Bannerline

I've mentioned before that the programmers MGM produced in the 1950s are often just as interesting as the Freed Unit musicals, if not more so. Of course, those programmres also include some clunkers, as I discovered when I watched Bannerline recently.

MGM was trying to make a star out of Keefe Brasselle, who had recently been in one of the lesser segments of It's a Big Country, so he gets the starring role in this film. Brasselle plays Mike Perrivale, a young reporter fresh out of J-school who thinks he knows more than the people who have been in the newspaper business since they were his age at the turn of the century. Mike works for a paper in one of those small towns MGM liked to use their backlot to recreate, only this time the town has the more ethnic-sounding name of Carravia. Mike is the low man on the totem pole, which means he gets the crappy assignments and doesn't even make enough to support his girlfriend, the teacher Richie Loomis (Sally Forrest), who still lives with her mom (Spring Byington).

Among the crappy assignments Mike gets is interviewing Hugo Trimble (Lionel Barrymore), the male equivalent of Jenny Jones in Good Morning, Miss Dove, a teacher who can be a bit tough but who is actually loved by the people who took his classes. Trimble has been teaching for 50 years, but he's terminally ill in hospital. Hugo is disappointed that he'll die with the town having done nothing about the man who really runs the place, mobster Frankie Scarbine (J. Carroll Naish).

After Hugo teaches Mike how to conduct an interview that people will actually want to read, Mike decides the way to thank Hugo is to use the newspaper as a print shop, since centuries before this the printers who published the earliest newspapers did take on all sorts of other print jobs. In this case, the plan is to make a fake front page in which it will be revealed that Scarbine has been indicted, and let Hugo read that on his dying day.

But then Mike, along with Josh (Lewis Stone), who runs the newspaper's morgue, comes up with an idiotic idea, which is to release the fake front page to the general public. Unsurpisingly, Mike's editor/publish Stambaugh (Larry Keating) is pissed, especially because Scarbine can get a whole bunch of businesses to pull their ads. But this is an MGM programmer, so even though they tried to take on social issues in the era after ditching Louis B. Mayer, they were never anywhere near as good at it as Warner Bros.

In this case, the solution is to engage in some good old witness tampering. There's a grand jury investigating Scarbine, so Stambaugh and the rest of the staff at the paper decide that since they know who the foreman of the jury is, they'll just tell him the grand jury should act independently. As I said, it's blatant witness tampering, but this perversion of the justice system is treated as a good thing.

Bannerline has a whole bunch of problems. Keefe Brasselle is bland, and it's not surprising that he didn't become a big star, never mind the issues in his personal life. This movie, more than a lot of others, looks like it's all done on the back lot. And never mind the journalistic ethics; the rest of the movie is pretty badly mawkish, too.

Then again, the lack of journalistic ethics in Bannerline shouldn't have surprised me, considering the way the press of today spent the past six years working with the the Beltway establishment to violate all sorts of journalistic and constitutional norms to go after who have the wrong views either about Donald Trump or the coronavirus. I suppose the press was just as bad in the 1950s.

Still, there are probably people who have enough trust in the media that they'll like Bannerline. I'm just not one of them.