Bill Slocum They don't make them like this anymore. "Scandal Sheet" is a big-city crime story that isn't afraid to get preachy or mushy even while beating you over the head with a nonstop bloody tale."Write it up big, kid, it'll sell a lot of newspapers." That instruction by Broderick Crawford's editor character might well be the defining motif not only of this film but of the man who wrote the novel it was adapted from, Sam Fuller. Fuller loved newspapers, and "Scandal Sheet" makes us love them, too, even with all their messiness.The stage is set right off, with a scene that screams Fuller. We pan over an alley to a tenement balcony where we zoom in on a woman talking to John Derek, but staring right at us: "He had this meat ax, her blood all over it!"We soon find out Derek is no policeman, but rather star New York Express reporter Steve McCleary, smirking at his deception. She tells him off, and he lets her so his photographer Biddle (Harry Morgan) can capture it for the layout."You know, that wasn't a bad-looking dame," Biddle muses after. "Too bad the guy used an ax on her. Spoiled some pretty pictures for me."It's such a distinctive opening that shows up in Fuller compilations. Funny thing, Fuller neither directed it nor wrote the script. Director Phil Karlson knew how to make a solid B-picture, as he showed the same year with "Kansas City Confidential," with his tight angles and clipped pacing. He was no Fuller, but if you wind up with less vision on this one, you do get a lot of polish.Great cast, too. This is one of Crawford's best performances, as he works both sides of the story as the menacing figure at the center of things. An introductory scene shows him getting raked over the coals by the Express shareholders for "pandering to the passions of the base morons." He sneers his way to an easy victory by pointing out how the circulation has risen by giving people what they want.Donna Reed is quietly effective as a more scrupulous reporter, dubbed "the Grand Duchess of Vassar" by the editor. Henry O'Neill lends pathos as a former top reporter, now "a washed-up drunken rummy." Finally, there's Derek's golden boy, heir to the throne as the editor sees him: "I always said you were born in a field of shamrocks." Derek always looked good; the magic of "Scandal Sheet" is watching him turn in a performance just as beautiful.The mystery that turns the story is somewhat convoluted, and pretty thin in some key respects, but Karlson and the cast sell it. As the film goes on, and the villain is revealed, Karlson and the scriptwriters do a fine job raising the tension in such a way I realized I was kind of pulling for the murderer. Not that he's ever likable; I just wanted to see how long he could keep it up.By my clock, that was just over 81 minutes. But you wouldn't guess it was even that long from the way it moves. Even the side business keeps you interested, like the drunks who sing off-key out at a nearby bar or the pawnshop owner who muses about higher-class shops he could run while the murderer rifles through his victim's effects.Wikipedia calls this a "film noir," which is wrong. This is high-class pulp fiction which plays to the cheap seats just like the Express and scores more often than seems possible or right. When it's over, you don't know whether that's ink on your hands, or something else, and you don't care.

bkoganbing With themes borrowed from The Big Clock and for a lot less money, Columbia Pictures delivered a good noir thriller with Broderick Crawford as the editor of a Scandal Sheet type newspaper who kills and then exploits the story in his paper.Neither the killing or the exploitation was planned. Crawford was summoned by someone out of his distant past. Rosemary DeCamp is his estranged wife whom he abandoned 20 years earlier and even took an alias that he's been living under ever since. DeCamp who usually plays mother roles plays a slightly unhinged woman and one can see why Crawford left her. She's very good in a part that is light years from what she normally plays.A sudden burst of lost temper and Crawford kills her and then tries to cover it up. But one of his junior reporters John Derek gets the police call and a hunch and proves homicide if not her identity. Even her lack of identity is exploited as it is referred to as The Lonely Hearts Murder. And Crawford goes all the way with it providing Derek and sob sister columnist Donna Reed don't get too close.Crawford and Derek work well together, they're reunited from All The King's Men where Derek played Crawford's son. There's also a nice performance by Henry O'Neill as a stew bum ex-reporter who also starts investigating. A very offbeat role for him as well as he's usually authority figures of sorts in movies.Samuel Fuller delivered a good noir film from his ensemble cast.

nomoons11 I mean that just about everything he does he steals every scene he's in.Broderick Crawford was just a huge personality on and off screen that I imagine other actors, being around him, kinda had a feelin' they didn't have a chance of stealin' a scene away from him. He was just that good an actor.This little film is no different. He plays a newspaper editor with somethin' to hide.Throughout the film he has to make sure no-one finds out his little secret from his past. Enter his favorite little cub reporter who thinks of like a son and a woman's columnist who thinks he has just sunk the paper's integrity by printing scandalous news and not the real news people wanna read. She basically see's right through him but not all the way...well until the end.Check this one out. It's a winner for sure. I was pleasantly surprised.

evanston_dad A suspenseful little newspaper thriller about a bullish editor of a trashy paper (Broderick Crawford) who inadvertently engineers his own downfall when he commits murder and his young protégé (John Derek) dives into the case, smelling a sensational story that will send the paper's circulation skyrocketing.This film is full of little twists and turns that made me gasp and laugh out loud as they heaped one surprise on top of another. Crawford gives a convincing performance as a man who's taught his underlings too well: he has to try to figure out a way to make Derek give up on the case without making it too obvious that he wants the story buried. Derek is given an unconvincing love interest in the form of Donna Reed. She works at the paper too, but despises Crawford's management of it and sees a little too much of him rubbing off on her boyfriend for her own comfort. Derek is such an ass, it's inconceivable that Reed would want to give him the time of day. But the inconsistency in her character serves as only a minor distraction; it doesn't torpedo the film.Phil Karlson provides the fluid direction, and keeps things moving at a brisk pace.Good fun.Grade: A-