While the newspapers await the details of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s report on President Trump, we went up on the Web to watch “Five Star Final.” That’s the classic movie about the genre of gutter newspapering that seeks to drive up circulation — or Web traffic — through the journalism of personal destruction. If ever there was a metaphor for our time, this is it.

We’ve been thinking about it since Mr. Trump spoke of the “young and beautiful lives” that have been crushed by the special prosecutor’s “witch hunt” that turned up no prosecutable collusion on the part of anyone that mattered. “Who’s going to give back the young and beautiful lives (and others) that have been devastated and destroyed by the phony Russia Collusion Witch Hunt?” Mr. Trump tweeted.

“They journeyed down to Washington, D.C., with stars in their eyes and wanting to help our nation,” the president tweeted. “They went back home in tatters!” The president seemed to blame both the Special Prosecutor and the press. The press has run up big online circulation flogging an investigation that eventually cleared the president of collusion and spared him of obstruction.

“Five Star Final,” made in 1931, stars Edward G. Robinson as the editor of the Gazette. The paper’s publisher, Hinchecliffe, decides to try to sell more papers by exposing the fact that one Nancy Voorhees has a skeleton, so to speak, in her bourgeois closet. As a young woman, she’d shot a man who’d made her pregnant. She’d been acquitted, found a husband, and raised the daughter.

When the daughter is about to get married to a respectable young man who knows nothing of all this, the Gazette gets to work. Robinson sends a reporter named Isopod, played by the young Boris Karloff and disguised as a clergyman, to ingratiate himself with the family. His exposé hits on the eve of the wedding. Nancy Voorhees and her husband kill themselves. Their shattered children accuse the editor of murder.

Robinson is struck by — wait for it — a pang of conscience. We know, we know, in real life, editors don’t have consciences. Hollywood, though, was young. Not only does Robinson crack, but he wheels on his publisher. “I’m through with your dirty rag,” he roars. He doesn’t duck his own blame. He does draw a distinction. “I did it for wages,” he keens. “You did it for circulation.”

The editor tells the publisher he wants him to wake up in the middle of the night and confront his own “squashed, putrid soul.” Says he: “I want you to know that every human being that worked for you knows what a diseased hypocrite you are.” Then he quits and throws his own publisher out of his office. Then goes into his private bathroom to wash his hands compulsively before stalking out.

We understand that the analogy between Edward G. Robinson and, say, Dean Baquet is a bit of a stretch. In the movie, reporters of the Gazette are so mortified by their paper they sometimes pretend to work for the Times. “There’s some guys that furnish the manure,” one of them remarks ruefully, “and there’s some guys that grow the flowers.”

Not that the editor of the Sun is any angel (by flogging the Brexit story the tyrant has run up our own circulation to dozens of page views a week). Even in newspaperdom, though, there are sometimes Hollywood endings. “Five Star Final” ends with the Gazette’s front page lying in the gutter, before being swept along with the rest of the muck. Drain the swamp indeed.