Park Row

A film about the newspaper world of late nineteenth-century New York. Phineas Mitchell is a journalist who has lost his job. He decides to start his own paper. There is no money; the press is old, the staff are volunteers and the first issue barely appears. Against him stands the city's largest paper and the woman who runs it. The competition runs through the news first and then moves into the street: distributors are beaten, machines sabotaged. What the film is interested in is journalism itself. How type is set, how a print run is organised, how a story is chased; the narrative shows all of it in detail and refers to the real papers and real names of the period. Samuel Fuller made the film with his own money and stayed tied to no studio. It failed commercially, but for years Fuller said it was his own favourite among his films. He had genuinely worked on newspapers as a young man. Gene Evans is in the lead. A personal and passionate production for anyone who likes newspaper films and Fuller's direct storytelling. For a viewer expecting a large-scale period film, the production is small, the sets are limited and the narrative takes place in a single street.