For the last couple of years, I’ve closed most nights by watching one of the hundreds (thousands?) of early sound movies made in the period commonly referred to as Pre-Code, from the introduction of sound in the late 1920s to the adoption of the Motion Picture Production Code (often called the Hays Code) in 1934. Technical limitations aside — and these have as much to do with the quality of film stock and the blasé attitudes of studios towards preservation as with the shortcomings of the recording equipment of the period — these films manage to squeeze a lot of story into 60- to 75-minute packages.
But recently, I’ve begun to explore the literary roots of Pre-Code, gathering some of the stories, novels, and plays that provided the source material for many of these movies. Although studios did use original stories devised by member of their writing staffs, the majority of Hollywood A-list movies (and a healthy share of the B-movies) were adapted from existing literary properties. Often, the adaptations wandered far afield from the original works. A notorious example is the 1934 film based on Willa Cather’s novel A Lost Lady, which transplanted Marian and Captain Forrester from 1890s Nebraska to 1930s Chicago, jettisoning almost everything except character names and a skeleton of the plot along the way. Cather was so disgusted with the result that she forbade further use of her work by Hollywood for the rest of her lifetime.
Louis Weitzenkorn’s play Five Star Final, which debuted in New York in December 1930 and was transformed into a film starring Edward G. Robinson that was released by Warner Brothers nine months later, sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Cather’s A Lost Lady. Both play and movie are scathing attacks upon “yellow journalism” — the unscrupulous practices of tabloid newspapers that, sadly, continue to be seen today. A veteran of New York City newspapers, Weitzenkorn came up through the ranks until he became editor of one of yellow journalism’s worst offenders, the New York Evening Graphic, which was known by its critics as the “Porno-Graphic.” He only lasted a few months in the job, though, finding it too hard to stomach the necessary ethical compromises. One of his colleagues on the Graphic, Frank Mallen, later wrote that, “He never liked anything about it. As a matter of fact, he didn’t know why in hell he ever got tangled up in it.” After tendering his resignation, Weitzenkorn boarded a ship for France and decided to work out his feelings about the Evening Graphic and its ilk in dramatic form.
Five Star Final debuted in December 1930 and was a critical and popular success. Over a year after the Wall Street crash, theater-goers in New York still had an appetite for social criticism, and Five Star Final delivered it fast and unfiltered. As John W. Perry wrote in Editor and Publisher, the play is “a venomous, sullen, and bitter castigation of that sensational fringe of American newspaper making which has only one god — circulation — and which, for the sake of this god, will sacrifice honor, decency, and self-respect without the quiver of an eyelash.” Arthur Pollock, a widely-syndicated critic, said the play “froths at the mouth considerably” and would have been more effective with a little toning-down. The Daily Worker’s reviewer took a strict Marxist view: “Since it is bourgeois criticism and not workers’ criticism, it mixed in a lot of snobbish disgust at the workers,” characterizing the Gazaette’s readers as “soda jerkers and fat chambermaids.”
In Five Star Final, Weitzenkorn portrays the transgression and redemption of Randall, his fictional counterpart, editor of the Evening Gazette. Prodded by a circulation-hungry owner, he agrees to run a serial about a scandal from 20 years past, in which a distraught young woman named Nancy Voorhees murdered the employer who had seduced and impregnated her and then refused to take responsibility for his act. Found innocent by a sympathetic jury, she slipped from the public spotlight and seemingly disappeared. Randall soon manages to track her down though, and his publicity tears down the facade of a normal life Nancy and her husband have created. The relentless sensationalism of the Gazette’s coverage ultimately leads the couple to commit suicide.
Five Star Final ran for 175 performances on Broadway and several touring companies took the play around the country in the following months. Warner Brothers bought the film rights for $25,000 and began lining it up as a feature for Edward G. Robinson, the studio’s hottest star from the success of his protrayal of the Al Capone-like Rico in Little Caesar. Warners’ most productive director, Mervyn Le Roy (six feature films in 1931 alone), was assigned to direct. There was a slight delay in the film’s release, however, because Weitzenkorn’s contract prohibited Warner Brothers from going out to theaters until the last touring run of the play ended.
As scripted by Byron Morgan and Robert Lord, the film may represent the closest thing to a faithful adaptation short of an actual filmed stage production. After reading the play — one of the relatively rare examples of a Pre-Code source play that was published — I watched the film again, following along from the book, and was struck by how extensively Morgan and Lord reused Weitzenkorn’s text. Indeed, more than just dialogue, whole pages of which are essentially reproduced word-for-word, but also the act/scene structure and even staging directions.
Although Weitzenkorn had no film experience when writing the play, his staging made the film easy to translate into a shooting script. While there are just seven locations used in the play’s 19 scenes and Weitzenkorn called for the use of a revolving stage floor that would allow several scenes to be performed in two or three locations simultaneously. This was innovative for theaters but Le Roy could easily reproduce the effect using the split-screen technique perfected early in the sound era. Le Roy also eliminated several brief scenes from the play that had less to do with advancing the plot than with creating the atmosphere of the Gazette’s typical readers.
Dropping one in particular — set in “Trixie’s flat” — avoided running afoul of state censors with its unsubtle suggestion that Trixie and her flatmate are prostitutes. Another, in “the apartment of a colored couple,” makes the film a bit less offensive to current sensibilities than the play. Its omission, on the other hand, probably leaves today’s viewers wondering what the references to “Clearing House numbers” was all about. (See this item from the Harvard University Press blog for an explanation of how numbers rackets in Harlem used the daily transaction totals from the New York Clearing House as the basis for the daily betting.)
One aspect of the film that draws the attention of viewers now, on the other hand, is absent from the play. Several times in the film, Robinson is shown diligently washing his hands. Robinson and Le Roy came up with the idea, and it works well on several levels. Although the term obsessive compulsive disorder hadn’t come into widespread use at the time, the behavior not only shows the stress Robinson’s character feels in continually being forced to engage in duplicitous and exploitive practices but symbolizes his desperate attempts to cleanse his guilty conscience. Its last instance also provides the set-up for one of film’s best lines when Aline MacMahon, playing Robinson’s secretary, castigates him, saying that “You can always get people interested in the crucifixion of a woman.
Five Star Final (the play) has not shared its film version’s longevity. One watches the film now for its brisk direction (despite running nearly 90 minutes), sharp dialogue (much from the play), and ensemble acting. Frances Starr and H. B. Warner, Warner’s stock players are particularly effective as Nancy Voorhees and her husband, one of more believable examples of marital love onscreen from the time. Tabloid journalism is every bit as awful now as then, but at least we’re saved from the onslaught of papers attempting to produce three, four, five, or more editions in a single day. And so while the film still works as entertainment, Weitzenkorn’s play is only of interest as a historical artifact today.
Five Star Final the film was even more successful than the play, making a profit of $500,000 over its costs and earning a nomination for Best Picture at the 5th Academy Awards (it lost to Grand Hotel). Warners recycled the story in 1936 in Two Against the World, with Humphrey Bogart in the lead and the setting changed somewhat awkwardly (the age of 24-hour news broadcasting was still almost 40 years away) to a radio station. Louis Weitzenkorn moved to Hollywood for a few years, contributing to screen plays for 24 Hours (1931) and Men of Chance (1932), before returning to New York and the newspaper business. In the early 1940s, he moved back to his home town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and tried writing another play, but he died in 1943 when his clothes caught fire as he was fixing a pot of coffee in his apartment.
I have a mild fascination with unreadable books. Mild because I often lack the courage or persistence to take them on, fascination because I often have the nagging sense that I should. By “unreadable,” I don’t mean truly unreadable, like the book of Pi to the millionth digit or whatever length it is, but dauntingly difficult–the sort of book that refuses to fit itself to the molds that make books accessible. 