Newsies Blu-ray Review
Extra! Extra! Flop Defies Critics, Becomes Hit!
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, June 26, 2012
Newsies' history as a film is as unlikely as that of its titular heroes. The biggest live
action flop in Disney's history (at the time), it steadily built a devoted following on home video until
it not only recouped its costs, but also spawned a hit stage musical that is currently filling the house on
Broadway (and, like most successful musicals, can look forward to a profitable national tour). Like the determined newsboys for whom
hawking papers is a matter of basic survival,
Newsies won't take "no" for an answer.
It was writers Bob Tzudiker and Noni White who came up with the idea of transforming the 1899
newsboy strike into a movie featuring "newsies" who sang and danced, and it was producer
Michael Finnell who persuaded Disney to greenlight the project. Tzudiker and White were just
getting started as writers (they would later work on
The Hunchback of Notre Dame and
Tarzan, among others), but Finnell was a veteran of such oddball fare as the
Gremlins
films and
Innerspace.
In its original concept, the film was supposed to be a drama, and no one seems to recall just when
it became a musical. Certainly it was before Kenny Ortega was hired to direct, since Ortega was a
veteran choreographer, whose resumé included such hits as
Dirty Dancing and
Ferris
Bueller's Day Off.
Newsies marked his debut as a feature director. To write songs, Finnell
recruited the award-winning team of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, whose soundtracks for
Beauty and
the Beast and
The Little Mermaid deserve much of the credit for reviving the fortunes of
Disney's animation department. When Ashman had to drop out due to the AIDS-related illness
that would ultimately claim his life, he was replaced by Jack Feldman.
Newsies' initial failure at the box office can be seen as a matter of timing. Its style was a
throwback to an earlier era of movie musicals with all the artificiality of backlot decor, stylized
choreography and the directness with which characters burst into song. The film's eventual
success among an ever-expanding cult of loyalists is a tribute to the skill with which director
Ortega and his cast and crew implemented that style, so that, for anyone who chooses to enter
into the spirit of the thing, the film works at multiple levels. Star Christian Bale, who was a
teenager when he made the film, has been quoted as follows: "You say something bad about
Newsies, and you have an awful lot of people to answer to."
Newsies has almost too much plot. Several storylines overlap and interweave to the point where
the film just barely manages to contain all of them.
The overarching storyline concerns the effort by publisher Joe Pulitzer (Robert Duvall, in a
performance that teeters right at the edge of ethnic caricature) to squeeze even more profit out of
his successful newspaper, the
New York World. Pulitzer's underling, Jonathan (Mark Lowenthal),
recognizes that they can't extract more profit from
customers by raising the price, but they can charge more to their
distributors. Another senior executive, Seitz (Charles Cioff), counsels against this maneuver, but Pulitzer loves the idea.
This was the era before newsstands and home delivery. The principal mode of distribution for
newspaper publishers in New York City, including Pulitzer and his chief rival, William
Randolph Hearst, are "newsies"—independent paperboys, all of them poor, many of them
orphans, who line up every day (several times a day, if there are multiple editions), and buy
papers to flog to customers from the distribution manager, Weasel (Michael Lerner). At
Jonathan's suggestion, Pulitzer has Weasel raise the price charged to newsies by a tenth of a cent
per paper. Now Pulitzer has his bigger profit, but the kids who were barely scraping by have to
figure out how to sell even more papers just to stay even. The result is a strike by the newsies,
and a standoff between a mob of "have not" teenagers and the city's richest and most powerful
tycoon.
Newsies' second plotline is the personal odyssey of Jack Kelly (Christian Bale), the organizer
of the strike. Jack is a classic American hero: brash, self-made and also something of an outlaw. It
turns out he's on the run, having escaped from a reform school run by a corrupt warden, Snyder
(Kevin Tighe). But Jack is also the yearning soul of
Newsies, and half an hour into the film
Alan Menken gives him what has come to be known as the "I want" song that occurs in all Disney
musicals since Ariel sang "Part of That World" in
The Little Mermaid. Here the song is called
"Santa Fe", which is where Jack longs to go, for the wide open spaces and the romance of the
Old West. At the moment, though, Jack has to stay and lead the newsies, especially in difficult
tasks like venturing into the scary wilds of Brooklyn to negotiate an alliance with Spot Conlon
(Gabriel Damon), the short but intimidating leader of the town's toughest newsie gang.
The third plotline concerns David Jacobs (David Morrow, who was the younger version of Tom
Hanks in
Big) and his little brother, Les (Luke Edwards), who have just started as newsies to
help support their family, because their father (Jeffrey DeMunn) was laid off after an on-the-job
injury. Jack takes them on as apprentices for purely mercenary reasons: Les has an angelic face
that's a great marketing tool. Through David's eyes, because he's fresh to the scene, we get the
least romantic perspective on a newsie's life, as he watches Jack and others struggling to make a
living with no one to look out for them. Everyone else, including colorful characters like
Racetrack (Max Casella), Crutchy (Marty Belafsky), Boots (Arvie Lowe Jr.) and Mush (Aaron
Lohr), just takes the newsie's daily grind as normal life. It's also David who shows
Jack what
it's like to be part of a family. Of special interest to Jack, when David and Les bring him home to
dinner, is their sister, Sarah (Ele Keats).
Two additional characters weave in and out of the proceedings. One is a chipper lady named
Medda Larkson, the Swedish Meadowlark, who owns a vaudeville house and performs there
nightly. She's a friend to the newsies and to Jack in particular, always willing to shelter him from
the authorities. Under different circumstances, one could imagine Medda being edited out of the
film, but she's played by Ann-Margret—and when you have Ann-Margret in your musical, those
scenes stay in the picture. The other key character is a reporter for the
New York Sun named
Denton (Bill Pullman), a former war correspondent who knows bravery when he sees it. Denton
is instrumental in getting wider attention for the newsies' battle with Pulitzer. Eventually the
story reaches all the way to the state capital in Albany.
With so many characters and so much plot, it's a credit to director Ortega (and to editor William
Reynolds, a two-time Oscar winner for
The Sting and
The Sound of Music) that
Newsies manages to hang together, keep driving forward and even accommodate elaborately
choreographed production numbers, the likes of which have rarely been seen since (and certainly not
without the kind of slam-bang editing that leaves you wondering whether the dancers actually performed
their moves). One of the reasons the film did better on home video than on the big screen may be
that the smaller screen camouflaged the fact, which was inescapable on the big screen (and also
on Blu-ray), that these musical extravaganzas are playing out on backlots and soundstages.
Despite extensive historical research by the production team,
Newsies doesn't have a single set
that feels like a real place. It's a stylized, artificial world, done like an old Hollywood
musical.
By 1992, audiences were no longer comfortable with that style, except in animation, and
arguably that hasn't changed today. It will be interesting to see how
Newsies plays to new
viewers in this Blu-ray edition, which effectively recreates the original experience in a manner
that hasn't been possible until now.
Newsies Blu-ray, Video Quality
Newsies was the last feature film shot by the late Andrew Laszlo, a veteran cinematographer
with a varied resumé that included
Streets of Fire and
The Warriors for Walter
Hill, the original Rambo film,
First Blood, and the fifth
Star Trek film,
The
Final Frontier. Laszlo had worked in television, but he didn't compose or shoot for it when making
a feature film. This is especially crucial for a film like
Newsies, where scene after scene
involves large groups of people, often in motion.
The image on Disney's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray for
Newsies presents some interesting
issues. It's a detailed image, even though it doesn't have the crisp edges that eyes conditioned by
digital photography have come to expect. If you don't go in looking for hard-edged "pop", but
focus instead on the details of faces, costumes and decor, especially in long shots, it quickly
becomes evident that the Blu-ray effectively reproduces the elaborate production design and the
multitude of youthful cast members. The palette of
Newsies is muted and dominated by the
browns of street life, but in contrasting environments (Pulitzer's office or Medda's theater)
brighter and more saturated hues appear, and the transfer brings them out effectively. Deep
blacks are rarely in evidence, but this appears to be by design; no part of the frame is ever
completely dark.
Several posters on the Blu-ray.com forum have complained that parts of the film are too grainy.
My own reaction was the opposite: I found large portions to be suspiciously "clean". I've spent
some time reexamining portions of the film and have reached the following conclusions:
- Newsies has not been subjected to what people like to call "DNR". Let me repeat that
with emphasis: Anyone citing this review for the proposition that Newsies has been
"DNR'd" fails the reading comprehension test.
- Film grain is still visible throughout Newsies, but you often have to look closely to see
it. Its visibility has been reduced as much as possible, consistent with a philosophy that seems to be gaining
in major studios to minimize the appearance of visible film grain in Blu-ray
transfers. (Sony is the notable exception.) The goal seems to be to make films from the analog
era more closely resemble films from the brave new world of digital photography, digital projection
and digital intermediates, because that's the look contemporary audiences have come to
expect.
- The software available to post facilities has progressed to the point where the detail
represented by film grain can be adequately translated to video without stripping it away.
This is yet another reason (aside from imprecise usage) why "DNR" is no longer a
relevant term. Post facilities no longer strip away grain as noise; they translate it into
something that appears stable on video. (For a shining example, see Aliens.)
- Even with a first-rate "translation" of film grain to video, there are some scenes in
Newsies—almost always in low-light conditions—where the grain is heavier. The
granular texture of the translated image is therefore more obvious. But never does the
image shimmer or vibrate the way an image typically described as "grainy" would.
Bottom line?
Newsies is a well-done transfer
if (but only if) one accepts both of the
following principles: (a) the film will never look like a contemporary production, nor should it; and
(b) the "de-graining" philosophy represented by the
Newsies transfer is the way to
go.
I have no problem with (a), but I do have a problem with (b), even though there are major
directors who clearly do not (James Cameron for one; John Landis for another, given what he allowed
to be done with
Three
Amigos!). But I'm not driving this bus, and neither are the self-anointed
videophiles who squawk about "DNR" as if it meant something, when it's already yesterday's
news.
