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.

Review of Scandal Sheet. - Shockproof / Scandal Sheet review by Steve

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 crime and his sleazy background, but he 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 has been promised to the editor. Sales go through the ceiling but the trail leads right to his desk.

This is a fabulously entertaining film, 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 is memorable as a former Pulitzer prize winner who has drunk his way down to skid row.

The locations are anchored in the New York lowlife, among the drunks and bums, hock-shops, scummy hotels and, well, tabloid newspapers. It's a light satire on the press. Derek finds redemption when he rejects their corrupt 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 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.