Exclusive (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Sep 17, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Alexander HallRelease Date(s)
1937 (July 15, 2025)Studio(s)
Paramount Pictures (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
The stage and screen success of The Front Page prompted an entire subgenre of newspaper comedies and melodramas; among them, Exclusive (1937) is agreeably unpredictable partly because it’s all over the map. At times it’s Capraesque, with its idealistic, principled assistant city editor (played by Fred MacMurray) fighting corruption and leading an eye-opening populist revolt against its gangster antagonist. At other times it plays almost like a screwball romantic comedy. Some of this herky-jerky tone might be traced back to co-screenwriter Sidney Salkow. As a director, his films often broke with storytelling conventions, though it’s hard to tell whether Salkow was being playful or experimental or merely incompetent. (In my opinion, usually the latter.) Another of the writers, Jack Moffitt, is better remembered as a film reviewer and virulent anti-Communist. A third, Rian James, was like Moffitt a newspaper man, a columnist for the Brooklyn Eagle, but also an airmail pilot and one-time stunt man. With a combination of talent like that, how could Exclusive not be peculiar and unconventional?
After jury-tampering his way to a not-guilty verdict, gangster Charles Gillette (Lloyd Nolan) smugly “pays his respects” to the editorial staff of the Mountain City World, a crusading newspaper where assistant city editor Ralph Houston (MacMurray) and aging reporter Tod Swain (Charlie Ruggles), along with mayoral candidate Horace Mitchell (Ralph Morgan) and others have been campaigning to get Gillette convicted. Gillette announces that he’s just purchased the Sentinel, the World’s rival newspaper, and in an effort to poach the World’s staff, offers to double the pay of anyone willing to join him there.
Refusing Gillette’s offer, Ralph and Tod head to Tod’s home, where Tod’s daughter, Vina (Frances Farmer), is Ralph’s fiancée. They make light of her college degree and scoff at her ambitions to go into journalism, prompting her to go to work for Gillette. There, she exposes mayoral candidate’s Mitchell’s long-ago prison record. His life ruined, Mitchell appears at the Swain home and commits suicide in Vina’s presence, blowing his brains out. (Considering Production Code limitations, this is a surprisingly effective scene.) Later, with the naïve Vina’s unwitting assistance, Gillette plots to ruin another rival, a department store owner, by causing a spectacular elevator accident at his nine-story flagship building.
With Charlie Ruggles’s character particularly, the story’s shifts between comedy and tragedy, complete with comical underscoring for the comedy scenes, doesn’t work, but it does keep the viewer on his toes, uncertain where all this unusual storytelling is heading. Further, the plotting is rarely credible, from Vina’s willingness to work for an obvious gangster clearly using her to realize his malicious, felonious actions, to an absurdly unbelievable scene where Ralph and Vina talk their way out of being murdered by Gillette’s chief henchman (Horace McMahon). Nevertheless, the suicide and elevator accident scenes are almost shocking when contrasted to the film’s lighthearted moments, such as a comical drinking aside with Ralph and Tod, the former ending up locked in the icebox.
For the climax, when the town turns on Gillette and the townsfolk become a violent, unstoppable mob, the film becomes almost epic, with unexpected big scale action incorporating several enormous sets; the picture becoming genuinely exciting here.
Frances Farmer, undoubtedly the big draw for a title like this today, is fine in a role reportedly earmarked for Carole Lombard, who supposedly turned it down. The film came in the middle of the major part of her career, roughly 1936-42, before psychological problems brought her ruin for many years. MacMurray, however, is the rock that holds the film together, and Charlie Ruggles, stuck with the part most schizophrenic in tone, is excellent in both the comedy and dramatic moments, while Lloyd Nolan, usually hard to dislike, is effectively oily and unrepentant.
Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray of Exclusive, in its original 1.37:1 full-frame and black-and-white, is an excellent encoding, sharp with good blacks and contrast. Seemingly everywhere on the Internet and in every film reference book I consulted the film is listed with an 85-minute running time, while the disc itself runs 78 minutes. It’s possible the film elements sourced were from a cut-down reissue version, but the movie gives no evidence of this and might well be the complete, original release version. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono is also above average, and supported by optional English subtitles. The disc itself is Region “A” encoded.
The lone supplement is new audio commentary track by Jason A. Ney, with “Frances Farmer expert” Jeffrey Kauffman joining the chat.
For a modest newspaper melodrama probably intended to be nothing more than filler on Paramount’s releasing schedule, Exclusive is pretty good and more than a little surprising.
- Stuart Galbraith IV