Dangerous Papers

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The staff of a tabloid find themselves with blood on their hands after exposing a murderess in 1931's Five Star Final. Unremarkably for the period, the film presents a morally simplistic dichotomy of heartless journalists and their innocent victims. But certainly it was true then, and perhaps even truer to-day, that tabloid journalism can be quite vicious.

Edward G. Robinson stars as Joseph W. Randall, an editor who's fed up with his paper's unscrupulous practices. But he reluctantly accepts instructions from the paper's owner to publish a story on a woman named Nancy Voorhees who murdered her boss twenty years earlier. She was acquitted by a jury when it was found that she was pregnant with the child of that boss and that he had cast her aside.

Meanwhile, one of the paper's journalists, played by Boris Karloff, poses as a priest and in this guise speaks to a woman who reveals to him that she is Nancy Voorhees, living in secret. Her daughter (Marian Marsh) is about to be married to a respectable young man. Naturally, Boris Karloff has no compunctions about exposing Voorhees, even though it means scandal and potentially the end of the young woman's chances at marriage.

This is a pre-Code film, on Criterion this month as part of a collection of pre-code Mervyn LeRoy movies. That means this movie has frank references to women's body parts and suicide. The story's climax hinges on something that couldn't even have been portrayed in American movies after the code was enforced in 1935. The extremes LeRoy was able to indulge in contribute to the story's simplicity. One could almost use it as an example of how the code led to filmmakers being more creative. But Edward G. Robinson gives a good performance and Marian Marsh is beautiful.