Scandal Sheet
With Broderick Crawford, Donna Reed, John Derek.
US, 1952, 35mm, black & white, 82 min.
Print source: Swank
Director Phil Karlson hit an important stride in the 1950s with a series of tough, low-budget noir thrillers that cast an unpitying eye on the tawdry, violent, lonely lives of hard-bitten petty crooks and gangsters. A high point of Karlson's exploration of America's shadowy lower depths is Scandal Sheet, a relatively faithful adaptation of Fuller's celebrated pulp novel, The Dark Page, published in 1944 while Fuller was fighting the war in Europe. Fuller's portrait of amoral yellow journalism was directly inspired by his years working for the notoriously sensationalistic New York Daily Graphic, given a savage twist by his taut story of a muckraking newspaper editor trying to cover up a crime and evade his own ace reporter. In the hands of Karlson and master cinematographer Burnett Guffey, Fuller's fable of ruthless ambition becomes palpably dank and claustrophobic, thanks especially to the snarling, sweating presence of Broderick Crawford as the hounded editor—in a mesmerizing performance equal to his starring role in All the King’s Men just a few years earlier—and pretty boy star John Derek as the impishly devious protégé with an insatiable appetite for red meat.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
Pickup on South Street
The Crimson Kimono
The Naked Kiss
Underworld U.S.A.
The Baron of Arizona
Merrill's Marauders
House of Bamboo
Fixed Bayonets!
Forty Guns
Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street
A Fuller Life
Run of the Arrow
Street of No Return
The Steel Helmet
The Big Red One
Shock Corridor
Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made
