Tales from The Warner Archives #11: "-30-" (Jack Webb, 1959)

In my heedless youth, with my slovenly wannabe-hippie attitude and all, I was never much of a Jack Webb fan, so I wasn't even aware of his film -30- until I read this evocative writeup of it in Michael Weldon's Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, published in 1983 (the year I turned 24): "Another Thursday night shift at the Los Angeles Banner. Jack Webb arrives late from his weekly visit to the graves of his wife and son to settle in with city editor William Conrad for eight hours of cigarettes and stale coffee. David Nelson and friends relax with 'Copy Boy' for voice and bongos, while assorted newsroom types await progress reports on a 5-year-old girl lost in the city's storm-drain system. Cannon and Friday's backups include Richard Bakalayan, Joe Flynn of McHale's Navy, and Hazel's Whitney Blake." (The writeup itself was not by Weldon but by his collaborator Charles Beesley, a very cool and taciturn customer—he looked a bit like DeNiro's Johnny Boy, without the stupid hats—who was sometimes seen in the company of Hoboken's most enigmatic musical luminaries, and who appears to have disappeared from the face of the earth. But that's another story.)

The film sounded like a little slice of heaven to a guy who still hadn't much of a clue as to what life after the college paper was going to hold for him. Cigarettes and stale coffee was my idea of some kind of breakfast of champions. Of course the film, like so many in Weldon's book at the time, seemed almost impossible to see at the time, and even when I became friendly with Weldon shortly after the book appeared, I never asked him if he had a copy I could borrow (Psychotronic pictures were often passed around like VHS or Beta samizdat by like-minded cinephiles). Maybe I was afraid the reality of the picture would disappoint me. Having now finally seen the movie via a recent DVD from the Warner Archive, I can report the film does not disappoint at all, although Beesley's writeup makes it sound a little more impressionistic and aimless than it actually is. 

For this IS a Jack Webb picture, after all, and Jack Webb pictures—not to generalize overmuch, but still—are about regular Joes doing really important things. And getting the morning paper out is an important thing, in spite of it all. The "it all" part does involve tedium and flim-flammers and editors heading up nonexistent departments, but -30- hardly takes as cynical a view of the old-school news-gathering process as does, say, The Front Page, or Front Page co-author Ben Hecht's account of his early days in newspapering in his autobiography A Child Of The Century, which it so happens I'm reading now. (See here.) Hecht's faux-pokerfaced recountings of his exploits as a "picture-chaser," going to almost any lengths (including simulating a house fire to make a family flee, the better for Hecht to break in and ransack the photo albums) to acquire pertinent photographs of victims of crime and natural disasters and such, are enough to make any contemporary ombudsman's blood run cold. In -30-, with respect to the photo of the aforementioned 5-year-old-girl stuck in the city's storm-drain system, well, at one conference an anonymous editor allows that the picture the Banner is going to run was "hustled off a next-door neighbor." Well, all right then. 

While maintaining an admirable unity of space of the sort that some critics like to cite in support of a claim of "formal rigor"—that is, the camera never leaves the newsroom during the entirety of its nearly 97-minute running time—the picture juggles multiple storylines and what they now call character arcs. The will-the-5-year-old-girl-make-it? question is of course paramount, but there's also the dilemma of the lovely female obit writer who wants a crack at a real story, but is afraid of getting it because she's the daughter of the paper's owner; the pride and anticipation of another female staffer, a longtime reporter, whose son grandson the rest of the staff never even knew she had is making a daring cross-country flight; the frustration of the copy runner stuck in a go-nowhere job, or so he thinks; and other such stuff. All of which is both driven and punctuated by lots of  newspapering nuts-and-bolts jargon, as witness this exchange between Webb's M.E. Sam Gatlin and Conrad's Jim Bathgate:

Gatlin: Jim—this shot of the catch basin, let's run it same size...across pages two and three.

Bathgate: Across both pages, 16 columns?

Gatlin: That's right.

Bathgate: No can do. 

Gatlin: Oh, can do. We'll run two eight column cuts with a gutter down the middle. Now run a type overlay, white on black, across both pages. Use 72-point Bodoni caps..."Danger, Kids: Stay Out Of These." Exclaimer. Then in lower case: "One little girl didn't."

Yeah, this Gatlin fella's got it all—the sizzle, the steak, and a great big heart that's been broken bad once and doesn't wanna get broken again. Which leads to his mule-headed resistance to his new wife's scheme to adopt a little tyke. You can likely see where all this is going, right? 

Which hardly detracts from the pleasure of it all; in fact I dare say it adds to it. In any event, when Conrad's had enough of the griping from those damn copy runners and launches into his grand, "Why sure, it's just a newspaper" speech, you may well be harumphing right along with him. -30- is as affectionate as Fuller's great Park Row, while being infinitely more mushy, and mushy-headed. But if you're one of the increasingly rare breed who still has a bit of printer's ink in his or her blood, it may well be just your preferred variety of mush. Now where's a DVD of Webb's next collaboration with screenwriter William Bowers, the ineffable The Last Time I Saw Archie?

Comments

[Lou Lumenick]

Nice writeup, Glenn, on one of my favorites, which also offers Richard Deacon of "The Dick Van Dyke Show'' as a sarcastic staff artist and Howard McNear of "The Andy Griffith Show'' as the fussbudget wire editor. I especially love the way Conrad makes his coffee. The doomed flyer is the rewrite woman's grandson, though.

[Stephen Whitty]

Yes, a fave of all ink-stained wretches (I'm looking up at a particularly garish, pink-toned lobbycard as I type this). "Park Row" too. Although, for '50s newsprint dramas, I still gotta go for "Deadline, U.S.A," and Bogart.

"That's the power of the press, baby! The power of the press. And there's nothing you can do about it."

sigh.

[jbryant]

Aw, jeez, now I gotta sell some plasma or something and score this thing. Big Webb fan-boy, so the lack of printer's ink in my blood shouldn't be an issue. If "Mel Cooley" and "Floyd the Barber" are on board, that's just gravy.

I also need to re-see PETE KELLY'S BLUES pretty bad (I think I have enough plasma). Have seen and dug the DRAGNET feature and THE D.I. As for THE LAST TIME I SAW ARCHIE, well, I'd watch it again in a heartbeat, but yeah, "ineffable" is one way to describe it. The episodic structure and bursts of broad humor make the film feel like 3 or 4 sitcom episodes strung together. Webb's visual imagination, so evident in his other film and TV work, is only fitfully apparent. Nonetheless, there's some good stuff, almost all of it between Webb and Robert Mitchum, who work very well together in a subtle comic style. An entire film in that tone might have been aces, but the belabored wackiness of some of the supporting cast didn't work for me.

[Peter Nellhaus]

"Archie" is found right here:
http://movies.netflix.com/Movie/The_Last_Time_I_Saw_Archie/70147191?trkid=2361637#height665

You're welcome.

[jbryant]

Peter: Well, there ya go. I had to rent an old VHS from Eddie Brandt's video store in North Hollywood to see it a few years back. Now it's just a click away. The DRAGNET feature is there, too. Now if they'd just get the other Webb films on there.

[Paul Duane]

The other weird place Jack Webb turns up is in the list of recommendations at the back of the Incredibly Strange Films book. There, right alongside Andy Milligan and the rest of the sick crew, is a listing for Webb's drill sergeant melodrama, The D.I., which (I hate to admit) I haven't yet managed to track down.

Nice to see a mention for the great work of weirdo scholarship that is the Psychotronic Encyclopaedia. Whatever else I do in my life, getting a byline in Michael Weldon's Psychotronic Video magazine is always going to be one of my proudest achievements.

[Griff]

Excellent commentary on my favorite Webb picture. Of all of the major newspaper pictures, I give this one particularly high marks for paying careful attention to the actual work and details -- not just the "nuts-and-bolts jargon" -- of city room activity. Yes, it's melodramatic, sentimental, corny... but it also has a certain electricity and drive. Some of its strength, oddly, derives from its determined "this is a day like any other day" atmosphere. Though a major plot thread involves an endangered child, much of the picture's real interest emerges simply from the interplay of the characters and the work we see them perform; they do this daily, bringing out the morning paper is an important job. [Webb and Bowers deserve credit for resisting the temptation to involve thugs or gangsters in the film's plot; this is above all a human story.] Nice work from Conrad, Webb and the colorful supporting cast; David Nelson isn't bad in the thankless role as the green copyboy, but it's an unimaginable continuity flaw for us to accept that he could be a Korean War vet.

Now, MGM, how about PARK ROW?

[Escher]

A few years back, on his "Whoops I'm an Indian" cd, Hal Willner built an absolutely brilliant track called "Do You Hear Me (No Pie)" around a Jack Webb dialogue sample from THE D.I.

[christian]

THE LAST TIME I SAW ARCHIE shows that Jack Webb had less comic sensibility than Otto Preminger. It's more of a William Bowers film though.