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Buñuel had an idea about newspaper stories coming to life before a reader on a bench, René Clair's journalist meanwhile goes from predicting articles to starring in them. Fin de siècle prophets, chief among them the obituary writer turned reporter (Dick Powell) who contemplates the nature of time with the bookkeeping phantom (John Philliber). The premise is an evening edition showcasing events from 24 hours into the future, which sends the scribe scampering to the scene of a crime moments before the crime takes place. (The heist at the opera house is glimpsed through a circular door window, a silent-film iris for a pantomimed bit of cops and robbers.) The "nose for news" also makes him a potential accomplice in the eyes of the inspector (Edgar Kennedy), one side of the front page has racetrack outcomes and the other has a notice about his own demise. "What they won't do to get a story!" The miracle business between H.G. Wells and Rod Serling, Clair's cinema of comic evanescence. Daisy-chains of gags, often bridging different scenes: The stage magician (Jack Oakie) has an assistant-niece (Linda Darnell), in a faux-trance she foresees a suicidal maiden and fulfills it herself by leaping into the river, afterwards she sneaks back home in masculine garb and sends her uncle out in furious pursuit of a nonexistent lover. "Everything is an illusion in my profession," Oakie declares while loading actual bullets into a prop pistol, "in the end we live in reality." At first tickled by the visionary novelty, the artist is increasingly acquainted with its mortal side—a filmmaker's unconscious self-portrait? "Que sera, sera," Allen offers a variant (Curse of the Jade Scorpion) or two (Scoop). With George Cleveland, George Chandler, Edward Brophy, and Sig Ruman. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |