Flavorsome Warners programmer, a cautionary Yellow Journalism fable that starts with a foreword (added late in the day as a sop to the press?) so we’ll know there’s good and bad among the ink-stained wretches of the world. Here, the main event is the murder of an important man in an unimportant town. Tom Brown, the sweet kid who runs the local rag (circulation 2117) with his best girl, has the first scoop of his young career. But come the dawn, and every two-bit big city reporter shows up. He knows all their bylines, heroes with jobs he’s dreamed of landing someday. But soon, they show their feet of clay, churning out gossip instead of news, drinking, gambling, forcing action on officials to keep a good thing going. Anything for circulation numbers . . . and a bonus. Joan Blondell’s one of them, but a straight shooter who’s been thru the ringer and tries to set the kid straight, especially when she spots her slick ex hitting on the boy’s gal. And that murder that brought them all to town? Reduced to a trial-by-innuendo circus that threatens to subvert justice; and only sorted out when the scales fall from Brown’s eyes and he returns to honest investigative journalism practices. Director Lloyd Bacon doesn’t try to oversell a script loaded with illogical jumps and plot holes. Though an extended, noble speech on idealized newspaper ethics (another sop to the press to bookend the Foreword) is nearly enough to flatten the tart & tasty action elsewhere.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: As the wronged husband, look for Leon Ames, then going under the name Leon Waycoff. His last credit 54 years later in Francis Coppola’s PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED/’86.
DOUBLE-BILL: Warners did a more serious Scandal Sheet pic in FIVE STAR FINAL/’31, with Edward G. Robinson & Aline MacMahon under Mervyn LeRoy’s direction.
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