Review: Five Star Final (1931)

Mervyn LeRoy's Five Star Final (1931) is not just an old Hollywood movie; it is a direct conversation about the ethical failures that have plagued journalism since the rise of the penny press. The film follows a tabloid newspaper that digs up a decades-old murder case involving a woman who has long since rebuilt her life, purely to boost circulation. The consequences are devastating. For anyone in journalism, the film works almost like a textbook on what happens when a newsroom abandons its responsibility to the public.

The most central ethical problem in the film is the complete lack of regard for the people being covered. The editors and reporters at the Gazette never stop to ask whether publishing the story is the right thing to do, they only ask whether it will sell papers. This is the defining sin of yellow journalism, and the film portrays it without any sympathy. The subject of their coverage, Nancy Voorhees, is not a public figure. She poses no threat to the public interest. There is no legitimate reason to expose her past other than profit. That distinction, between stories the public needs and stories the public simply wants, is one of the oldest and most important debates in journalism ethics, and Five Star Final puts it front and center.

The film also tackles the issue of deception in reporting. At one point, a reporter gains access to the Voorhees family by pretending to be a clergyman. This kind of deception, using a false identity to extract information from an unsuspecting source, is considered a serious ethical violation by modern journalism standards. The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics explicitly calls on journalists to avoid deceptive newsgathering methods unless there is no other way to get a story that genuinely serves the public. In this case, there was no public interest justification at all, making the deception purely predatory.

Perhaps the most shocking moment in the film comes after Nancy and her husband both die by suicide following the story's publication. Reporters climb through the fire escape and photograph the scene, calling the details into the editor for the five-star final edition. Rather than pausing to reckon with what the paper's actions caused, the newsroom treats the deaths as just another angle to chase. It's a complete illustration of what happens when journalists stop seeing their subjects as human beings.

What makes the film especially credible is that it was written by Louis Weitzenkorn, a veteran of New York City newspapers who rose to become editor of the New York Evening Graphic, a sensationalist tabloid known by its critics as the "Porno-Graphic." He was not an outsider criticizing the press; he was someone who had worked inside it and watched these compromises happen in real time. That background gives the film's ethical critique real weight.

Five Star Final is a scathing indictment of for-profit yellow journalism that rings true nearly 100 years later. The ethical violations it portrays, like prioritizing profit over people, using deception to get a story, and ignoring the human cost of publication, are not relics of a different era, they are warnings that journalism, at any point in history, can lose its way when circulation replaces conscience as the bottom line.