--Exclusive--
Exclusive - 1937
Frances Farmer - Vina Swain
Fred MacMurray - Ralph Houston
Charlie Ruggles - Tod Swain
Lloyd Nolan - Charles Gillette
Producer - Benjamin Glazer
Director - Alexander Hall
RALPH HUSTON, assistant editor of The World, was an intense young man. Intense about his work; intense about Vina Swain, daughter of the paper's star reporter, Tod Swain. Life, for Ralph, was always at the crest of his own exuberance, but not until Vina gave up her job as model and embarked upon a career as reporter on the town's rival newspaper, The Sentinel, did the tide of his emotions rise to unrestrained fury. For The Sentinel was owned by Charles Gillette.
Charles Gillette, racketeer. Tod Swain shook his head in bewilderment that Vina should go against the principles for which he stood, for which his paper, The World, had fought so valiantly. And when, on an assignment, Vina unknowingly carried out Gillette's plan for revenge against the Mayoralty candidate, Horace Mitchell, by exposing him as having once served a jail sentence for causing a death in an automobile accident, Tod faced her in righteous indignation. And when Mitchell, on the night the story appeared, came to the Swain home and committed suicide, Tod's wrath knew no bounds.
The World printed the story of the suicide under the byline of Tod Swain. And the headline was: TONIGHT MY DAUGHTER KILLED A MAN!
Bewildered, angry, and hurt, Vina left Home. After all, she argued, the story she'd written was true. It wasn't her fault that Horace Mitchell hadn't had the courage to face the truth! But, when Gillette ran a story, charging that the elevators of the town's department store were unsafe - because the store's owner had refused him his advertising account - and then, when Gillette bribed an elevator operator to grease the cables and cause an accident, to prove his libelous charges, she knew him for the unscrupulous racketeer that he was.
Ralph Huston was among the passengers in the elevator when it fell. Injured, he begged Tod Swain to get and print the proof of Gillette's criminal scheme. And Tod Swain, fearless to the last, paid for that expose' with his life.
Vina, kneeling beside her father, thought, in anguish, that now indeed she had killed a man. White-lipped, she faced Ralph in the offices of The World, as he announced grimly that the paper had been sold to Gillette. The town, itself, he said bitterly, would now be owned by the racketeer. But, he added, with courage born of desperation, one edition would go to press before Gillette took over the property. One edition - exposing him not only as a racketeer, but as murderer!
The police, with an aroused public squarely behind them, wrote finis to the gangster's criminal career within an hour after the edition reached the street. They demolished the offices of The Sentinel. They put handcuffs on Charles Gillette and his henchmen. And a committee of citizens took over the control of The World and appointed Ralph Huston as editor.
He had time, then, to listen to Vina Swain's heartbroken words. Time to forgive her for her misguided, reckless obstinacy. Time, he said, to love her for all the rest of their lives.
Review featured in Screen Romances
Courtesy of George Snow
Courtesy of Jack Randall Earles
Actress Judy Garland takes time out to observe the 'next attraction'.
This page last updated 2000, Aug 26