This hard-hitting film . . . is generally considered one of the best films about the newspaper business.
"But I never saw Paris" "Darn the Mayor"
Humphrey Bogart as Ed Hutcheson
Ethel Barrymore as Margaret Garrison
Kim Hunter as Nora Hutcheson
Ed Begley as Frank Allen
Warren Stevens as George Burrows
Paul Stewart as Harry Thompson
Martin Gabel as Tomas Rienzi
Joe De Santis as Herman Schmidt
Joyce MacKenzie as Katherine Garrison Geary
Audrey Christie as Mrs. Willebrandt
Fay Baker as Alice Garrison Courtney
Jim Backus as Jim Cleary
James Dean as Copyboy
The story is based on the closing of the New York Sun, founded by Benjamin Day, in 1950. The Sun was sold to the Scripps Howard chain and absorbed into the "World-Telegram."
Jim Cleary: "A journalist makes himself the hero of the story. A reporter is only a witness."
Originally titled 'The Newspaper Story', location shooting took place both in the newsroom and the printing plant of The New York Daily News, with real pressmen playing themselves. This was augmented by an 'almost letter-perfect' reproduction of a newsroom on a Hollywood soundstage.
During the first day of shooting, star Humphrey Bogart admitted to friend and writer/director Richard Brooks that he had been drinking until late in the morning, and had not learned his lines. Earlier in the day, while he had been difficult on the set and resistant to saying his lines (ones he never knew) veteran Ethel Barrymore pushed him to just get on with it, by explaining that 'The Swiss have no navy'. In other words, like actors, they are powerless.
James Dean appears in a tiny non-speaking role in the film as a press boy.
In order to get the feel of what it would be like to work for real newspaper, Bogart hung out at the city room of the New York Daily News.