Showing posts with label Jack Webb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jack Webb. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Warner Archive Wednesday ~ -30- (1959)



Sam Gatlin (Jack Webb) is the managing editor of an L.A. newspaper’s morning edition. We follow him and his staff through their nine hour evening shift as they put together the morning’s paper. -30- (1959) is more of a slice of life tale than a plot-driven movie and there are various story threads throughout. The major ones include Sam Gatlin’s marriage to Peggy (Whitney Blake), the breaking news story of a young girl trapped in an L.A. sewer, a death in the family and the in-house bet to predict the gender of an Italian movie star’s unborn child.

This film was written by journalist-turned-screenwriter William Bowers  and was directed and produced by Jack Webb who also stars in it. Webb is best known from his role in Dragnet which saw a few iterations including two popular TV series and a feature film in 1954. This film has various TV personalities including David Nelson (Ozzie and Harriet), Howard McNear (The Andy Griffith Show) and Richard Deacon (The Dick Van Dyke Show) and William Conrad (various).

Classic film fans will recognize William Conrad as one of the two killers from the film noir The Killers (1946). In -30-, he plays a foul-tempered grump Jim Bathgate who taunts the office copy boys including the pouty faced Earl Collins (David Nelson). It’s difficult to take him serious with a name like Bathgate but his character is effective in putting the fear of God into the young staff underneath him. Richard Bakalyan plays Carl Thompson, who throughout the film gives a tour of the office to a married couple who have financial investments in the newspaper. It’s through his character that we meet some of the minor characters as well as learn about the various tasks and jobs required to keep a newspaper running. Thompson is both lovable and annoying and provides some comic relief in an otherwise dramatic film.


 

-30- was a box office flop. It’s slow and sentimental which doesn’t make for an exciting movie. I enjoyed it for what it was and didn’t have any expectations. It casts a relatively sympathetic light on newspaper journalists portraying them as hard-working and hard-nosed individuals who are very driven and often butt heads with each other but are at heart sympathetic human beings. It’s not like Ace in the Hole which will make you weep for humanity.

There are some wonderful roles in this film. I particularly enjoyed watch Webb, Conrad and Bakalyan as well as Louise Lorimer who plays Lady Wilson, a newspaper veteran and Gatlin’s right-hand “man”. Child actor Ronnie Dapo has a small role as Billy, a boy whose possible adoption by the Gatlin family proves to be a point of contention in the film. I immediately recognized the actor but couldn’t quite place him. It took a quick look up on IMDb to realize that Dapo also charmed audiences with his sweet face and innocences in one of my all-time favorite films Ocean’s 11 (1960).

The story of the young girl trapped in an L.A. sewer was inspired by the true story of a girl who fell down a well 10 years earlier. It got a lot of TV coverage in a time when TV was still very new. Those of you who were around in the 1980s might remember the story of Baby Jessica who also fell down a well. Her rescue was a media sensation. I remember as a young girl being glued to my TV screen hoping and praying that baby Jessica would survive the ordeal and much to our relief she did.

The term “-30-“ is used in journalism to mark the end of a story. It’s also used in this film to mark its ending and a brief explanation of the term is given. The closing credits for -30- are very entertaining to watch. Depending on the era, a film will usually have a brief closing credit scroll or nothing at all. In -30- we get a choppy kind of boring scroll in the opening credits with a drastically different closing credit sequence. The credit is put in front of an actor or actress or an object that represents them. The variety is what makes it entertaining. We get a full on shot of David Nelson for his credit, an empty chair for Jack Webb’s, a framed portrait for Whitney Blake and the back side of William Conrad for his. It’s not perfect but I had a lot of fun watching it.

Contemporary audiences will be incredibly frustrated trying to search for “-30- (1959)” online. Google will respond with the answer to a math equation! Here are some links for further reading that will save you from that headache.

IMDb
Wikipedia

Special note: The rental copy I received from ClassicFlix didn’t have the standard Warner Archive 10 minute chapters and also didn’t keep time. If I stopped the film at any point, I’d have to start over and try to find where I left off. I've encountered WAC DVDs like this before. I spoke with Matt from Warner Archive and he told me that these were faulty discs and all WAC discs should have the 10 minute chapters. This serves as a heads up in case you ever get a disc like this!



-30- (1959) is available on DVD-MOD from Warner Archive. 

Warner Archive Wednesday - On (random) Wednesdays, I review one title from the Warner Archive Collection. I rented -30- (1959) from ClassicFlix.

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