by Allan Fish
(USA 1931 89m) DVD1
Raising sex to a dignified attitude
p Hal B.Wallis d Mervyn le Roy w Byron Morgan, Robert Lord play Louis Weitzenkorn ph Sol Polito ed Frank Ware art Jack Okey
Edward G.Robinson (Randall), Marian Marsh (Jenny Townsend), H.B.Warner (Michael Townsend), Anthony Bushell (Philip Weeks), George E.Stone (Ziggy Feinstein), Ona Munson (Kitty Carmody), Aline MacMahon (Miss Taylor), Boris Karloff (T.Vernon Isopod), Oscar Apfel (Hinchecliffe), Frances Starr (Nancy Vorhees Townsend), Purnell Pratt (French), Robert Elliott (Brannegan), Harold Waldridge (Arthur Goldberg), David Torrence (Arthur Weeks), Evelyn Hall (Isobel Weeks), William H.Strauss (Jerry),
A film that begins and ends as if in perpetuum, with credits and fade out accompanied not by the traditional Warner library music but a cacophony of newspaper sellers crying “extra, extra”, “read all about it” and other such guttural clichés. This is the newspaper business as only the pre-code could show it and it’s a stereotype perpetuated most of all at Warners, whether via the gossip columns of Lee Tracy in Blessed Event, the morgue chasers of Frank McHugh in The Mystery of the Wax Museum, or even Tracy again in Doctor X. Most of Warners’ repertory played news hounds at some time or other and this was Robinson’s time and one of the definitive roles of its time.
Robinson is Randall, editor of the muck-raking tabloid the New York Evening Gazette, which he tries to turn into a newspaper only to be dragged down into the gutter every time by his bosses out to boost circulation at any costs. He toes the party line, if reluctantly, and sets out to reopen interest in a 20 year old murder case centring round Nancy Vorhees, who killed her lover and was left with a baby without a father. What Randall doesn’t know is that Nancy has lived an honest life since, married to a financier called Michael Townsend, who walked out on his disapproving family to marry her, and that her daughter Jenny is now engaged to a Michael of her own, Philip, who is also prepared to let his snob Park Avenue parents disinherit him.
The final part of this crusade descends into melodrama, or rather plummets into it, and in doing so exposes perhaps a hypocrisy, perhaps an irony, depending on your point of view, that lies at the film’s crux. Randall develops a Jiminy Cricket when Nancy and her husband commit suicide, and in doing so we are left with a thorny dilemma. As the press are described as “great mirrors that reflect the world”, and one is left murmuring under our breath “yes, if stolen from a Fun House”, are not the movies themselves held to the same task? Here’s a film that essentially has its cake and eats it, attracting audiences with sleaze and sex and then has the temerity to accuse itself as it were of moral and professional degradation.
In the end what ensures its place as a minor classic of pre-code cinema are the script and the performances. Choice dialogue is dropped into proceedings like cigarette butts onto the sidewalk. “New York is full of enough Christians as it is” a Jewish office boy is told; “they don’t throw you out of speakeasies, they carry you out” another wag quips. “Editors have a tendency to put themselves on a pedestal above their readers” Hinchcliffe tells Randall, who replies “if I sat on a cigar box I’d be above ours.” Amongst the cast, Bushell, Marsh, Starr and even the usually reliable Warner are pretty maudlin as the targets of the Gazette’s knives, but the press office ensemble are a joy, with Stone offered a raise for “coming up with a new way to kill 100 people” and MacMahon as loyal, suffering and wisecracking as ever. Then there’s Karloff, just before immortality for James Whale, as a character with a name out of Washington Irving, dressed up like the most blasphemous thing the editor has ever seen, a debauched cadaver thrown out of seminary for an undisclosed misdemeanour and a roving hand drawn like a magnet to what lies up girls’ skirts. At the moral centre, finally recapturing his soul, there’s EGR, an absolute treat complaining in a speakeasy that “I’ve been here three hours and not a member of my staff’s been here. No wonder the paper is rotten. We need more drunkards.” Amen, brother.
A kind soul at this place passed on a copy of this to me last year. I would agree with Mr. Fish that it’s a minor classic, and that Robinson gives one of his finest performances as Randall.
Indeed Frank. FIVE STAR FINALE is a kind of pre-code classic, and Robinson is exceptional. The Warner Archives DVD is terrific, and Allan has penned a great capsule assessment.
Ew, thanks Allan, this sounds like an ink-stained treat!
Definitely a treat for fans of Pre-Code and Pre-Frankenstein Karloff. I like to think he would have fared fairly well in movies had Whale never seen him, though he probably wouldn’t be remembered as well today. This is a little sanctimonious for Warners but I don’t mind Robinson getting righteous. It’s a good change of pace every once in a while.
Robinson is perfect as ruthless new editor, willing to destroy lives for a headline and sales. When he finally becomes gulit ridden, it’s too late. The dialogue, as Allan points out is snappy. The rest of the cast, George E. Stone, Aline MacMahon, Ona Munson and especially Karloff as an alcholic reporter lacking any sense of descency, all make this worth watching.
Just watched this and must agree with you, Allan, that the real joy of it is in the snappy dialogue and performances in and around the newspaper offices – Robinson is great. Loved it when one of the other staff says “For two cents, I’d punch you in the face!” and he snaps back “You’d do anything for two cents!” Also an amazing scene when the circulation boys go round to teach the newsagent who isn’t displaying their papers a lesson… in much the same way that Cagney teaches bars to stock his booze in ‘The Public Enemy’.
However, I do agree that the film plunges into melodrama towards its end, becoming rather too preachy, and it also goes off the boil whenever there is a scene focusing on the newspaper’s victims, who are just too sweet to be true. I see there was a remake in 1936 (‘Two Against the World’ aka ‘One Fatal Hour’) with Bogart in the Robinson role – wonder how that compares.
very bad review of a very good movie
“…, are not the movies themselves held to the same task?….” etc
seems you have a problem separating playing with real lives and and playing with fictional lives. media and some movies(not this ) play with real lives.
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perhaps my pointing out that callous deficiency in you is too “preachy’ for you, same way the movie is?
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anyway your problem, in differentiating reality from fiction, is common, esp among liberal murderers of usa, who elect mass murderers/book burners/ torturers/child killers /etc, like obama/bush, so that they can live in self satisfied callous indifference and welfare benefits, fueled by resources looted from other countries. as long as their media makes western atrocities in to entertaining (no preaching!) heroics that callous fools like you can enjoy..
valueless brutish monsters like you cannot makes valid aesthetic value judgements .
Hmm, so long since I’d been trolled I had begun to forget what it felt like, like having a raspberry blown at me by a dwarf.
I must ask, were you born so ingratiating and diplomatic or did you have to study? Under Myra Hindley perhaps…
[…] Wonders in the Dark touches on the film’s own hypocrisy– it derides newspapers for frolicking in depravity, while the movie itself contains its fair share of racier moments. I can see where he’s coming from, even if I think the film still retains a moral high ground simply because there are places it won’t go that the paper would; for example, do we ever see the dead bodies in the film? […]