Five Star Final: Movie Review and Connections

Five Star Final Movie Poster

The 1931 film Five Star Final gives viewers a dramatic look at the newspaper industry during a time when competition between newspapers was intense and selling papers was often the top priority. Throughout the movie, the newsboys running through the streets yelling headlines show how important it was for newspapers to grab people’s attention. Their job was simple sell as many copies as possible. Even though the movie may feel a little dramatic to some viewers I personally loved it and how it reflected many real parts of journalism history, especially ideas connected to the Penny Press, Yellow Journalism, and the influence of powerful Press Barons.

One connection to journalism history is the Penny Press. In the 1800s, Penny Press newspapers were sold cheaply so that ordinary people could afford them. Because newspapers depended on large audiences, publishers started focusing on stories that would attract readers quickly. Crime stories, scandals, and emotional topics became popular because they sold papers. In Five Star Final, the newspaper decides to bring back a scandal about a woman’s past because they believe it will increase circulation. This shows how newspapers sometimes focused more on getting attention than on whether publishing the story was the right thing to do.

This also reminded me of the EOTO presentation I did on James Gordon Bennett Sr. and his influence on journalism. Bennett was the founder of the New York Herald and helped change the way news was reported. One of his major contributions was encouraging reporters to go directly to crime scenes to get their information. This type of on scene crime reporting made stories more immediate and exciting for readers because journalists could describe events as they happened and talk to witnesses. While this helped improve reporting in some ways, it also made crime stories more sensational and competitive between newspapers. Watching Five Star Final made me think about how the pressure to get dramatic details and attract readers has been part of journalism for a long time. When the two journalists found the couple dead they didn't hesitate they immediately brought in their camera equipment and started taking pictures for their first page story. Before the police were even called to repost a double suicided they were there ready to gather information and honestly take advantage of the situation and the family as a whole.

The Moment of Realization

The movie also clearly reflects the idea of Yellow Journalism. Yellow Journalism focuses on dramatic headlines, emotional storytelling, and sometimes invading people’s privacy to create a shocking story. In the movie the reporters did just that. They dug into a woman’s past even though the events happened many years earlier and she has moved on with her life. They know that publishing the story could harm her family, but they still continue because they believe it will sell newspapers and put them back on the top. The editors heavily encouraged the story because they wanted higher circulation numbers. This shows how sensationalism can sometimes become more important than fairness or compassion. They were willing to ruin not only the mother's life but also her daughter's future.

The characters in Five Star Final make viewers think about journalism ethics. Journalists have responsibilities both to the people they write about and to the people who read their work. They should try to report the truth while also considering the harm a story could cause. In the movie many characters ignore this responsibility. They treat a real person’s past as entertainment for readers. In the end some characters begin to feel guilty once they see the serious consequences of their reporting which resulted in them being held at gun point. 

Five Star Final Ending Movie Scene

Overall the movie shows how journalism has always faced a tension between making money and acting responsibly. Five Star Final reminds viewers that journalists have a lot of power and with that power comes the responsibility to think carefully about how their stories affect others.

How America Learned to Read Its Highest Court: EOTO #2

Outside of Supreme Court

When the Supreme Court held its first session in 1790, it made decisions that shaped the young nation and virtually no one knew what those decisions said. There was no official system for publishing the Court's opinions, no press office, no distribution network. Opinions were not read aloud in public, not printed in newspapers, and not sent to the states in any organized way. For ordinary Americans, the rulings of the nation's highest court were functionally invisible. Getting the law to the public was slow, incomplete, and, as it turned out, surprisingly controversial.

In the Court's earliest decades, reporting its decisions fell entirely to private individuals working without any institutional support or pay. The first was Alexander Dallas, a Philadelphia lawyer and newspaper editor who began publishing Court opinions in 1790 as a side project alongside his other legal work. According to Craig Joyce's 1985 study in the Michigan Law Review, Dallas's volumes were incomplete, sometimes inaccurate, and not even exclusively focused on the Supreme Court. They mixed in state court decisions with little distinction. His successor William Cranch improved on the accuracy and brought more focus to the task, but the work remained a private endeavor with no government backing and no guarantee of continuity. For the first three decades of the republic, the American public had no reliable or timely access to the rulings that governed their lives.

Alexander Dallas

That changed in 1816 when Congress appointed Henry Wheaton as the first official Reporter of Decisions. Wheaton brought consistency and professionalism to the role, and for the first time the Court's opinions were published systematically and with authority. But his tenure also produced one of the most dramatic legal disputes in journalism history. When his successor Richard Peters republished Wheaton's reports in a cheaper, condensed edition intended to make them more widely accessible, Wheaton sued him for copyright infringement. The resulting case, Wheaton v. Peters(1834), became the first copyright case the Supreme Court ever decided about its own work. The Court ruled that judicial opinions belonged to the public and could not be privately owned by any reporter. As Patterson and Joyce argued in their 1989 UCLA Law Review article, that principle still governs legal publishing today.

The next major shift came in 1874, when Congress established the United States Reports as the official government publication of Supreme Court decisions, finally replacing the old practice of citing opinions by the reporter's name. Then in 1882, West Publishing launched its Supreme Court Reporter, adding headnotes and cross-references that made legal research practical for the first time. Lawyers, journalists, and engaged citizens finally had an organized, annotated record of what the Court had decided. The catch, as Joyce's research notes, was that access still required expensive subscriptions that most ordinary Americans could not afford. The law was public in theory, but private in practice.

From Dallas's incomplete pamphlets in the 1790s to West's annotated volumes at the end of the 1800s, the history of Supreme Court reporting is the history of a democracy struggling to make its most powerful legal institution transparent. The reporters, publishers, and litigants of the 19th century did not just document the Court. They built the foundation that legal journalism still stands on today.

AI disclaimer: Claude was used to make this post based on the sources and presentation outline Claude made for me based on the instructions I was given for this project. I tailored the information to what I thought would be most helpful to share with the class. I also edited both the presentation outline and blog post for clarity based on the sources I found most useful. I also found the pictures on my own.