Summary
In 'Say! Young Fellow,' the narrative orbits a duality of conscience embodied by The Young Fellow and his diminutive companion, The Hunch—a whimsical yet taut psychological shorthand for inner moral calculus. The protagonist, a fledgling journalist at The New York Herald, navigates a labyrinth of financial corruption and personal valor, his journey punctuated by moments of both slapstick audacity and tense, shadow-draped intrigue. The film’s brilliance lies in its duality: the literal and metaphorical. The Young Fellow’s shoulder-bound Hunch serves as both a literal physical guide and a symbol of ethical navigation, its presence a constant reminder of the precarious balance between ambition and integrity. The plot pivots on a dual arc—the external heist to recover incriminating documents from a reclusive bachelor’s estate and the internal conflict of the reporter’s wavering resolve. This is interwoven with a secondary thread of romantic entanglements, where the secretary’s agency and the landlady’s kindness complicate the hero’s monomaniacal focus. Director Theodore Reed and Joseph Henabery, wielding a script that dances between farce and drama, craft a tale that mirrors the early 20th-century zeitgeist: a world of industrial titans and journalistic idealism clashing under the flickering of silent cinema’s golden age. The film’s climax—a blend of physical daring and moral triumph—is rendered with operatic grandeur, its resolution both satisfying and thematically resonant.
Synopsis
Whenever The Young Fellow is troubled or undecided, The Hunch, a miniature version of The Young Fellow, perches on his shoulder offering common-sense advice and encouragement. Consequently, when The Young Fellow, recently hired as a cub reporter for The New York Herald , is assigned to interview a noted financier who earlier refused to admit a star reporter, he screws up his courage, scales the millionaire's wall and forces the interview from him at the point of a gun. The editor, much impressed, then asks the young man to unearth the facts concerning a scheme to defraud a group of minor stockholders in the town of Melford. Unless certain papers in the possession of an old bachelor are delivered to a board meeting, the villainous financier will win complete control of a local company, and the stockholders will lose their investments. With the aid of his Hunch, the aging bachelor's attractive secretary and The Young Fellow's spinster landlady, the determined reporter thwarts the millionaire and his gang of thugs, delivers the papers on time and obtains a sensational story. In the process, he captures the secretary's heart, while the spinster wins the kindly bachelor.
