The Press: At the Death

When Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand was done to death at Sarajevo 20 years ago, no camera caught the act, although a memorable newspicture shows the capture of Assassin Princip. Last year at Miami, Hearst’s brash Cameraman Sammy Schulman snapped Chicago’s late Mayor Cermak bleeding from his fatal pistol wound (TIME, Feb. 27, 1933). Far more striking was William Warneke’s famed shot of New York’s Mayor Gaynor, taken a second after a bullet struck him in the neck. But no complete view of an assassination—before, during & after the act —was ever caught by the camera lens until last fortnight at Marseilles. The heroes were the newsreels. The stage could not have been set more neatly. Press agents for the Quai d’Orsay, eager that the visit of King Alexander to France get wide publicity, gave the cameramen carte blanche. Eight U. S. and European newsreel crews, some with sound trucks, were allowed to swarm so close to the King and French Foreign Minister Barthou that an intruder would never have been noticed. As the automobile carrying Alexander and M. Barthou moved out of range of the sound trucks at the quay, cameramen seized portable machines and trotted after it. There they were when a man jumped on the running board of the car and opened fire. A French cameraman fell with a bullet in his leg. Paramount’s close-up camera was kicked over in the mêleé. Fox Movietone’s George Mejat ground away as the police hacked down the assassin, then fought to the side of the car for closeups of the dying King, wriggled away to focus on the bleeding assassin, and a closeup of his gun. Before the eyes of a half dozen cameras, the assassin was trampled to death by the crowd, and bystanders fell before a wild fusillade of police bullets. The newsreel crews rushed their precious films to Paris by air, hoping to catch the Bremen or Aquitania about to sail for the U. S. To their indescribable rage, the films were seized at Le Bourget Airport and at Cherbourg on orders of the Surété Nationale, because supposedly the pictures vividly illustrated lack of police protection for Alexander. After two days of wrangling, the French authorities finally released the films in time to catch the George Washington, due in Manhattan this week. Universal Newsreel barely overtook the steamer at sea, dropped its films from an airplane to the deck. Meanwhile some reels, including Paramount’s and Universal’s, had been smuggled across the Channel to London, were being shown throughout the British Isles. So impressive were they that New York Times Correspondent Ferdinand Kuhn Jr. found meat for a glowing front-page two-column story on the work of a rival news medium.