The Famous Ferguson Case

One more movie that I noticed showing up again on the TCM schedule that I had recorded was The Famous Ferguson Case. Its next airing is tomorrow, October 23, at 2:30 PM, so I sat down to watch it in able to be able to do a post on it here.

The movie starts off with a "foreword", one of those scrolling establishing walls of text that were not uncommon in silent movies and then the first few decades of talkies (The Famous Ferguson Case was released in 1932). This one tells us about how some "journalists" didn't really care about "news", but sensationalism and reporting on things long since worthy of public discussion. Of course, we know nowadays that most journalists are sensationalists and panic mongers, and it's the honest journalist that's in the severe minority.

Cut to the town of Cornwall, somehwere in upstate New York (there's really a Cornwall-on-Hudson not too far north of New York City, but this Cornwall is presumed to be somewhere north of Albany based on a comment from one of the characters). We first meet the local denizens of Cornwall: Marcia Ferguson (Vivienne Osborne) is married to wealthy banker George (Purnell Pratt), who works down in the City and spends quite a few nights down there. To compensate, Marcia is having an affair with Judd Brooks (Leon Ames), who works as a teller at the local bank and has a wife of his own. They meet at the train station; also showing up is local cub reporter Bruce Foster (Tom Brown), who has a girlfriend of his own in Toni (Adrienne Dore), one of the secretaries at the local newspaper. She dreams of bigger things, and is busy pushing Bruce to advance his career and get a job in the big city.

And wouldn't you know, but Bruce gets the story of his life falling into his lap when he hears from the telephone operator that a call has been placed from the Ferguson residence to the sheriff's department. Bruce rushes over to investigate, and discovers that Marcia has been bound and gagged, with George having been shot to death.

Even if George hadn't been a wealthy banker in New York, this sort of lurid case would have brought a bunch of reporters, and sure enough, every paper in New York City sends one of their reporters north, led by Bob Parks (Kenneth Thomson). He's one of the yellow-press types, although as it turns out not all of the reporters in the gaggle are as manipulative as him. Martin Collins (Grant Mitchell) has his heart in the right place, but the heroine of the piece is Maizie (Joan Blondell), the one lady reporter in the bunch, and she's Lee Tracy-level cynical here.

Most of the reporters set out to manipulate the DA because that would make for a more "interesting" story. They've figured out that Marcia was seeing Judd, and get the DA to have Judd arrested and put on trial for the murder. Bruce, meanwhile, starts doing his own investigation, the sort of journalistic work that the big-city types no longer do because "prestige" reporting means letting the little people do all the grunt work while they hobnob with the powerful. Much like the press release-driven journalism of today. Bruce discovers that....

The Famous Ferguson Case is the sort of thing that Warner Bros. did exceedingly well. Blondell is unsurprisingly quite good as the cynical female journalist; this is no light Torchy Blane movie. Tom Brown as the naïf who learns a lot over the course of the movie is suprisingly good as well, and Grant Mitchell provides his usual good support. So do the rest of the cast, a bunch of names you'd recognize if you watch a lot of early 1930s movies but that are sadly largely forgotten today. The movie as a whole is one of those that's fallen through the cracks, in part because it wasn't one of Warners' prestige movies and in part because movies of today just aren't made like this.

That's a shame, because The Famous Ferguson Case is definitely worth watching.