by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the movie Exiled
to Shanghai, a 1937 Republic “B” shown
in a cut-down TV version from the 1950’s (53 minutes’ running time instead of
the original 65) and with a reshot opening title for TV — ironic since the plot
of the film is about TV, more
or less. Ted Young (Wallace Ford) is a correspondent for the Worldwide Newsreel
company, which is feeling the pressure of competition from wire photos as well
as radio — both of which can cover the news faster than the newsreels can —
when he’s assigned by his former cameraman Charlie Sears (Dean Jagger), who’s
now his editor, to cover a million-dollar sweepstakes winner who’s taking a
train to New York City. Only he shoots the wrong girl, Nancy Jones (the
personable June Travis), who was on her way to New York after winning a
contest, but a considerably less lucrative one sponsored by the Supreme
Television Company, which picked her slogan, “Television: The Eyes and Ears of
the World.” Fired from the newsreel company for his mistake, Ted decides to
promote a TV newsreel and gets Supreme to back it (after a montage of the heads
of all the other TV startups in New York shaking their heads at him), only
unbeknownst to him the head of Supreme, Grant Powell (William Harrigan, who
played Kemp in The Invisible Man), is a crook whose only interest in “TV newsreel” is to get buzz so he
can raise his company’s stock price, then dump his own shares at the peak of
the market and flee the country with his ill-gotten gains before the share
price collapses again.
Ted catches on to the scheme when he’s assigned to cover
the landing of a dirigible as his first TV newsreel story, and the shots they
air show the dirigible landing perfectly while in fact it crashed and burned
(needless to say, stock shots of the real crash and burn of the dirigible Hindenburg are used here — oh, the humanity! — making this a
movie of Hindenburg ex machina); what was being shown on the “TV newsreel” was in fact a stock shot of
a dirigible landing successfully from the previous year. Ted had previously
interested his old company, Worldwide Newsreel, to provide footage for the TV
newsreel, and had improvised an explanation for a reporter of how the TV waves
could get across the Rocky Mountains, and now he finds himself blamed for the
scam, arrested (he cornered Powell and started a fight to recover the money
Powell was about to abscond with, but the police assumed they were both in on
the scam and arrested both of them!), and though he’s ultimately exonerated he
has to beg for his old Worldwide job back, while Charlie gets an assignment to
cover the civil war in China. Ted gets Charlie drunk and has him arrested for
dropping a bottle out of a tall building, then takes the plane to Shanghai (the
film finally mentions the titular city
with just about 10 minutes left to go!), only to bail out of it again when he
sees Nancy’s train below, so they’re reunited.
Directed by Nick Grinde (who’d
formerly worked at the major studios with the accent on his last name, “Grindé,”
still attached, but was now pretty much a creature of the “B”’s for Republic
and later Columbia, where he made three of the Boris Karloff mad-scientist
films) and produced by Armand Schaefer from an “original” screenplay by Wellyn
Totman that seems sometimes to sink under the weight of how many clichés Totman tried to cram into it, Exiled to
Shanghai (shot under the working
titles Crashing the Front Page and News in the Air, either of which would have given a far better idea of what the film was
about) at first seems like it’s going to set up one of those best/worst
comparisons I like to make (“Let’s see, at the top of films about the newsreel
business there’s Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman … and at the bottom there’s Exiled to Shanghai”), but this film gets better as it progresses even
though Wallace Ford is clearly modeling his performance on Lee Tracy’s in
similar roles and he gets just as annoying as the actor he’s copying.
