Movie Reflection
The Story follows Joseph Randall, a news editor who is played by Edward G. Johnson is pushed by his publisher to uproot a 20 year old scandal involving a woman named Nancy Vorheese. Nancy had already paid her debt to society. She rebuilt her life from the ground up after the incident the way you are supposed to. She lived right and she was not hiding from the person she once was, She moved on. However that was not enough to protect her from the Gazette. The reporters run the story anyway chasing sales ratings and the Five Star Edition. This results in the very unfortunate act of Nancy and her husband taking their lives all because of the greed and selfishness of the reporters and the Gazette.
What really resonated with me when watching the movie, was that Randal himself typically was not a bad man in the film; he is grounded and has common sense. However he knows what he is doing is really out of line. You could even see it in the first scene of the movie, him washing his hands like he is trying to scrub something off that wont come clean. In the end he still continues to see it through and he keeps reporting. There is a willingness to do the right thing inside of randal I could see but what good is it if you do not put it to action. Randal had every quality except sticking up for the right thing when it mattered most.
Boris Karloff plays the character Isopod, a disgraced clergyman who pretends to play the role of a minister in order to get close with Nancy’s family in order to gather information for the story. I remember watching this and thinking to myself this is the ultimate lawsuit, and violation of privacy. It concerned me to think that a news organization today might pull these types of tactics in order to get a good headline or a story. It made me think of how much negativity we see in the news today and that's what people thrive on. If there wasn't someone in jail, or beaten, or killed no one would turn on the news. As human beings in today's world. We are all about conflict, we are all about destruction and death. Look at what the media is doing with the Iran war for example. It is being twisted and turned into a massive cesspool of lies and truths and the American public doesn't know what to believe when looking at it anymore.
This movie really was ahead of its time in my opinion because in 1931 they did not plan on exposing a majority of the problems we see in today's world. Problems like media deformation. In the movie it led to the death of Nancy because her name was dragged through the mud again after she re-built it. News isn't what it used to be and I feel there is a need for a major internal look at our outlooks and sources. Because how long can the world tolerate lies for.
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