Five Star Final (1931) on Netflix
Circulation falling, publisher Bernard Hinchecliffe orders the New York Evening Gazette to revive a twenty-year-old murder scandal. Managing editor Joseph W. Randall is put in charge.
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- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.3/102,971 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes91%
Trailer
Plot summary
Joseph W. Randall is managing editor of the New York Evening Gazette, a tabloid whose sales have collapsed since he cut back on sensation and improved its reporting. Publisher Bernard Hinchecliffe wants a serial that revives an old scandal: twenty years earlier, stenographer Nancy Voorhees shot the boss who had made her pregnant and then broke his promise to marry her, and the jury acquitted her. Nancy is now the wife of the respected Michael Townsend, and her daughter Jenny, who believes Townsend is her father, is preparing to marry Philip Weeks, whose family is socially prominent. Randall hands the assignment to T. Vernon Isopod, a reporter who passes himself off as a minister to win the confidence of the bride's parents.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Five Star Final (1931)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst read Five Star Final as a thinly veiled attack on himself and his papers, and hit back by publishing negative reviews in his newspapers and pressuring theaters not to show the film.
- Louis Weitzenkorn wrote the play behind the film after editing Bernarr Macfadden's sensationalist 1920s tabloid the New York Evening Graphic; the play ran for 175 performances on Broadway in 1930 and 1931.
- Producer Hal B. Wallis sent Warner Bros. staff members out to study the design of two real newspaper offices so that the film's press room set would look authentic.
