Five Star Final

Five Star Final wants to be a searing indictment of tabloid journalism. It settles for being half of a good newspaper picture.

Edward G. Robinson plays the editor of a scandal sheet, perpetually washing his hands in a nice bit of business that speaks volumes. His boss wants circulation. Robinson wants out. But not before he assigns Boris Karloff, playing an oily reporter in his meatiest role yet, to dig up a twenty-year-old murder case. The story sells papers. It also destroys lives.

When the film stays in the newsroom, it crackles. Robinson’s rapid-fire delivery suits the role perfectly. Aline MacMahon, making her screen debut, matches him beat for beat as his secretary, delivering the picture’s sharpest line. Will the murder story sell? “You can always get people interested in the crucifixion of a woman.”

The script is talky, but it lands some haymakers. Robinson’s greedy publisher lectures him about editors putting themselves on pedestals above their readers. Robinson’s comeback: “If I sat on a cigar box I’d be above ours.”

For his part, Karloff gets the meatiest role of his career to date. He gets substantial screen time and a terrific drunk scene opposite Robinson. He makes the most of it.

Behind the camera, director Mervyn LeRoy offers some flash—a three-way split screen, a well-timed whip-pan that captures the mounting chaos. The newsroom feels alive.

But when the film leaves the newsroom, it becomes precisely the kind of cheap sensationalism it pretends to condemn.

The scenes with the victimized family play like second-rate melodrama. The actors overplay their hands. The dialogue goes stiff and artificial. When the undertaker arrives at the apartment, he reads the coroner’s report like he’s addressing a jury, not standing in a hallway. It’s a contrived device so another character can overhear.

The contrivance extends to the tragedy. It’s so abrupt and out-of-character, it borders absurdist comedy. Robinson rises above the material—he always does—but even he can’t bridge the gap between cynical newsroom procedural and overwrought domestic tragedy.

Five Star Final needed to choose what kind of movie it wanted to be. The newsroom scenes earn three stars. The family melodrama earns one. Split the difference and you get a movie at war with itself.

Believe it or not, Warner Bros. remade it five years later with Humphrey Bogart in Robinson’s role as Two Against the World. It suffers from all the same problems as this version, yet somehow manages to add a few more despite recycling much of the dialogue and clocking in almost twenty-five minutes shorter.