Five Star Final 1931

In this tense social thriller, Joseph W. Randall, Edward G. Robinson, is the managing editor of the New York Evening Gazette. He has spent years trying to legitimize the paper by dialing back sensationalism and foregrounding responsible reporting, yet the paper’s circulation has fallen sharp and cold. When owner Bernard Hinchecliffe contemplates a dramatic comeback—a retrospective on a 20-year-old murder to rekindle interest—Randall reluctantly agrees to pursue the scandal. The case centers on Nancy Voorhees, a stenographer who shot her boss after he reneged on a promise to marry her. The verdict had been softened by the jury’s sympathy for her pregnancy, and Nancy was acquitted, a twist of fate that still haunts the city’s memory.

Nancy Voorhees, now married to Michael Townsend, lives under the calm surface of respectable society with their daughter Jenny Townsend, who believes Townsend is her father and is poised to marry Philip Weeks, a scion of a socially prominent family. The plan to reopen the old wound is meant to boost sales, but Randall’s appetite for dirt is uncomfortably matched by the town’s long memories and private fears. To dig up fresh dirt, he assigns the unscrupulous reporter George E. Stone as Ziggie Feinstein to work alongside Ona Munson as Kitty Carmody, a pair who will stop at nothing to harvest a sensational headline. The mission hinges on a figure who can pretend spiritual absolution while quietly pulling strings—Reverend T. Vernon Isopod, a con man masquerading as a minister, skillfully wheedling the confidence of the bride’s anxious parents.

Isopod’s ploy is cunning: he gains access to the Townsend home, and the family unwittingly hands him a photo of Jenny. The moment Michael learns of the ruse, he phones the church in a scramble to avert disaster. Randall’s secretary, Miss Taylor, disillusioned by the entire affair, spends a tense night at a speakeasy and then bluntly tells her boss what she thinks. In short order, Isopod appears in the newsroom, drunk but full of information, and Randall seizes the opportunity to stage a dramatic, five-star photo layout that could revitalize the newspaper’s fortunes.

What follows is a cascade of converging crises. Randall sends Ziggie Feinstein and Kitty Carmody to document the Townsend apartment, while the Townsends make a desperate bid to keep the wedding from collapsing. Michael, torn between protecting his wife’s memory and facing the relentless glare of the press, tries to manage a family crisis that is rapidly becoming a public spectacle. Nancy, overwhelmed by renewed scrutiny, pleads with Randall to drop the story, but he resists. The tragedy accelerates when Nancy kills herself with poison, and Michael returns home to find her body. In a cruel twist of calculation, he pretends to be deep in a phone conversation with Nancy to spare Jenny and Phillip the truth, then, unable to bear the weight of the events, he too takes his own life in the bathroom.

Carmody and Ziggie manage to capture the aftermath on film, and they relay the footage to Randall, who sees a sensational finale taking shape. The next day, Phillip’s parents pull Jenny aside to cancel the wedding, and Phillip himself arrives to stand up for his commitment. Randall, by now teetering on the edge of ruin, drinks himself into a sorrowful numbness and orders the night desk to drop the story, hoping to salvage what remains of his conscience.

Hinchecliffe’s fear of scandal clashes with the newsroom’s appetite for numbers. His underlings crave the dramatic gains, even as Jenny confronts the people who killed her mother—“crimes” committed in the name of circulation. Randall, confronted with the truth, confesses that the newspaper’s sensationalist drive fed the murders by turning them into headlines. Jenny points a gun at the editor, and Phillip arrives just in time to forego a tragedy, delivering a blistering rebuke that lands like a bolt: he proclaims that they have grown rich on filth and that someone must crush this machine of noise. He threatens to hunt them down if her mother’s name is ever dragged through the paper again.

In the tense aftermath, Randall renounces Hinchecliffe and resigns, leaving behind a legacy of guilt and a city half convinced that truth and profit share a fragile, dangerous balance. Miss Taylor, equally shaken, follows him as the chapter closes on a world where a newspaper’s power can topple lives and rewrite souls. The final image lingers on a single sheet of newsprint—a copy of the New York Evening Gazette proclaiming that the suicide victims have been buried—swept away by rain, a quiet echo of the cost of chasing circulation.