Five Star Final

This largely forgotten film stars Edward G. Robinson and was one of the Best Picture Oscar nominees in 1931-1932. Robinson plays the editor of a newspaper whose publisher instructs Robinson to come up with a story that will increase circulation. Robinson's solution is to track down a woman who killed the father of her child twenty years before when he refused to marry her, but she was acquitted, largely because of her child. She has since married, and her daughter is on the eve of her own marriage and has no idea of her mother's past. Robinson's "what ever happened to" idea is a success, but at a horrible cost to the family involved.

Not on DVD or VHS, the film uses some techniques that were rather odd for Warner Bros at the time, considering that their urban dramas usually were very fast-paced. To begin with, the film makes a big production of introducing Robinson to the audience, having the other players talk about him at length, and even showing a shot of just his hands as he washes up before he makes his big entrance. Then - the whole movie proceeds to switch its dramatic center more to the family that Robinson's newspaper is writing a scandal piece on and its tragic effect on them.

Robinson and Boris Karloff - in an odd turn as an alcoholic reporter just prior to his star-making role in Frankenstein - have acting in the age of sound down to a fine art. However, the actors playing the roles of the family targeted by Robinson's scandal sheet seem to be hold-overs from the silent era, the best known being silent star H.B. Warner. Their speech is somewhat slow and over-dramatic, and their gestures exaggerated, but not ridiculously so. This might have been to contrast them with the hard-boiled occupants of the newsroom, but it makes the film look like it has two entirely different directors.