The idea of a vagrant journalist drifting through life fits me to like an old shoe. So it is just as well that I chanced about a 77-year-old movie about a vagrant reporter played James Cagney in the 1943 movie ‘Johnny Come Lately’ on YouTube.
I too am a vagrant journalist these days unsure of where my life will take me. Although in his review of the film on September 23, 1943 the New York Times film critic skewered the film calling it “a curiously second-rate film”, I don’t seem to mind it as much. Like I said it has some distinct shades of my life in it; near vagrancy being one of them. Cagney was a brilliant actor and movie star active between 1919 and 1984. He was born July 17, 1899 and died on March 30, 1986.
Cagney plays Tom Richards, a newspaperman who comes to a small town called Plattsville and avoids being imprisoned for vagrancy after the publisher of a local newspaper Vinnie MacLeod, played by Grace George, intervenes and employs him to take on a local crook W M Dougherty played by Edward McNamara. I can see why the movie got unflattering reviews but mainly because it partly reflects my own career predicament I was drawn in by the movie.
Cagney is eminently watchable with his deadpan performance. Cagney reminds me of Joe Pesci.
Richard’s first task is to overhaul the newspaper Plattsville Shield Banner as he along with the publisher decides to take a three-day break in publication to change the design. This is before they take on Dougherty’s corrupt demand to print his editorials full of lies under the publisher’s name. Richard works out a plan where the paper would publish the editorials but in italics and an accompanying note that they were being published under coercion.
The quick scenes where the paper’s small staff start feverishly typing and setting the linotype machines to make printing blocks took me back to 1981 when I first joined the Free Press Journal in Bombay in the dying days of the linotype machine. The smell of molten lead to make the printing blocks is still in my nostrils. I think I have beaten the coronavirus so far because the lead fumes are still in my nostrils and the virus cannot survive lead (This is an egregiously false claim made here for the effect in league with the suggestion by our outgoing president to inject bleach.)
An interesting aside. Cagney could draw very well as he creates impromptu chalk caricatures on a blackboard of some of his colleagues. I draw and paint as well.
The Plattsville Shield Banner publishes a series of exposes of Dougherty’s many corrupt actions.
I am not going to report the whole story of the movie and spoil it for those who might choose to read my blog first and then watch it. (Literary exaggeration.) Watching it had an uplifting effect on me in that that I decided to write this post.
I have always been drawn to movies about the press and journalists, especially print journalists. That was even before I became one myself some 40 years ago and notwithstanding the fact that it has brought me to near vagrancy like Cagney’s character in ‘Johnny Come Lately’.