Break the News is a British film of the end of the interwar period that displays some of the ambition of the film industry at that time. The film is a remake of a 1936 French film called Le Mort en Fuite (Death on the Run). Break the News was directed by Frenchman René Clair who cast his compatriot Maurice Chevalier in one of the lead roles. The other male lead was played by Jack Buchanan, a British actor who enjoyed fame both on stage and on film. The main female role was fulfilled by June Knight, a Hollywood starlet who had come over to Europe. Buchanan also produced the film under his short-lived production vehicle Jack Buchanan Productions.
Although Clair is mostly remembered for his post-war films, he started directing in France in the mid-1920s. Break the News was his second picture in the UK, after he directed Robert Donat in the supernatural comedy The Ghost Goes West in 1936. The casting of Break the News demonstrates the high aspirations Buchanan and Clair had for the film. Buchanan had considerable star power in interwar Britain, and Chevalier was a recognised Hollywood star.[1]
The film’s plot is as internationally mobile as its stars. The action starts on the West End, where Teddy and François, played by Buchanan and Chevalier, are in the chorus of a musical comedy show. The show’s lead star is Grace Gatwick, played by Knight. Teddy and François long to have the same level of fame as Grace, so they come up with a cunning plan. After staging a face argument in their lodgings, they make it appear that François has killed Teddy, and make sure that he conspicuously tries to dump the ‘body’ in the Thames. Teddy goes off to the south of France to enjoy a holiday; the plan is that the ‘murder’ will generate a lot of newspaper publicity; François will get arrested and Teddy will dramatically return from France during the trial to ensure François gets acquitted. Both men will get famous and then they will be able to put on their own stage production.
Unfortunately, and obviously, the plan goes awry. Firstly, the anticipated media storm after the ‘murder’ does not materialise, so whilst François eventually gets arrested, the men do not get famous. Secondly, whilst in France Teddy is mistaken for a revolutionary leader of a (fictional) Balkan country, and gets kidnapped and taken back to this Ruritania. He only very narrowly manages to get out and return to Britain just in time before François is executed. This being a musical comedy, of course all is well at the end, and with the help of Grace the men do get their names in lights on the theatre façade.
The plot of Break the News, and indeed the film’s title, place great importance on the operation of the written press. The newspapers are presented as the only vehicle that can give Teddy and François the fame they long for. Fame is not dependent on talent on stage, but rather on who is able to get and keep the attention of the journalists. Grace’s character functions to demonstrate this; early on in the film she manages to create a media storm by reporting that her little dog has gone missing; and then another one when the dog is found. Once the story breaks of a ‘murder’ within her show’s production, she makes sure to put herself in front of journalists and spin the story in a way that puts herself at the centre of it.
Teddy and François also assume that a murder case will most definitely hit the front pages. Much of the comedy in the first part of the film is derived from the way the men stage the ‘murder’, starting with a phoney argument on stage in front of the whole company; moving on to a loud argument in their lodging; and finishing with François taking a black cab to Limehouse to drop a heavy, corpse-shaped parcel in the river. But what the men do not take into account is that the press are not interested in murder per se. Grace is able to generate publicity on anything because the press consider her to be interesting. François and Teddy are never interesting to journalists, no matter what they do. Whereas the men assume that the press can make someone famous, they find that in order for the press to pay attention to you, you must already be interesting or relevant yourself.
The power of the newspaper press is underscored through the implicit assumption that if the press were to write about the murder story, then Teddy and François would become instantly famous. As is often the case in interwar films, ‘the press’ is treated as a homogenous entity, and it is taken for granted that a story is either covered by all papers, or by none. Break the News shows journalists to be operating in a pack, indistinguishable from one another as they all try to get a quote from Grace. Once a story is covered, the next assumption is that the newspapers’ reach is such that the details of the story would become generally known.
The comedy of Break the News relies in a large part on the audience understanding and accepting these beliefs about how the written press operates. It is funny that the murder gets no attention from the papers, because, like Teddy and François, we assume that it would attract column inches. Whilst Break the News pokes fun at these assumptions, the jokes only work because we share the same underlying beliefs that the film’s plot is built on. In that way, Break the News gives insight in the position of the written press in interwar British society.
[1] Andrew Spicer, ‘Jack Buchanan and British Musical Comedy of the 1930s’ in Ian Concrich and Estella Trincknell (eds), Film’s Musical Moments (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006)
Interwar London 