Summary
Ink-stained moralist Martin Drake, monarch of the morning daily The Record, crusades for Prohibition while nursing a clandestine thirst that burns his throat like swallowed cinders. Across the civic chessboard stalks Ned Medford, brewers’ bagman and state-house puppeteer, whose gaze lingers lecherously on Drake’s porcelain-pure wife Esther. One dusk-shuttered parlour scene—Medford’s gloved hands clamping Esther’s waist, Drake bursting in—detonates the plot: the publisher drowns suspicion in bootleg gin, his vow of abstinence shattered on marble bar-tops. Medford, scenting ruin, dispatches plug-uglies to hustle the editor into a warehouse tomb; enter Tip O’Neill, ink-slinging knight-errant, who drags his boss from a coffin of newsprint and exposes the booze-ring’s ledger of graft. Esther, desperate to clear her name, confronts Medford in his rococo lair; Drake arrives like an avenging paragraph, fists flying, chandeliers crashing, till Medford lies pulped beneath a ticker-tape snowfall of incriminating headlines. Marriage re-set in boldface, Drake’s paper rolls off presses wet with absolution.
Synopsis
Publisher of the influential newspaper, The Record , Martin Drake, supports Prohibition because of his own secret battle with alcohol. Ned Medford, a powerful politician who represents the liquor interests, is infatuated with Martin's wife Esther, and when Martin enters the room as Medford is seizing her in his arms, he mistakenly believes that she is being unfaithful to him and goes on a drinking spree. One of Medford's henchmen kidnaps Martin to prevent him from publishing information that would implicate Medford in a plot to destroy the publisher. Reporter Tip O'Neill rescues Martin and writes up the story, while Martin goes to Medford's apartment, just as Medford is attacking Esther, who had gone there to plead her husband's case. After a vicious fight in which Medford is defeated, Esther explains everything to her husband, and his shadows of doubt are banished.
