The best Russell Simpson’s crime movies

A hunter happens upon a fugitive and his daughter living in a Georgia swamp. He falls in love with the girl and persuades the fugitive to return to town.

A bored small-town teacher gets mixed up with an escaped bank robber.

Mike (Phillips Holmes) is a popular college track star, but with a terrible secret. His father John (Grant Mitchell) is in prison for murdering the person who murdered his brother. The story leaks out, Mike loses a class election and he withdraws from school and heads home in shame. The town's old timers admire Mike and his father, while younger ones think Mike is probably no good. Before long, John is pardoned and heads back home. Can they all live in peace?

A foreword warns against the peril of yellow journalism, and the story illustrates it by following events in the upstate New York town of Cornwall after prominant financier George Ferguson is killed. Two types of New York City journalists descend on Cornwall, one interested in facts, the other in getting sensational "news". Mrs. Ferguson is known to have been friendly with a local banker. The Fergusons quarrel the evening he is killed (by "burglers", his wife tells the police later), and she is arrested, spurred on by the "bad" journalists, who also manage to badger the banker's wife into the hospital. Meanwhile, young Bruce Foster runs the Cornwall Courier, and shows the big city reporters how to dig out real news while they attempt to subvert justice for their own ends.