"Page One and The Screen are bedmates. Working in the morgue and shooting a movie trigger constant visions. A headline has the impact of a headshot, pulp and rawstock, fight linage and footage, a news lead is the opening of a film." (Samuel Fuller, 1975) For Samuel Fuller, Park Row was "the story of my heart," embodying all the love, hate, action and emotion he associates with the press. Set in 1886, it is the tale of two rival newspapers, the muckraking Star and the Globe, started by an idealistic journalist/crusader Phineas Mitchell. It is a history, in miniature, of the emergence of modern journalism, with Mitchell (Gene Evans) combining all the great newspaper editors of the period, but mostly reflecting Joseph Pulitzer. Park Row is about freedom of the press and its early perversions, about invention as the mother of creativity (in the emergence of the linotype machine), about the making of news and by extension the making of movies (Fuller here gives himself to the long take, dollying through only three main sets like a dogged snoop). If the film is a tad crusading itself, it's not highfalutin in the least: most of Mitchell's thinking takes place in a bar.