Tödlicher Skandal

A tabloid magazine threatens to ruin a television performer's career in "Slander," a 1956 film starring Van Johnson, Steve Cochran, Ann Blyth and Marjorie Rambeau.

Well, first of all, it should have been called "Libel" which refers to the printed word; slander refers to the spoken. You'd think after years of dealing with both, someone at MGM would have known the difference.

Steve Cochran plays the head of this trash magazine, a type of periodical nowadays so common one doesn't even blink. In the film, his magazine was the pioneer, probably modeled after the real-life "Confidential." As in the film, a host of me-toos followed - in the '50s, this included "Whisper" and "Quick" magazines. These mags released Rory Calhoun's criminal record, accused Lisabeth Scott of using the services of call girls, that sort of thing. Something about the black and white format of the early tabloids made them even sleazier than "The Enquirer" types today, which deal mostly with gossip, hospital records sold to them by the hospital staff, and outing of celebrities. Eventually celebrities fought back by breaking their news first on talk shows.

H.R. Manley (Cochran) believes that everybody has some dirt in their past, and he's after a huge female film star. He knows that a children's TV performer, Scott Martin (Johnson) grew up with her and knows about a problem in her past. He finds out that Martin himself spent four years in prison for armed robbery and intends to print that story and ruin his career if Martin doesn't tell him what happened to his childhood friend. Does he save himself and let her career be sacrificed? His decision leads to tragedy.

Cochran is cold as ice as Manley and handsome in a George Clooney-Tyrone Power kind of way. His facial expression never changes, nor does his smooth voice. He's a man with a dead soul. His mother, played by Marjorie Rambeau, is against what he does to make a living. Rambeau, a favorite actress of mine, is excellent. Van Johnson and Ann Blyth are the Martins; Blyth is really more suited for society women - she's very pretty and also not the warmest person to stand before a camera. But she does a good job, as does Johnson, who is very well cast as a family man and children's entertainer.

The story is dramatized in a somewhat extreme way. It will definitely hold your interest, though the ending could have been better.