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Park Row

Screening: Monday 30 July, 6:30pm

Park Row (Samuel Fuller, USA 1952)

Fuller’s favourite of his films — "the story of my heart," he called it — is also one of his most influential: Martin Scorsese considers it "a very important movie to me for the use of tracking shots and the staging of action and violence." Climaxing in one of the most celebrated sequences in film history, Park Row "gathers all of Fuller’s major themes in a burst of dramatic and visual excitement" (Jean-Pierre Coursodon).

Set in New York in 1886, the film deals with the struggle between the abrasive, idealistic Phineas Mitchell (Fuller’s alter ego) and his upstart paper The Globe, and the steel-willed Charity Hackett, whose New York Star is the voice of the power elite. In one of Fuller’s most quoted and analyzed sequences, an insanely long, hurtling take traverses three sets (with the camera strapped to the operator). Nicholas Garnham claims this shot "puts Fuller technically in the same league as Welles, Ophuls, and Mizoguchi and other masters of the moving camera."

"The giddiest celebration of American journalism after Citizen Kane… Park Row continues to stun through its outrageousness, which at inspired moments becomes a worship of pure energy" (Jonathan Rosenbaum). "One of Fuller’s best films" (Myron Meisel).

Written by Fuller, Photographed by Jack Russell. With Gene Evans, Mary Welch, Bela Kovacs, Herbert Hayes.

(16mm, B&W, 83 mins, G)

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