Gentlemen of the Press (1929)





Mr. Millard Webb, free-swinging director, strode to the plate at the Paramount Eastern film foundry, grasped his wagon tongue firmly and smote out the first entirely successful newspaper picture in the history of the photoplay. In fact, successful isn't just THE word to describe "Gentlemen of the Press." It's a knockout. Newspaper pictures, in the past, have been soggy with sentimentality and crammed with technical errors that have drawn only guffaws from the lads with the pad and pencil. But not this baby.

This all-talkie is the film version of a stage play of the same name written by five New York newspapermen. The story is that of a flea-bitten old newspaperman who has chased kings and ambulances all over the world — of his struggles to break out of newspaper business into the big money, of his young daughter's love trouble, and his own affair with a sirenish sweetie. A fast, smart and cynical story about the press boys, all lighted up with plenty of horse laughs and awash with enough tears to use up the most lachrymose customer.

"Gentlemen of the Press" knocks in the head the theory that only picture actors know anything about film technique. An all-stage cast, with hardly an ounce of movie training in the bundle, walks out and gives a set of rip-roaring performances. Walter Huston is superb as the old star reporter, and a long-legged, dark girl named Katharine Francis is going to be a great film sensation in vamp roles of the new, slinky type. Good work by Charles Ruggles, the comedian. Handshakes and nosegays all round.

Photoplay June 1929



Vintage magazines

Photoplay , March 1929
Photoplay , March 1929
Photoplay , May 1929

Photoplay , June 1929
Photoplay , June 1929
Photoplay , December 1930



Year: 1929
Country: United States
 
IMDb: 0019920