A decent film poster for this doesn't seem to be available online. It's not really an obscure film, although it is Pre-Code, and the Criterion Channel print of it was pretty pristine. It's a fun little film that looked like it could be skirting more tragic elements but was determined to remain light and breezy throughout. The lead actor is one I've never seen before, but who apparently had a solid career - Lee Tracy.
He plays Alvin Roberts, someone who worked in advertising for the Daily Express but got to sub for the gossip columnist George Moxley (an excellently deadpan Ned Sparks) while he was on holiday and turned the column into a scandal sheet, revealing what society couples were about to procreate (using the code words "Blessed Event") by bribing a nurse in the maternity ward to tell him the minute rooms were booked. His moment of truth arrives when he reveals a "blessed event - without benefit of clergy" and it ruins the woman involved.
Brief recap: Al's salacious baby-gossip inflames the masses, brings in threats of lawsuits, but most importantly, massively improves the Express's circulation. So when Moxley comes home early from his vacation to deal with the clamor, the owner of the paper takes him aside
and puts him on various bogus assignments (ending up as the Pet editor) so that he can keep Al churning out the rumors. Al is soon sitting pretty, even more so when an attractive high schooler comes to interview him for her school's newspaper and he starts to court her (it cuts down the ick factor that she looks in her late 20s).
But then a well-known Chicago hit man comes up to warn him against some things he's said about his boss, and Al shows that he's canny and brave as well as a tabloid trash-monger. He records his confession to a recent hit on his newfangled dictation-taking device (it records on tubes of something breakable) and, having sent an intern downstairs with them, confront him with this fact and uses it to turn him from threat to stooge, as a plant in the city's underworld who will feed him tips to keep his bottom away from the electric chair that Al describes so vividly to break his spirit.
(After he leaves Al discovers that the boy tripped going downstairs and the recorded evidence is all broken, but thankfully the hitman never discovers this.) Threaded throughout is Al's long-running feud with local crooner Bunny Harmon (real name: Herman Bunn, played by Dick Powell in his first film role)
whose radio show his mother adores. This leads to a climax where Al sneaks into the opening of Harmon's new night club, to prove that he can, despite being banned, only to be shot at by a new hired goon of the mob boss (who, it turns out, is the baby-daddy of the singer who blabs her secret to Al, thinking he already knows it, gets his assurance that he won't reveal it, and is stabbed in the back, the one thing he feels bad about). Will Al's girl ditch him because of his dirty trick? Will Al survive the hit attempt? Will the poor singer commit suicide now her mother knows she got knocked up out of wedlock, or will the mob boss have her knocked off to keep the secret from his wife? It won't take you long to find out, this one's a trim hour and twenty minutes.
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