"Love is News" (1937) and the Newspaper Movie

Yesterday I whined about the decline of newspapers. Today, The greatest Cable channel known to Man is running a festival of print journalism movies. And last week I watched, via Fox Movie Channel, the 1937 Tyrone Power flick "Love is News." All of this has me thinking: The death of newspapers is terrible news for movies.

How will we replace all those great scenes of grizzled newsmen (and women) sitting around cracking wise and pounding out copy on their keyboards (typewriters or even better, of course)? Or the rush of reporters to a bank of phones so they can call in stories to "the desk" back at "the office"?

It's bad enough we lost fedoras and little cards that say "PRESS" and giant cameras that blind everyone in the scene with a supernova of a flash. It's bad enough we said good-bye years ago to the classic scene of a scrappy bigmouth yelling "Extry! Extry!" causing characters to stop in their tracks, wheel around, and grab a copy of that latest edition so they can confirm the shocking proclamation. "Yep...Mrs. Flanagan's cat DID find way back home."

Now we run the risk of losing all those other great newspaper movie cliches. What, you want to see a dramatic scene of a blogger rushing to his keyboard to upload a wise-ass review of a State of the Union speech. Of course not! Maybe so-called New Media and New Journalism can replace Old Newspapers in real life, but who cares about real life? In the movies, newspapers will never be replaced.

Fortunately we still have old flicks like "Love is News" to remind us of better days. This isn't a great one, even as screwball-ish newspaper romantic comedies, but the cast works hard. Reporter Tyrone Power tricks heiress Loretta Young to get a story, then she tricks him right back, which leads to all sorts of hijinks for the better part of an hour and a half as they fall in love, menace each other, and argue, not necessarily in that order. All the while, Power squabbles with his colleague Don Ameche, who gets to act exasperated a lot while Power gets to look dashing.

"Love is News" is hurt by a too-long sequence in which the leads are in a small-town jail. Despite Slim Summerville doing his thing as the judge in charge of the place, the story drags for a while. Plus it's tough to really get into the Power/Young pairing, and the movie just feels overall like one that is straining to be much more clever than it really is.

But it's entertaining enough, offering small roles for the likes of George Sanders, Jane Darwell, Stepin Fetchit, and a not-sleazy-as-usual Elisha Cook Jr. And it has plenty of Newspaper in it. We need to preserve films like this to remind the whippersnappers what journalism was like back in the day...or, more importantly, what Hollywood told us journalism was like back in the day.