EXILED TO SHANGHAI (1937)

Cocky newsreel reporter Ted (Wallace Ford) returns from Spain to face fellow reporter Charlie (Dean Jagger), angry because Ted cheated Charlie out of the assignment. Charlie has since been made an editor, and, out of spite, he assigns Ted the demeaning assignment of  interviewing a sweepstakes winner, though both men are warned by their boss that newsreels are being made obsolete by newspaper and radio wire services. Meanwhile, young Nancy (June Travis), who dreams of leaving her boring small-town life, wins a television slogan contest ("Television--the eyes and ears of the future") and gets a one-week trip to New York City. Her Aunt Jane and Nancy's fiancé Andrew disapprove but she goes anyway. At the train station, Ted mistakenly interviews Nancy instead of the sweepstakes winner and when the newsreel is shown, Ted gets in trouble. He quits seconds before he's fired and decides to work on his idea for "television newsreels" (basically what we know as TV news). Assuming television ownership will soon go through the roof, Powell, the owner of Supreme Television, likes his idea. A demonstration is set up for investors, using real-time coverage of the landing of an airship, but Ted finds out that the airship actually crashed on landing and they didn't get the story because Powell, worried that the broadcast wouldn’t work, substituted stock footage of a past airship landing. Nancy is in hot water herself, as everyone assumes she deliberately fooled the public about her identity. Aunt Jane and Andrew show up in New York, but Nancy has grown sweet on Ted, and vice versa. Ted confronts Powell which leads to a room-demolishing fistfight but Ted is still blamed for shadiness, and even Nancy starts to believe that he's just a conniver. In a rapid-fire climax, Charlie gets assigned to cover the war in China, Ted steals his plane ticket, Charlie sends him a telegram supposedly from Nancy that all is forgiven, and Ted parachutes out of the plane to land near the train that homebound Nancy is on. Somehow, all is forgiven and Ted marries Nancy, leaving Charlie to cover the war.

You will notice that I didn’t mention Shanghai once in my summary. Nor did I mention any exile. The title of this B-movie has nothing whatsoever to do with the content, except that we see Charlie in China in the last seconds of the film. But he hasn't been exiled; he's gotten what he wanted all along. I could forgive the misleading title, but the slapdash script practically falls to pieces at various times--to be fair, the print I saw was about five minutes short of the running time listed on IMDb so maybe some crucial scenes were missing. Wallace Ford is fine in supporting roles, but in B-lead roles like this one, he's lacking in charisma and romantic appeal. June Travis made 30 movies between 1935 and 1938, almost all B-films, and never caught on with the public. She's absolutely average here. The reason to watch this film is the young Dean Jagger who has a personality and an acting range that Ford and Travis do not. William Bakewell is effective as Andrew, the fiancé you love to hate, and Arthur Lake, later Dagwood Bumstead in the Blondie movie series, has a couple of fun moments as Ford's assistant. Newsreels were a big deal back then, with some theaters in big cities showing only newsreels all day long, and the TV news aspect of the story is nicely prescient. Still this is only worth seeing for Dean Jagger (pictured above to the left of Ford). [YouTube]