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This fleet and raffish newspaper melodrama was released the same year as Citizen Kane and in its far more modest way is almost as much fun. Like Kane (and dozens of ‘30s potboilers before it, most churned out by ink-stained wretches come west for a piece of the Hollywood action), it's a cautionary reminder of the roughhouse beginnings of the Fourth Estate.

Reporter Edward G. Robinson, overseas winning The Great War, started a peppy servicemen's paper The Doughboy. When he returns to New York, he wants to run the same sort of rag – a tabloid for the straphangers. `The war's done things to people,' he tells his old-school editor. `We've made life cheap. and that makes emotions cheap...There's no privacy left...Keyholes are to look through.'

But getting start-up money proves hard, and he ends up striking a bargain with big-time gangster Edward Arnold, who'll stay the silent partner. But when Robinson's let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may style threatens Arnold's interests, the partners become adversaries. `What people want to put in papers is advertising,' Robinson lectures Arnold. `What they want to keep out is news.' After Arnold tries to strong-arm his way into control of the paper, Robinson vows to put him out of business.

LeRoy was an old hand at filming quick-and-dirty dramas that rested, however lightly, on timely social issues. So he predictably does as well (if not a mite better) as he did a decade earlier with Robinson in Five Star Final. Other players include Laraine Day, Marsha Hunt and William T. Orr, but Robinson and Arnold dominate, as they should. The story takes a clumsy and fanciful turn or two near the end (with Robinson suddenly delivering a reverent paean to the press at odds with everything he stood for), though even these twists echo big stories of the roaring ‘20s. The closing sentiment of Unholy Partners, however, is a dubious one: That the `tabloid age is over.' A pass through the supermarket checkout aisle or a few clicks of the television remote show how laughable that prediction was.

Fresh from World War I, Edward G. Robinson has all kinds of new ideas about his chosen profession of journalism. But his old newspaper won't see things his way. Not discouraged, but needing cash he gets it from Edward Arnold a gangster with whom he becomes Unholy Partners with.

Although Arnold is at first a silent partner and gives Robinson a free hand with the paper, it's not a partnership that in any way can last. Robinson, and more particularly reporter William T. Orr, starts looking into the activities of Arnold's friends and later Arnold. And then Orr becomes interested in Laraine Day who is a nightclub singer that Arnold has taken a kind of lease out on.

The whole film builds toward the inevitable showdown of Arnold and Robinson and the two really dominate the film, the other players barely getting any innings in their performances. Arnold is a very careful man in maintaining a respectable front and he sees the possibilities in controlling a large media outlet. Not unlike that other Arnold film character from 1941, D.B. Norton from Meet John Doe.

Charles Dingle who is a favorite character actor of mine is in Unholy Partners. But he's in a very subdued role who Arnold has under his thumb by controlling Dingle's gambling debts. Dingle's not at all the arrogant and pompous man he usually plays. And I miss that.

Robinson and Arnold make quite a good pair of matched adversaries. Unholy Partners showed they should have done more work together.

All set up for a rip-roaring hour and a quarter, with Edward G. as the sassy newshound back from the trenches, in partnership with gangster Edward Arnold, surely two of the very greatest. Just watch Robinson outwit Arnold in a poker game for the paper. You know it won't end well. In tow are Laraine Day, who loves the former, as does naïve William T. Orr, an aspiring newspaperman who still has all his ideals intact.

It goes more or less as you'd expect, but with MGM glitz and taste rather than Warners energy. Which means it's 20 minutes too long, and with a weird drawn-out ending tacked on for no particularly good reason, and you go away after 95 minutes feeling less than satisfied. Someone shudda told those guys at MGM, class ain't everything.

I saw this movie over twenty years ago, but it remains somewhat more memorable for the speed and sureness of it's directing and acting, particularly the dynamite pairing (I believe the only time it happened) of Robinson and Arnold. Theirs, as it turns out, is an unholy partnership, with Arnold slowly realizing that his control of a major newspaper would give his criminal economic power a tremendous boost, and Robinson slowly realizing the responsibility of a newspaper is more than just ballyhoo and gossip (would that a certain current newspaper tycoon would learn this - but he won't). Inevitably the partnership ends violently, with Robinson left in a very, very peculiar position of knowing too well who killed his partner.

Unfortunately, Mervyn LeRoy's film was smothered in 1941 by Orson Welles' first masterpiece (and greatest film?) CITIZEN KANE. But though Kane does show how a newspaper empire is built (and almost lost) by Kane, that film is actually a look at a flawed "great man", and the problem of how people remember the man's actions. This space is not adequate to go into the plot of KANE (or it's technical brilliance), but one should only note that Charles Foster Kane's ego also involves grasping at a political career aimed at the White House, marrying two women (and losing both of their love for him), building an opera house and failing to control public views on culture, and building a modern version of a pyramid as a final monument to that ego. The many sides of the character of Charley Kane keep our attention with repeated viewings, but such a depth is not found in LeRoy's film. This does not dismiss the LeRoy film as a failure, but relegates it to an entertaining movie only.

The interesting thing is that UNHOLY PARTNERS has (like KANE) a basis in fact. KANE is based (whether Welles admitted it or not) on the life of William Randolph Hearst, with his political interests and his social pretensions. And yes, Susan Alexander is a nasty swipe at poor Marion Davies. But in UNHOLY PARTNERS, the newspaper is based on THE NEW YORK MIRROR, a tabloid that popped up in the 1920s, and lasted into the 1960s (I remember reading it's Sunday comic sections in my first eight years). The newspaper was edited by Phillip Payne, who loved spreading scandalous stories to sell his paper. He also enjoyed ballyhoo - stories about aviators, channel swimmers, murder cases, baseball and football stars, actors and actresses - you did not read THE MIRROR to get an intelligent political viewpoint. He is not known for having any criminal partner, but the Arnold character is clearly based on Arnold Rothstein, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, and was known as "the big bankroll" being the contact man between Wall Street and the underworld. In 1928 Rothstein was shot to death in a hotel elevator, and the crime was never solved. That same year, like Robinson's character, Payne was killed when a plane he was flying across the Atlantic crashed into it.

Edward G. Robinson plays a newspaperman who comes home from World War I with a plan to launch a tabloid newspaper. The problem is he can't find financial backing from any reputable businessmen, so he gets it from racketeer Edward Arnold. Which is fine, at first, until Robinson starts running stories that tick Arnold off.

Enjoyable crime drama from MGM with solid turns from the two Edwards playing characters that aren't so nice. Kind of funny that the protagonist in this is less likable than the villain!. They always tried to give Eddie G. young love interests and in this one it's Laraine Day, who wasn't even born when WWI ended. She's fine but miscast as one could never see her being into Robinson and, frankly, she's at least a decade younger than she should have been. Really I'm not sure why it was necessary to set the film in the post-WWI years, especially when they don't try very hard to capture that era. Many of the hairstyles and clothing are of the 1940s not 1920s. The movie also features a banal "young lovers" subplot. William T. Orr plays the guy and he is nothing special. Lovely Marsha Hunt plays the girl and she gets to sing, which is nice, but other than that also nothing special. Despite some issues, there's no way a movie starring Edward G. Robinson and Edward Arnold could be a total misfire. The movie is most interesting when these two are on screen together. Give it a look for the Eddies.