A Dispatch from Reuters (1940)
Directed by William Dieterle
For our Film of the Week with a touchstone word, blackbird, I thought I’d better come up with a movie that stars some of our feathered friends, and since we’d already done The Birdman of Alcatraz, and since everybody’s heard of Hitchcock’s film with those birds that all go insane at once and for no discernible reason, this really interesting and little-known film came to mind — A Dispatch from Reuters. Not that it was a low budget affair, not with the great Edward G. Robinson in the lead role as Paul Reuters, the 19th century entrepreneur who founded what would become a world-wide news operation, and director William Dieterle was also one of the best. It’s just that if the movie isn’t a romantic or screwball comedy, isn’t a noir thriller with somebody stalking the heroine in a dark alley or the femme fatale slipping poison into her husband’s gin, or a western with steers that have to be gotten to Kansas City by yesterday, or a war movie with brave men destroying the enemy’s cannons at the top of a mountain in Greece, well — it may fall out of people’s handy categories, no matter how good it is. And this one is a very good film indeed. How can it really be otherwise with Eddie Robinson in it? He was the consummate professional, devoted to the art as art, and despite his many gangster parts, was really quite a humble fellow whom everybody seems to have liked.
Robinson is in the business of getting information to people as quickly as possible, to beat out his competitors. Let’s think about this for a while. Before the telegraph, how could you let people know what was going on even fifty miles away? You could send a message, to be delivered by somebody on a horse; that’s what the post does. I don’t know how it could be done faster than that, unless — unless you’ve got a creature faster than a horse, with a more direct route. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, not a message but a signal is delivered, that the war in Troy is over and the Greeks have been victorious. The vindictive Clytemnestra wants to know immediately, so she stations watchmen from one mountaintop to another, even hopping across the Aegean by way of the islands, to receive a fire signal and then to pass that along, so that the whole “message” can be sent within a few minutes, across hundreds of miles. But you see, there isn’t really anything in that message, other than what’s been predetermined. Now then, how do you get information across the English Channel, even after the telegraph has been invented, information that must be had in some detail? We mean here political news, military news, and stock exchange news, the sorts of things that we now expect to have at our fingertips. That’s what inspired Paul Reuters to beat his competitors with our feathered friends, the homing pigeons.
The idea itself wasn’t original to him. Torquato Tasso, in his 16th century poem about the First Crusade, Jerusalem Delivered, has a scene in which a homing pigeon meant to go from the Sultan of Egypt to the Saracen king of Jerusalem is intercepted by Godfrey of Bouillon, the Frankish leader of the Christian armies. That wasn’t anachronistic on Tasso’s part. Pigeons had been used for war messages for around 2,000 years anyway. But for stock quotes? Where there’s a will, and where there’s money to be made, the restless entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century could always find some way to get the job done. Paul Reuters’ method was brilliant, and all he had to do was to deliver precise information in a matter of hours before the others. So the film has real tension built into the work, because, after all, birds can get caught in a storm, or they can get confused, I suppose, but Reuters has a network of employees in all the main countries, on the lookout for the information and ready to pass it along. In these cases, an hour or two can make all the difference.
It’s not just about the pigeons, either; Reuters is also going into the telegraph business. Anything, everything, to get accurate news to people as fast as possible. He was the first to report the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. But don’t think that the film is all business. Why, he and his beloved, Ida, use homing pigeons to get themselves married: he sends her his proposal by pigeon, and she accepts it by that same conveyance! I hope the pigeons got some of the wedding cake to peck at. See also the excellent Eddie Albert, as Reuters’ chief employee, as young as you’ll ever see him, and the first-rank child actor Dickie Moore as Paul Reuters when he was a little boy. If there’s romance to the business world, with high risks, demands of loyalty, and a clock to beat, A Dispatch from Reuters shows it.
Your striking description of watchmen stationed in towers to send signals to one another vividly reminded me of the scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, in which watchmen send signals from mountain top to mountain top.