Two Against the World

Sherry Scott (Humphrey Bogart) is a tough programmer at The United Broadcasting Company. The owner wants more popular lower class programs. He wants to do a program about an old murder, the Gloria Pembrook murder case 20 years earlier. Sherry has to make up the murder drama about the woman and his secretary Alma Ross (Beverly Roberts) does not approve. It turns out that Gloria was justified in shooting her husband. She got the new name Martha Carstairs and her daughter Edith is about to marry Malcolm Sims Jr., heir to a big steel fortune. The fear of this program "Sin doesn't pay", leads to tragedy.

The premise is intriguing and has relevance for today. Only the morality is viewed differently today. In fact, it could be seen as quaint but it still matters. It gets a bit preachy at the end. It may be more convincing if Bogie could turn down the indignation by a hair. He should leave it to Reynolds and the doctor to make an ass of themselves.

Only five years after making "Five Star Final", Warner Brothers decided to remake it and this is what came of it. A very short, fast paced film that is very entertaining in its own way. Another good performance by Humphrey Bogart and company. The plot is about a radio station that decides to boost their ratings by bringing back to the public, a 20 year old murder and what happened to the lady who committed the crime. It has dire consequences for all those involved. A very good film, but not as good as "Five Star Final", which in 1931 was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture.

Jack Warner was a movie mogul who never let a good story go to waste. After doing an acclaimed version of Five Star Final with Edward G. Robinson four years earlier, Warner Brothers did a cut rate B picture version, shifting the location to a Fox News like radio station.

Humphrey Bogart steps into Robinson's role as the programming director of the radio station where the owner has a new idea for ratings. He commissions a dramatization of an old murder to be done as a multi-part serial over several weeks.

Helen MacKellar is the woman in question. She killed her husband and a jury acquitted her. Since then she's been living quietly, married again with a daughter. The daughter, Linda Perry, is about to be married to the son of a steel tycoon and she knows nothing about her mother's past.

After MacKellar and her husband Henry O'Neill try every means of pressure to bring to bear against the radio station, they fail and tragedy results.

If it all sounds melodramatic, take my word for it, it is. Still it has Humphrey Bogart in it and there's a nice performance by Harry Hayden who is the genius behind the program in question. Boris Karloff did the part in Five Star Final, but Hayden is fine as the sanctimonious fraud.

Really though for dedicated fans of Bogey.

I started watching this film, "Two Against the World," then thought I'd seen it, and consequently found out it's a remake of "Five Star Final." It's been a while, but the story is basically the same. Humphrey Bogart plays Sherry Scott, the manager of a radio station. His boss suggests that may he's aiming the programming above the heads of the audiences. "You could sit on a toadstool and be above this one," Bogie sneers. The station owner wants a serial based on a twenty-year-old murder case, in which a woman killed her husband but the homicide was found to be justifiable.

The woman, now Edith Carstairs (Linda Perry) at this point is married to a banker (Henry O'Neill) and their daughter (Helen MacKellar) is about to be married to a man from a very good family (Carlyle Moore, Jr.). When the show starts to air on the radio, Edith, whose daughter knows nothing of her past, begs her husband to do something about it. He tries, but to no avail.

This film is an indictment against tabloid radio, as opposed to what we have today -- tabloid everything. Bogart is good in a real '30s melodramatic role, and Beverly Roberts has a nice turn as the know-it-all secretary. Linda Perry is sympathetic as Edith.

I think "Five Star Final" is slightly better, but this film, for its time, was well done.

What a difference five years makes. This remake of "Five Star Final" (1931) came after the repeal of Prohibition and the institution of the Production Code. Consequently, the seedy speakeasy becomes a glossy cocktail bar, and the generally amoral atmosphere of the original acquires a bent to moral condemnation in the remake.

Still, "One Fatal Hour" (as it was titled on TCM) has a lot going for it. It's fast, nasty as Joe Breen would allow, and borrows much of "Five Star Final"'s sharp dialogue. (I think it also borrows the set for the hapless couple's apartment.) Bogart, in a rare pre-1940 lead role, gives a first-rate performance as the news director who struggles against his own principles even as he greenlights a muckraking radio series that will ruin the lives of a rehabilitated murderess and her blameless family. Harry Hayden, as a divinity student-turned-tabloid radio host, actually improves on Boris Karloff's performance in "Five Star Final"; he's charming, genial and deadly. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is B-level, but watchable.