Film Forum series explores dark side of the news

Everyone enjoys a good secret and a good story. Tales of intrigue and suspicions of subterfuge are the reasons why the public reads the newspaper (besides the fact that it feels good to be an informed citizen). To some degree, everyone roots for the (more or less) respectable newsman—a somewhat nobler predecessor of the paparazzo and the tabloid writer—and even revels in watching the unethical reporter extract, or perhaps construct, the truth and get the scoop.

Beginning in the 1930s, the reporter’s plights and prestige were brought to the silver screen, with movies such as “The Front Page” and “Night Mayor.” “The Newspaper Picture,” a month-long series currently playing at Film Forum, is paying homage to 44 newspaper films spanning the entire 20th century. The series depicts the news business at its best and its basest. It features classics such as “Citizen Kane” and “All the President’s Men,” as well as less fêted films such as “Front Page Woman” and “Call Northside 777.”

A great many of the movies being screened star William Lee Tracy—so many, in fact, that they’re having a “Lee Tracy Sidebar,” a mini-series in which they show a Tracy movie every Tuesday. Tracy was an actor who often assumed the roles of cocksure and quick-talking newspapermen during his career. “Doctor X,” one of many Tracy films being screened, presents the key mixture of mystery, horror, and a reporter’s hunt for the story. Tracy plays Lee Taylor, a reporter investigating a series of homicides dubbed the “Moon Killer Murders”—so named because each murder takes place under the light of a full moon and each victim is subsequently cannibalized. Taylor’s stories on the grisly murders cast suspicion on the mysterious Doctor Xavier and his medical academy. With its focus on cannibalism as well as a hint of necrophilia—both considered extremely perverse and therefore not depicted in motion pictures in the 1930s—the film is daring in its subject matter and deft in its execution.

Tracy’s frequent costar Ann Dvorak plays the quick-witted leading lady in many newspaper films, such as “Love is a Racket” and “The Strange Love of Molly Louvain,” both part of the Film Forum series.

Watching the stories unfold in these newspaper films is riveting, not simply because of the sensational plot lines that serve as the skeleton for many of the films, but also because these movies hearken back to a time when the newspaper business was thriving, not flatlining, and remind us of the redeeming qualities of the news and those who ferociously fight to find it and provide it to a hungry audience.