Five Star Final: A Melodrama in Three Acts

New York: Samuel French. Very Good-. 1931. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [good solid copy, spine cloth faded and spine lettering mostly rubbed away, minor scuffing to front cover; some pencil annotation next to cast list, ink numbers next to scene descriptions on synopsis page, text itself is unmarked]. Classic play about the cynical world of yellow tabloid journalism, by an author who "knows what he writes about," per the Preface by Herbert Bayard Swope. Produced in New York in late 1930, with a fast-moving film version released by Warner Bros. the following year (directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starring Edward G. Robinson as the hard-bitten city editor); they liked it so much they remade it -- albeit to considerably lesser effect -- as "Two Against the World" in 1936, with Humphrey Bogart. .