SCANDAL SHEET: this thriller really grips!

SCANDAL SHEET is a gritty fast paced film noir that packs a whole lot of punch into its brief 82 minute running time.
Based on a novel by fledgling film director Sam Fuller, this is a story that'll grab you by the throat in the opening minutes and just refuse to let go until its gripping climax.
And that - in no small part - is due to Broderick Crawford's mesmerising performance. Playing Mark Chapman, the brutish, unscrupulous editor of the New York Express newspaper whose only concern is the number of zeroes on the end of his circulation figures, he dominates the screen and absolutely demands our attention.
Chapman has no time for ethics or morals. He doesn't care whose lives he tramples on or whose reputations he destroys. His sole ambition is to give his readers what they want - or what he thinks they want - and that's cheap sensationalism and the exploitation of those who can't answer back.
And while he sits in his office and barks his orders, it's his protege, ambitious young reporter Steve McCleary, who eagerly puts Chapman's philosophy into practice. When we first encounter him in the film's opening scene he's scoring an exclusive interview with a distraught woman whose sister has just been hacked to death. He gets to her before the police do by passing himself off as a detective and laughs in her face when she rails at him for tricking her. 
And it's McCleary in his zeal to please his mentor who sets in motion the seeds of his destruction. Latching on to the apparently run of the mill suicide of a down on her luck middle aged woman in a seedy rooming house, he discovers she was actually murdered shortly after attending an Express sponsored Lonelyhearts dance. He decides to exploit the connection for maximum publicity and insists it be splashed on the paper's front page, unaware that her killer is his boss.
And if that's not a contrived enough coincidence, Chapman actually encourages him in his hunt for the killer because the story is just too good to pass up.

There's no need for a spoiler alert because SCANDAL SHEET is not a whodunit but a will he get away with it. The thrill is not in trying to guess the killer but in watching McCleary painstakingly piecing together the random clues and wondering when - and if - Chapman will act to protect himself from discovery.
With such a short running time all this naturally unspools at quite a lick and that's good because it helps mask the deficiencies of its two young co-stars. John Derek is too much of a fresh faced pretty boy to be entirely convincing as the kind of journalist in whom an experienced editor like Chapman would place so much trust and confidence.
It's equally difficult to understand why Donna Reed, as the conscience of the newsroom, continues to date McCleary when he's so brazen about his manipulation of the news. McCleary embraces everything she disdains yet she's endlessly willing to give him another chance. If McCleary really were the hotshot journalist the film wants us to believe he is he'd be running around town with fast women and hanging out at nitespots til the early hours, not placating dull as ditchwater Donna.
Not quite a hidden gem but certainly not a diamonique bracelet either SCANDAL SHEET is definitely worth checking out just to sweat along with Crawford as he and we wait to discover whether he's gonna get caught or get away with it.