Scandal Sheet

Mark Chapman has turned a respectable newspaper into a high-circulation scandal sheet. At a readers' event he set up, he runs into the wife he abandoned years ago, who knows his past. The argument escalates and he kills her by accident. The next day the body is found, and Chapman assigns his own paper's most ambitious reporter to solve the murder. Phil Karlson adapted Samuel Fuller's 1944 novel The Dark Page. Fuller was a newspaper reporter before he came to film, and that knowledge sits at the center: the newsroom, the deadline, the circulation arithmetic and how a story gets built are all shown in detail. The killer directing his own capture is a consequence of that same machine. Broderick Crawford plays Chapman, John Derek the young reporter, and Donna Reed the journalist with scruples. It opened on 16 January 1952. Who it's for: Viewers who like 1950s noir, newspaper stories, and suspense constructed from the criminal's vantage. Who it's not for: The budget is low and the ending is rushed. The moral outcome is also tied off to the censorship rules of the time.