Five Star Final
No music, just the cries of newsboys. Mervyn LeRoy’s 1931 newspaper melodrama, Five Star Final, begins unconventionally. It’s a Warner Brothers social conscience film, but the grim social commentary is shockingly combined with pre-code spice and wit, as if I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Blessed Event (1932) got fused together in an explosion.
LeRoy directed seven films in 1931, most of them raucous comedies. Here he squeezes every laugh he can from the material, and every tear from the audience – it could get ugly, but somehow doesn’t, except when it wants to.
After the credits we get a classic 30s montage to introduce muckraking New York tabloid The Gazette, featuring a panoply of peroxide switchboard operators, probably all producers’ girlfriends – the star girl, Polly Walters, gets a shot filmed from the switchboard’s viewpoint, nesting amid her wires like a bleached spider.
Then, after a suitable build-up by dullish supporting players, we meet editor Edward G Robinson, numbing his conscience in a local speakeasy, and obsessively washing his hands, a Pilate-inspired motif in the film. His boss wants him to dumb down the paper, already a rag: “You editors have a tendency to sit on a pedestal and look down on your readers.” Robinson: “I could sit on a cigar box and look down on our readers.”
Robinson is charged with raking over the coals of an old murder case. Meanwhile, the woman who fired the fatal shot has rebuilt her life, married a bank clerk, and had a daughter, who’s now about to marry an upscale young fellow with snooty parents. The scandal, long suppressed, threatens to ruin their lives.
While everybody at the scandal sheet plays in the emphatic hyperspeed of classic ‘30s cinema, the nice people move at a more sedate pace, in a more theatrical style, always anxious to position themselves for the camera. Marion Marsh, impossibly cute and perky as the daughter, is closer to the Warner style, but her co-stars pull her down into their more polite, rhetorical style. While these characters are anodyne and untextured, they’re genuinely sweet, and the mounting threat induces surprisingly affecting terror.
Meanwhile, the stock characters at the paper come to seem demoniac: Robinson, importing his gangster image, humanizes the editor but makes us wonder how far he’ll go into corruption. His secretary, hopelessly in love with him, is Aline McMahon, one of the few actresses who could make a plausible romantic interest for the fish-frog-gargoyle star. McMahon, with her big flailing hands and electric light bulb eyes, is nowhere near as grotesque as he, but quirky enough to suggest a viable love match.
As ace reporter, we get Boris Karloff, playing T. Vernon Isopod, thrown out of divinity college for some unspeakable perversion, now worming his way into decent people’s lives to expose their secrets. The girl reporter is Ona Munson (ten years later, Mother Gin Sling in The Shanghai Gesture), and instead of the usual perky career girl, she’s a brazen tart manipulating lecherous males to get ahead: neither of these characters will give off the slightest whiff of morality, their character arcs consisting solely in how grasping and self-centred they prove to be. Boris (who made Frankenstein the same year) is a particularly oily, insidious creature, his cadaverous visage and lisping, sepulchral tones enlisted to evoke some invertebrate horror (the isopod is an order of crustacean which includes the woodlouse, but Karloff’s perf insults that noble beast).
Tragedy is made to seem inevitable long before it happens, and the film communicates its outrage like a disease. Some kind of ironic justice is threatened, but no justice is really possible now that innocents have been harmed. Narrowly escaping the fate he deserves, Boris is aghast: “Why Mr. Randall, I’m all perspiration!” Eddie G. snaps back: “Perspire outside.”
LeRoy would become a slightly calcified figure in later years, belabouring Quo Vadis and Gypsy, so it’s ironic that he was such a sparkplug when cinema was struggling to throw off the tyranny of the sound booth and microphone. He pulls off the occasional fast track through the newsroom (maybe mimicking Lewis Milestone’s giddy dollies in The Front Page, released the same year) and gets very excited by the telephones on extensor arms: when Robinson yanks the phone closer, it can trigger a sharp reframing. But his real achievement is turning loose such actors, and going after the film’s two-tone split so aggressively. The bad guys are FUNNY, they’re the entertainment, whereas the nice people are a little banal, as can be the case in life, but we’re left in no doubt where our sympathies lie.
End title: again no music. The day’s Gazette lies in the gutter. We expect rainwater to swirl it down the nearest storm drain, as in Chicago (1927), but that’s too good for this paper: a foul gob of tobacco spit lands squarely on the front page, and then a morass of unspeakable filth swamps it. Truly, Robinson’s publisher is The Sultan of Slop.
by David Cairns