Plot
Joseph W. Randall (Edward G. Robinson), the city editor of a tabloid newspaper, reluctantly agrees when publisher Bernard Hinchecliffe (Oscar Apfel) plans to boost circulation with a restrospective series on a 20-year-old murder and scandal, involving a secretary, Nancy Voorhees (Frances Starr), who shot the man who got her pregnant and then refused to marry her. Nancy is now married to Michael Townsend (H. B. Warner), an upstanding member of society, and has a daughter, Jenny (Marian Marsh), about to marry the son of a socially prominent family, Philip Weeks (Anthony Bushell). She reacts with horror at the renewed interest in the scandal she had put behind her.
To dig up dirt about Nancy, Randall assigns an unscrupulous reporter, "Reverend" T. Vernon Isopod (Boris Karloff), who wears a clerical collar as a device to win the confidence of the bride's parents on the eve of the wedding. They confess to him their concerns that Nancy's past will come out, and he uses their information to write a story that Randall prints. Nancy tries get Randall to back away from the story, but when he refuses she kills herself, as does her husband shortly afterwards. Phillip's parents pressure him to call off the wedding to Nancy's daughter Jenny, but he refuses, and they disinherit him as he stands up to them. An enraged Jenny threatens Randall at gun point, attempting to force him to take responsibility for the deaths of her mother and father, but Philip shows up and calms her down. A guilty Randall denounces Hinchecliffe as a hypocrite and decides to quit the paper, as does his secretary Miss Taylor (Aline MacMahon), who's been in love with him for years.
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“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)