Matthew C. Ehrlich,
Journalism in the Movies.
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
ISBN 0 252 02934 8
208pp
US$35.00 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press)
Journalism in the Movies provides a useful overview of the representation of American journalists/reporters and of their profession in a number of key movies of the sound period. It is clearly a labour of love, having its origins in a doctoral thesis written by an academic working in a journalism department. It consists of an introductory chapter on genre and myth, and a closing chapter on myth and ideology, and, between these, separate chapters on journalism as it appears in The Front Page (USA, 1931), in Citizen Kane (USA, 1941), and in four distinct genres – the Screwball Comedy of the 1930s, the film noir, the conspiracy film of the 1970s and what might loosely be described as “post-modern” films. Detailed accounts of key scriptwriters together with their background in the press are included, as are the social history and specific real-life incidents that inspired or may have inspired the various films.
One minor criticism is that the title is misleading, since nothing in it indicates the restriction to American media – a restriction which is unfortunate since some consideration of material from abroad on the representation of journalists and the press would have served to identify the specifics of the American instance. The theoretical focus on genre and myth in the framing chapters is also a little misleading: only five lines are there devoted to the relevance of individual scriptwriters or to the historical events behind the filmic events, yet that sort of material plays a dominant role in several of the succeeding chapters. The potential for conflict between auteur and genre, or between reflective views of the medium and representational/mythic views of the medium are fairly crucial. Some more systematic consideration should have been accorded these matters. Moreover, claims about the mythic significance of the journalist genre, as about any genre, are more convincing if supported by statistical evidence, either of the frequency of particular representations within a given year or decade, or of their popularity at the box office. The various references to box office here are at best impressionistic.
A further problem, which is structural rather than theoretical, is the tendency to deal with films individually and in succession, even within the discussion of particular genres. This makes for repetitive commentaries, recapitulating with minor variations what has already been said of the main themes and oppositions in respect of previous films. A more thematic approach (Ehrlich refers to an earlier book that dealt with the reporter as scandal-monger, as villain, as crime-buster, as crusader etc), especially if based on oppositions, might have gone some way to eliminate this repetition while better identifying the evolution of various genre conventions over the decades. Traces of such an approach appear in the final chapter, but rather too late to be effective.
Sometimes Ehrlich seems too ready to accept the myths he is describing (for instance in accepting that journalism is a profession analogous to medicine and other sciences, and that its founding purpose is to seek out truth); sometimes he opts for an individualist ideology in dealing with the origins of specific films while decrying the cinematic practice of seeking to individualise history; sometimes the book’s academic origins are a little too obvious, as when citations from other writers on the subject make of the text a patchwork of quotations. Nevertheless, for all those interested in the representation of the press in US movies of the last seventy years this is a good place to start, since a large number of the key films are here identified, described, and commented on. But take a deep breath before reading the book’s last sentence, about journalism and “the American way”.
Colin Crisp
Australia
Created on: Monday, 18 July 2005 | Last Updated: 18-Jul-05