Star Reporter

Marsha Hunt is the best thing about this low budget crime drama! Mongram studios like other low budget poverty row studios tried to compete with the majors by adding more action, sex or violence where they couldn't afford talent. And this story has more than your average plot twists... In this newspaper drama, a young man's father, a prominent newspaper publisher is violently murdered by famous gangsters. The young man uses the power of his newly inherited press to get revenge upon the killers by exposing them. Unfortunately, the young man's schemes go awry when he learns the identity of the trigger man. Plot devices include two sets of fathers, two signed confessions that gets stolen out of two safes, by two safe crackers!

Warren Hull took over as publisher when he father was killed. He backed his parents' old friend, Wallis Clark, in his campaign as District Attorney; he and Clark's daughter, Marsha Hunt, being in love may have had something to do with it. They have the signed confession of hired killer Morgan Wallace, and hope to use it to force Wallace into testimony against Clay Clement and his mob apparatus. But Clement has something that should stop everything in its tracks. He knows that Wallace is the actual father of Hull.

I suppose it's a potentially interesting story, but under the direction of the usually reliable Howard Bretherton, this picture is a slow, confusing mess. Everyone talks fast, but they keep repeating the same thing, so the plot stalls out, and then there's a twist like Clement sending someone to steal the confession, so everything is back to the beginning, somehow making a 60-minute B seem much longer.

A lot of plot for 62 minutes in this fast paced little entry in the "newspaper vs. mob" genre. Various characters on both sides of the law harbor secret (and not-so-secret) motives, hidden relationships, and the good old-fashioned grudges that D.A.s, gangsters, and newspaper reporters bounce back and forth among themselves. Along with all that are the two women in the story--fiancée and mother, each with her own concerns.

At the center of it all, Warren Hull is not bad in the title role, though perhaps the most interesting thing about his character is how long it takes him to discover a basic fact of the plot that several other characters--both on his side and working against him--are keeping from him!

Is it a lot to keep track of? Um, not particularly, since the plot moves along too fast for us to get too wrapped in the whole situation. But then, we don't have time to get bored either. Which is kind of what we expect from a B movie with a title like Star Reporter, right?