THE HEADLINE WOMAN

US, 1935, 71 minutes, Black and white.
Heather Angel, Roger Pryor, Ford Sterling, Conway Tearle, Franklin Pangborn, Robert Gleckler, Jack La Rue, Ward Bond.
Directed by William Nigh.

A brisk comedy drama with elements of crime.

The headline woman herself does not appear until well into the film, the initial parts focusing on gamblers, a commission for a hit on a recalcitrant gambler and the response of the police as well as of newspaper reporters. Ford Sterling plays an often rather dumb policeman who believes the fleeing hitman is concerned about his wife and hails him into a taxi. This please badly for the Commissioner of police, Conway Tearle, with derisive headlines.

However, the focus is on the reporters, led by a lively Roger Pryor, other reporters including Franklin Pangborn in different kind of role and Ward Bond as a reporter usually sleeping and phoning in his reports pretending he is at the scene of the crime.

Pryor gets the bright idea of using Hugo Myers, the policeman, in solving crimes, putting reports in the papers (because the angry police Commissioner refuses to give information to the reporters). Eventually, they decide to have a night on the town, going to an expensive club – where the hitman is present – have a binge and then Hugo Myers is to raid the place at a particular time. He doesn’t, is challenged when he hears that he is considered too lazy and there is the raid. There is also some shooting.

At the club is the daughter of the newspaper owner, Heather Angel, who is compromised with the gun from the hitman but is rescued by the journalist, and in his home, with a variety of tangles in which Myers is encouraged to arrest the hitman’s girlfriend because of the gun. In the meantime, the Commissioner won’t listen to the truth.

Needless to say, it all works out well, with a romantic ending.

Direction is by William Nigh, a prolific director of small-budget films in the 1930s and 40s.