Power of the Press (Columbia, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, April 15) my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly good movie on YouTube: Power of the Press, a 1943 Columbia “B” directed by Lew Landers (not a very good sign, though this ranks alongside The Raven, Condemned Women, Night Waitress – despite its blah title – and Twelve Crowded Hours among his best films), from a script by Robert Hardy Andrews (not a good sign either) based on an original story by Samuel Fuller (a very good sign). I was attracted to this because I’d seen a précis about it on YouTube and it sounded interesting, since both Charles and I have read extensively about America’s last brush with fascism – in the 1930’s, when a lot of Americans looked at what Mussolini was doing for Italy (not only getting the trains to run on time but abolishing the Mafia in its country of origin until the U.S. brought it back as part of the World War II effort) and what Hitler was doing for Germany (mostly reawakening its sense of national purpose and successfully stimulating its economy through rearmament) and thought this country could use a solid dose of that. Power of the Press deals with John Cleveland Carter (Minor Watson), publisher of the New York Gazette, who’s let a 45 percent shareholder, Howard Rankin (Otto Kruger), essentially take over the paper and use it to spread isolationist propaganda even after the Pearl Harbor attack. Carter’s conscience is aroused by an editorial against him written by Ulysses Bradford (Guy Kibbee, top-billed), who runs a small-town hand-set letterpress weekly in an upstate New York town and has just blasted Carter for allegedly misusing his Constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press to undermine American democracy, sabotage the war effort, and ultimately bring about the end of democracy in America and its replacement by dictatorship. (Ulysses Bradford, you didn’t know how right you were!)

Carter decides Bradford was right about him, and he determines to make a big speech, which will be published on the front page of the Gazette as well as broadcast live on radio, in which he will admit his own responsibility, name other Fifth Columnists in the American media, and realign the Gazette’s editorial policy towards full-throated support of the war effort. Alas, he’s just started to deliver his big speech when he’s shot and killed, though he lingers in the hospital long enough to write a new holographic will giving Bradford control of the Gazette and naming him the new publisher. Carter’s secretary, Edwina “Eddie” Stephens (Gloria Dickson, a quite accomplished actress whose career went nowhere), goes out to see Bradford, who’s all too conscious that the task of publishing a major-city daily with a circulation of millions is way outside his comfort zone. Nonetheless, he’s persuaded to relocate to New York City and take over, though between them Rankin and his irascible city editor, Griff Thompson (Lee Tracy, older and very much stouter than he was in his glory days before he literally pissed away his career: he was in Mexico shooting the 1934 film ¡Viva Villa! when one morning while drunk he pulled out his dick and urinated on a detachment of Mexican soldiers marching by, which led to him and the entire ¡Viva Villa! company being expelled from Mexico and both Tracy and the film’s original director, Howard Hawks, being fired from it and from MGM when shooting resumed in Hollywood), he’s not able to accomplish much in changing the paper’s policy.

Behind his back, Rankin and Thompson between them arrange for former Gazette reporter Jerry Purvis (Larry Parks, three years before another Columbia production, The Jolson Story, briefly elevated him to stardom), to be framed as Carter’s killer. Rankin and his hired thug, Oscar Trent (Victor Jory) – who really killed Carter – trick Purvis into handling the gun used to kill Carter, thereby getting his fingerprints on it, and under Rankin’s direction the Gazette’s staff make what amounts to a citizen’s arrest of Purvis. Purvis’s elderly mother dies from a heart attack induced by the shock of her son being arrested for murder. (Purvis’s complaint that Rankin’s firing him from the Gazette has literally put him on a blacklist so no other paper will hire him is an eerie anticipation of Larry Parks’s own fate when he ended up on the Hollywood blacklist following the House Un-American Activities Committee’s second round of phony “investigations” of alleged Hollywood subversion in 1951.) Rankin and Trent intercept a cigar-store owner named Tony Angelo (Frank Yaconelli), who’s just taken the oath to be an American citizen, who’s come to the Gazette office saying that Purvis couldn’t have murdered Carter because Purvis was in his cigar store when Carter was killed. Rankin and Trent get rid of him by pushing him down an empty elevator shaft.

They next frame an innocent man (who beat Rankin in his campaign to be New York governor) as an alleged war profiteer, claiming in the Gazette’s pages that the man is hoarding large supplies of rationed goods (which starts to sound very much like the complaints of more recent radical-Rightists in America about the COVID-19 restrictions). They get him arrested and ultimately he dies, again of a heart attack, and it’s only after he croaks and his warehouse is set on fire by angry Gazette readers that the truth comes out. He was really working with the U.S. government to accumulate goods for a major overseas military operation. Ultimately Rankin files a lawsuit against Bradford to challenge his inheritance of the Gazette, thereby preventing Bradford from using the paper to expose Rankin’s treasonous activities. Where I thought Fuller and Andrews were going with this was copying Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (a film to which this one owes a lot): I thought they’d have Bradford retreat to his original small-town weekly and use it to expose Rankin’s secrets, including his murders – including using another hired thug, Mack Gibbons (Frank Sully), to kill Trent once it looked like Trent might turn state’s evidence and blow the whistle on him. Instead they crash Trent’s office and fake a confession from him even though he’s dead, then publish a mock edition of the Gazette and use it to trick Rankin himself into confessing. After it was over Charles said that Power of the Press was definitely a Sam Fuller auteur movie even though he only wrote the original story and others both did the screenplay and the direction. It’s tough and fast-moving (it had to be to crowd this much plot in just 61 minutes!), and though the melodrama gets to be a little hard to take after a while, it’s quite an intense little film that is now more timely than it’s been since it was made, now that the biggest threat to America’s future as a democratic republic is from inside via President-turned-Führer Donald Trump and his political movement.