A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Five Star Final (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931)

Edward G. Robinson and Oscar Apfel in Five Star Final

Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Marian Marsh, H.B. Warner, Anthony Bushell, George E. Stone, Frances Starr, Ona Munson, Boris Karloff, Aline MacMahon, Oscar Apfel. Screenplay: Byron Morgan, Robert Loird, based on a play by Louis Weitzenkorn. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: Jack Okey. Film editing: Frank Ware. 

Part of Mervyn LeRoy's Five Star Final is brisk and lively, and part of it is stiff and stagy. Edward G. Robinson plays Randall, managing editor of a New York tabloid called The Evening Gazette. Randall is being pressured by the paper's editor, circulation manager, and advertising sales director to increase circulation by printing a series about a murder that took place 20 years ago, in which a woman named Nancy Voorhees (Frances Starr) shot her boss when he reneged on a promise to marry her. She was acquitted of the crime because she was pregnant, but the sensation of the trial lingers in memory. Randall marshals his reporters, including a rather sinister one named Isopod (Boris Karloff), to find out whatever happened to Nancy. They discover that she's alive and happily married to Michael Townsend (H.B. Warner) who knows her story and has been willing to raise her daughter, Jenny (Marian Marsh) as his own. Moreover, Jenny is about to get married to Philip Weeks (Anthony Bushell), from a prominent family. Sensationally flogging the story has dire consequences for all concerned. Unfortunately, the melodramatic scenes that take place in the Townsend household are the ones we are supposed to believe in and take to heart, wrecking the tone of the movie. The entertaining ones in the newspaper office, filled with colorful characters and full of snappy repartee of the kind the Production Code would suppress, are the ones that bring Five Star Final to life. Robinson and Karloff are fine, and Aline MacMahon as Randall's secretary gets to pull off some memorable lines. When a Jewish reporter threatens to change his name to advance his career, she shoots back: "Don't do it, kid. New York's too full of Christians as it is." 

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