Rent Shockproof / Scandal Sheet (1952)

Two in One - Shockproof / Scandal Sheet review by Cato

Two super films in this package with Shockproof , directed by the great Douglas Sirk, coming first. The story has the superb Cornel Wilde as a parole officer falling in love with a murderess who is still being followed by her ex boyfriend, and the other film Scandal Sheet gives us a great newspaper story with the main star played by the superb Broderick Crawford. I thought that this was the best film of the two, but to get both films in one package is a real treat.

on both films... with spoilers. - Shockproof / Scandal Sheet review by Steve

on SCANDAL SHEET.

Short but thrilling film noir set in a news office. It was adapted from a Sam Fuller novel and it punches like his films, with an extrovert swagger and dialogue that sounds like headlines. The star editor (Broderick Crawford) kills the wife he left twenty years earlier when she threatens to expose his past to the rival tabloids, which are as rapaciously unprincipled as his own.

The newsman is conflicted. He wants to hide his criminal background, but can't deny the populist urge to sell papers. So he puts his top reporter (John Derek) on the story of the dead woman and blows it up big. A lavish bonus is promised to the editor. Sales go through the ceiling but the trail leads right to his desk.

This is fabulous entertainment, driven by a lively, hardboiled script and unpretentious direction. It pulses with energy, especially in the fast talking newsroom scenes. The cast lacks a little sparkle in places, with Donna Reed insufficiently sassy, but Derek is effectively sordid and Henry Barnes memorable as a former Pulitzer prize winner who has drunk his way down to skid row.

There are sleazy New York locations, among the drunks and bums, hock-shops, scuzzy hotels and, well, tabloid newspapers. Derek finds redemption when he rejects the corrupt tabloid methods. Crawford's constant justification for dealing in murder and vice is 'it will sell papers'. In the end, he flogs his own dirty washing and makes his biggest sale. He can't deny his nature.

on SHOCKPROOF.  

One of a cycle of film noirs directed by Douglas Sirk after WWII. They are not what he is remembered for but are all worth seeing. This is written by Sam Fuller whose presence is unmissable in the punchy dialogue, the scuzzy, pliable characters and sleazy plot complications. He is also responsible for the implausible central premise...

Patricia Knight plays a tough peroxide blonde out on parole after doing a stretch for murder. Cornel Wilde is the official in charge of her release, who... falls in love with her, though she is still seeing the oleaginous gangster (John Baragrey) she took the rap for. She even gets to live in the sap's house with his blind Italian mother (Esther Minciotti) and kid brother.

Then the public officer and the prisoner go on the run in a subplot reminiscent of the Hollywood road melodramas of the depression. The studio called in a re-write, so Fuller at least isn't to blame for the Hollywood ending. Yet, the improbabilities hardly matter. This is a stylish and entertaining crime thriller with a good cast playing engaging archetypes.

John Baragrey does best as the narcissistic racketeer; not an ordinary Joe gone wrong but a flashy, amoral sociopath. There's some talk of criminal psychology, which was a big issue back then. And Sirk gives the bogus intrigue a sheen of real quality. Wilde and Knight were married in real life and while they don't have the chemistry of Bogart-Bacall, they make attractive leads.

On Both Coasts - Shockproof / Scandal Sheet review by CH

It is hardly news that Mark Chapman is a killer. Less known is that this is the name of the killer in Scandal Sheet. From near the start one realises that the editor of a New York paper (played by Broderick Crawford) has been rersponsible for the death of his estranged wife, the sort of subject on which he has focussed a once-worthy paper in a bid to boost circulation and receive a bonus.

True to newspaper movie form, there are two reporters on he staff in a quest for the true story, and all moves as swiftly as papers do from the press (that familiar stock scene in such fims as the front page leaping from the machinery to fill the screen). A shame that the novel by Samuel Fuller which inspired it is hard to find now. The film met with his displeasure. The rest of us must surely decide otherwise.

And all the more so as this disc contains the equally brisk Shockproof. Again an authority figure - a parole officer (John Derek) - finds a place on the rack as he falls for a woman released from gaol after taking the rap for a smooth-talking gambler. By contrast with the night-time world of Scandal Sheet, Shockproof features many scenes of sunlit Los Angeles. All moves brilliantly, the atmosphere darkening, with many an on-the-tun trope well handled - that is, until all is upended by an ending out of kilter with what has gone before. The director (Douglas Sitk, again behind something as unlikely for him as Summer Storm a few years earlier) was si upset by this subverting of what he intended that he returned to Euope for a while. And, needless to say, Fuller was equally appalled - and hoped for better when he took to directing as part of a multifarious career.

Put in this disc for a double-barrelled evening.