Product Details

• Actors: Rance Howard, Lauren Hutton, Frances McDormand, Robert Urich, Burt Lancaster
• Format: NTSC
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Beverly Wilshire
• DVD Release Date: January 1, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00008G5C7
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #208,039 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bleak House Hollywood Style, June 29, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Scandal Sheet (DVD)

I remember when this film came out and how people dared to compare it to Lancaster's 50s classic THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS in which he played a similar type of scum, with an edge. SCANDAL SHEET isn't actually unworthy of the comparison and in some ways it's almost better than the original. Burt Lancaster must have felt like he was coming home, it was his meatiest role in some time. He plays the editor of a Santa Barbara based "scandal sheet" that's sort of like the Enquirer in some ways, but more like the Weekly World News in others, with completely insane headlines and UFOs, alien abductions, paranormal headlines that the Enquirer usually shies away from now.

I love the way one reporter plants his own story by advertising for readers who might have seen Princess Grace on the beach at Malibu, even though Grace has been dead for a few years. Sure enough, he reels in one woman who claims she saw Grace just last night, walking down the beach in the moonlight. "But Grace, why are you here, in Malibu? You died!" And Grace sadly replies, "But something calls me back to America." The nationalism of such rags is always their most reprehensible part, and SCANDAL SHEET nails it. The scenes around the conference table are scathingly funny, as though Nathaniel West wrote them.

Not so funny, indeed downright painful, is the main storyline, in which our leading lady, Pamela Reed, takes a job at INSIDE WORLD and instantly loses the friendship of her greatest friends, Meg North and Ben Cabot (Lauren Hutton and Robert Urich). Reed is marvelous at the part, not realizing what a moral cesspool she's stepped into, and then when she does realize it her disenchantment and self-loathing rival those of Isabel Archer at the end of Henry James' PORTRAIT OF A LADY. Ben Cabot, sort of a Burt Reynolds type, was once America's top action star, but drink hit him hard and his career's been moldering for years. His loyal wife, Meg North, still a leading lady, has secretly put uup her entire 800,000 dollar salary to make sure he passes his insurance exam. They're wary of INSIDE WORLD, and even though Pamela Reed has been their best friend for years, they know enough of Hollywood to know that evil Burt Lancaster will manipulate Reed into betraying them one way or another, for with him, the story is everything.

For a TV movie of the week, this picture is bleak, bleak, bleak. I can't remember anything like it. You wind up hating everyone, and the ending just twists the knife. All four of the main actors do some of their best work, I saw Frances McDormand's name in the credits, but which one was she? It was years before FARGO!

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Burt must have REALLY needed the money..., August 25, 2009

By 

Sharon Levenson "reader" (new jersey) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Scandal Sheet (DVD)

...to have agreed to star in a clunker like"Scandal Sheet"..Burt Lancaster made many outstanding films in his day.."Elmer Gantry" and "Atlantic City" come to mind as well as"judgement At Nuremburg" and"Sweet Smell Of Success"..It is perhaps his association with this last film that gave producers Roger Birnbaum and Irwin Winkler the idea to cast Lancaster as Harold Fallen,the manipulative,odious publisher of a tabloid newspaper that delights in nasty headlines that trash celebrities..Lancaster as usual does his very best,and his take as Harold Fallen is the only reason to watch this film..
For some unexplained reason Fallen has it in for recovering alcoholic actor Ben Rowan..Rowan,as played by Robert Urich,comes off as a lightweight,and one wonders why Fallen is so willing and eager to destroy him..These questions seem to be at the core of the script and yet they are never even addressed..Rowan is married to actress Meg North(who is played by Lauren Hutton)...She being the more bankable of the two is signed to do a 25 million picture but refuses unless her husband also stars..The producer of the film brings up not only Rowan's alcoholism but his heart and liver problems,making him sound as if he is at death's doors..One look at the healthy,boyish,obviously not sick Urich makes one wonder about the casting choices for"Scandal sheet"..Anyway Meg North says she will underwrite her husband's steep insurance costs with her own hefty salary for starring in the proposed flic,on the condition that her husband is not to know of this.
Enter Helen Grant(Pamela Reed),good friend of Movie star Meg North,and a good but struggling writer down on her luck.Harold Fallen,determined,for whatever unknown reason,to destroy Ben Rowan,now uses Helen Grant to do so..
Actor Peter Jurasik plays Fallen's slimeball right hand man with such skill that he almost steals the picture away from Lancaster,but once the two decide to use the Pamela Reed charecter to ruin Ben Rowan the script nose-dives into the gutter..All of the twists and turns that occur make one wonder why Fallen is so deadset upon ruining Rowan but,as mentioned earlier,this question is never addressed..Scandal involving celebrities has always been of interest to many americans,and the supermarket tabloids do do a brisk business because of this interest,but just being a drunk hardly seems the sort of scandal that would galvanize a tabloid publisher or make him go to such great lengths to destroy a career.
David Lowell Rich directed,which,in the case of"Scandal Sheet" more or less meant that he let the actors do pretty much as they pleased so long as they got thier lines straight.
Not anyone's finest hour,"Scandal Sheet" ranks at the very bottom of the Burt Lancaster film catalouge.