Themes: Members of the Press, Work Ethics, Wedding Bells
Main Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Marian Marsh, H.B. Warner, Anthony Bushell, George E. Stone
Release Year: 1931
Country: US
Run Time: 89 minutes
Plot
Adapted from the stage play by former newspaperman Louis Weitzenkorn, Five Star Final is an uncompromising look at the consequences of journalistic irresponsibility. Hounded by his publishers to pep up circulation with a sensational story, newspaper editor Edward G. Robinson decides to revive public interest in a long-ago murder case. He discovers that a woman (Sally Starr) who'd shot her lover nearly three decades earlier is now living under a new name and is married to a pillar of society (H.B. Warner). The woman's daughter (Marian Marsh) is just about to marry the son (Anthony Bushell) of another wealthy couple. Robinson sends one of his slimier reporters (Boris Karloff), a onetime divinical student who'd been expelled for sexual misconduct, to visit the woman and secure a photograph. The underhanded reporter disguises himself as the clergyman who will officiate at the wedding, worms his way into the family's confidence, and appropriates the photo. When the story hits the papers, the woman desperately tries to call Robinson and ask him to cease and desist, but Robinson is unmoved. The disgraced woman commits suicide, as does her husband a few moments later. The groom's parents snobbishly try to call off the wedding, but the groom stands by his fiancee's side and is disinherited. The grief-maddened daughter breaks into Robinson's office with a gun, threatening to kill him for ruining her mother. She is calmed down by her fiance, who warns Robinson that he himself will come back for revenge if the newspaper ever mentions the dead woman's name again. Five Star Final was remade in 1936 as Two Against the World, this time set in a radio station instead of a newspaper office. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
In 1931, at the dawn of the era of sound motion pictures, many of the standards for film genres were set. Nominated for an Oscar as the year's best film, Five Star Final was the prototypical newspaper movie which was widely imitated in the 1930s and 1940s. It features many of the aspects of such films that would later become cliches, including a hard-bitten newspaper editor (played by Edward G. Robinson), an unscrupulous reporter (played by the great villain Boris Karloff) and a cast of crusty journalists and outraged citizens. It's a thorough condemnation of yellow journalism and sets forth the same kind of tensions and themes that many decades later could be found in such newspaper films as All the President's Men and Absence of Malice. Like all such films, there is redemption in exposing hypocrisy and pursuing truth. Prolific director Mervyn LeRoy was at the helm. Five years later, the plot was recycled, with the setting shifted to a radio station, in Two Against the World, starring Humphrey Bogart. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide
Jack Okey - Art Director, Earl Luick - Costume Designer, Mervyn LeRoy - Director, Frank Ware - Editor, Leo F. Forbstein - Musical Direction/Supervision, Sol Polito - Cinematographer, Robert Lord - Screenwriter, Byron Morgan - Screenwriter, Louis Weitzenkorn - Play Author
Five Star Final (1930), a melodrama by Louis Weitzenkorn. [ Cort Theatre, 175 perf.] Caring only about circulation, the callous newspaper owner Bernard Hinchcliffe (Berton Churchill) orders his editor, Randall (Arthur Byron), to revive the sordid, long‐buried story of Nancy Vorhees (Merle Maddern), who had been acquitted of the charge of shooting her lover. Nancy is now married to Michael Townsend (Malcolm Duncan) and is preparing for the wedding of her daughter Jenny (Frances Fuller). When a reporter visits her, she gives him a picture of Jenny, thinking it is for the marriage notices. Learning the truth, Nancy begs Randall to kill the story, but he insists it is still news. The story is published on Jenny's wedding day, and Nancy and Michael commit suicide. Jenny comes to the newspaper office to kill Randall but, learning that Randall has quit in revulsion, walks away. Richard Lockridge of the Sun observed that the A. H. Woods–produced play displayed such “scathing contempt for tabloid journalism and its supporters that in the end only a few charred bones remain to mark the place.” The Theatre Guild had produced a similar play the night before, Claire and Paul Sifton's Midnight, which some critics thought had more literary value. But the dramatic effectiveness of Weitzenkorn's play succeeded, while Midnight failed. Louis WEITZENKORN (1893–1943) was born in Wilkes‐Barre, Pennsylvania, and later studied at Columbia. He was primarily a newspaperman but wrote several plays, of which this alone was successful.
Robinson plays the city editor of a tabloid newspaper who reluctantly agrees to the publisher's idea to increase circulation: a retrospective series on a murder and scandal of twenty years before, involving a secretary who shot the man who impregnated her and then refused to marry her. The woman, now married to a good man and with a daughter about to marry into a socially prominent family, reacts with horror at the renewed interest in the scandal she had put behind her.
The city editor, who has a compulsive hand-washing habit, assigns to the story an unscrupulous reporter (Karloff) who wears a clerical collar to get information from the parents on the eve of the wedding.
The film was based on a play by the same name, written by Louis Weitzenkorn after his stint as editor of the New York Evening Graphic, a sensational tabloid of the 1920s.
In the United States, the film is not available on home video DVD, but is broadcast by Turner Classic Movies from time to time. The TCM page for the movie [1] includes a trailer and a poll where viewers can vote to have the film released on DVD.
Trivia
The title refers to an era when competing newspapers published a series of editions during the day, in this case marking its final edition front page with five stars and the word "Final."
Five Star Final is also a font that was often used in newspaper headlines.
