, doesn't quite happen in Fuller's hands, though he does acknowledge their twisted admiration for one another as they practically plot each others' murder. Along the way Fuller provides us with some colorful supporting characters, some hard-rocking front page headlines (with drawings!) and some riveting set pieces and cinematography (best is seeing that tracking shot that goes from the bar, following Mitchell outside, into his printing press, a fight ensues, and then some dialog and ending on a close-up - other great scenes show a masterful use of a gliding camera, as if it's flying, in love with this time and atmosphere and the nature of the people and work.
It's also commendable that Fuller even decided to make the 'villain' a woman, and to give her complexity. It would have been an easy route to make this opposing editor a man and make it mano-a-mano, but Fuller's after something else here. I wonder how closely he took it to history, or if he merely wanted to see this power dynamic played out in the year it was set in. It goes without saying he draws from personal experience, as a journalist in his years before being a filmmaker. But he knows such characters so well, the small ones and the major players, that everything feels authentic emotionally even when things get a little sentimental or a little preachy (the way the old guy explains how things work in the printing press to the little kid SPELLS IT OUT in caps like that, which is Fuller's way but a bit much in those short scenes). There's violence, there's passion, there's daring-do and a sense of right and wrong. It's Fuller cinema! 9.5/10
Fuller's concerns here are expressed in the character of Phineas Mitchell, a guy who sits at a bar for years saying "If I had my newspaper I'd do so on and so forth," only to find in 1886 that someone who has been listening to him for so long give him an offer: run a newspaper as editor in chief. Mitchell founds The Globe, dedicated to doing real journalism - or whatever could be made up as news but still be fitting and pure - and with a crack staff of foreigners who can't read (and one of them better not!) and kids and old people, he gets to work. But Fuller's antagonist is a little tricker to put a handle on: Charity Hackett (first name means "She doesn't have any"), who runs the well-circulated The Star and sees The Globe as a direct threat, and puts out an order to her underling to get The Globe dismantled.
As it is Fuller, not without a fight, of course. But seeing how this dynamic of power plays out is really at the heart of the film, about what it means to be a journalist with integrity, and to give it your all - or to slink out of it and take the easy or ruthless route like Hackett. What's fascinating is also how the two of them (as played by Evans and Welch) have a kind of kinetic connection together, as they could at any moment just fall madly in love with one another... which, thankfully, doesn't quite happen in Fuller's hands, though he does acknowledge their twisted admiration for one another as they practically plot each others' murder. Along the way Fuller provides us with some colorful supporting characters, some hard-rocking front page headlines (with drawings!) and some riveting set pieces and cinematography (best is seeing that tracking shot that goes from the bar, following Mitchell outside, into his printing press, a fight ensues, and then some dialog and ending on a close-up - other great scenes show a masterful use of a gliding camera, as if it's flying, in love with this time and atmosphere and the nature of the people and work.
It's also commendable that Fuller even decided to make the 'villain' a woman, and to give her complexity. It would have been an easy route to make this opposing editor a man and make it mano-a-mano, but Fuller's after something else here. I wonder how closely he took it to history, or if he merely wanted to see this power dynamic played out in the year it was set in. It goes without saying he draws from personal experience, as a journalist in his years before being a filmmaker. But he knows such characters so well, the small ones and the major players, that everything feels authentic emotionally even when things get a little sentimental or a little preachy (the way the old guy explains how things work in the printing press to the little kid SPELLS IT OUT in caps like that, which is Fuller's way but a bit much in those short scenes). There's violence, there's passion, there's daring-do and a sense of right and wrong. It's Fuller cinema! 9.5/10