The Front Page

Although Howard Hawks gave The Front Page a different twist by making Hildy Johnson a woman and giving her a romantic involvement with editor Walter Burns, The Front Page still holds up well today for its biting wit.

All the clichés about newspapers as portrayed on film originate with this work. Lewis Milestone assembled a great cast of character actors as the gang in the press room and the lines they toss back and forth at each other are priceless. Even better were some of the lines at the expense of the self important political and law enforcement figures they cover.

I suppose it's the nature of the job that makes newsmen cynical. But this group takes it to an exponential level. Frank Capra did something very similar in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. When newly appointed interim Senator James Stewart arrives in town and they make him out a buffoon, Stewart goes around punching out all of them he can find. When he does reach the Capitol Press Room, the whole group of them Thomas Mitchell, Jack Carson, Charles Lane, etc. bring him up quite short. That group of correspondents could easily have been in the press room in The Front Page. I have no doubt that Capra was inspired by Milestone's work in The Front Page.

The casting of the leads is quite a story. Pat O'Brien had played Walter Burns on stage and someone in the Howard Hughes organization got their wires crossed and signed him for Hildy Johnson. O'Brien made the switch effortlessly though.

Lewis Milestone originally wanted Louis Wolheim with whom he'd worked the year before in All Quiet on the Western Front. But then Wolheim died suddenly right before filming was to start. Adolphe Menjou was hurriedly substituted and he proved to be an inspired choice.

When The Front Page was done on the Broadway stage the roles of Johnson and Burns were played by Lee Tracy and Osgood Perkins. I could see either of them in their respective parts. Both got to Hollywood, but too late to do either part for the screen.

The two female roles of note were Johnson's fiancé Peggy and the streetwalker who had befriended convicted killer George E. Stone who's execution the reporters are covering. Mae Clarke as the prostitute is just fine. A tough year for Mae, she jumps through a window here and gets slugged with a grapefruit later on in Public Enemy.

Mary Brian is the fiancé and in an underwritten part, she's dull as dishwater. Not her fault because the film is about the guys. But seeing this, no wonder Howard Hawks got the inspired idea to eliminate her, create THE Ralph Bellamy part and make Hildy Johnson a woman for His Girl Friday.

Of course The Front Page has the look and feel of the era that birthed it. But the portrait of newspapermen is still fresh and the issues raised about crooked politicians running on "law and order" platforms is probably even more relevant today than back then.

Newspaperman Hildy Johnson (Pat O'Brien) is quitting the business and getting married to Peggy (Mary Brian). But his unscrupulous boss Walter Burns(Adolphe Menjou) doesn't want him to quit. Also an innocent man is about to be hanged and Burns will do anything to make sure Johnson works on that story.

Fast and funny--the first cinematic version of this story. It shows its age at times and some of it is wildly overacted but O'Brien and Menjou are both just great in their roles. Also director Lewis Milestone uses some very unusual camera tricks to keep the story moving and there's lots of action and running around which is unusual for an early talkie.

This was remade in 1940 with a sex change making Johnson a woman. That was "His Girl Friday" with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant. That one is better than this but this is better than the 1974 version (that had Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau) and 1988 remake called "Switching Channels" (with Kathleen Turner and Burt Reynolds). They're all good to varying degrees but this one came first. Worth seeing.

The camera-work on this underrated beauty is breathtaking - one of the panning shots in the newsroom precedes Woody Allen's restaurant pan shot in Hannah and Her Sisters by over half a century! It is so organic, yet so breezy and alive. Don't miss the clever panning action with the gun sequence, and the mirrored room with the man getting off the elevator, which is also a throw-away gem. The actors are some of the finest character and bit players ever assembled on screen and the lightning dialog and clever editing is really quite modern in its speed and ingenuity.

I too am a devoted fan of His Girl Friday, but these are two very different films. Front Page is a masterpiece of old school ensemble character acting, and without it to break new ground, I don't believe His Girl Friday would have had nearly the breakneck pacing and out of the bottle genius that it is rightfully remembered for. The Front Page should take an esteemed place in film history for being the fertile breeding ground of screwball comedy in general and many of its masterpieces, including His Girl Friday, in particular. A must see for 1930's film buffs and screwball comedy fanatics!

If it weren't for the even better Howard Hawks remake, "The Front Page" would probably be much more well-remembered today. It's entertaining in its own right, with a slightly different feel from the remake, and it is better than most movies of its own era in at least a couple of important respects. While you can still tell at times that it is from the very early sound era, it does use sound and dialogue more smoothly and constructively (that is, rather than as a mere novelty) than do most early 30's movies.

Adolphe Menjou has the role of Walter Burns, and he is a good fit, giving the character just a slightly different turn from the way that Cary Grant would later play it. The role of Hildy Johnson is somewhat bland in this one - it was the genius of Hawks in changing this role into a more worthy foil for Burns that made "His Girl Friday" so outstanding - but in compensation, some of the other reporters get more to do here. The supporting cast has a number of good character actors, especially Edward Everett Horton as the fussy Bensinger, and it's good that they were given some worthwhile moments of their own. Certainly the great remake deserves its own reputation, but this version deserves to be remembered as well.

One of the biggest problems facing filmmakers in the early sound era was not a technical one, but one of what form the stories should take. Now that the spoken word was a means of expression, stage plays became a prime source for movie material. The only trouble was that, while the theatre is not necessarily an inferior medium, if you shoot a play simply as it is, no matter how good it would be in the theatre, on the screen it becomes static and dull. There are ways round this problem, and they demonstrate how much of a difference it makes the way in which a movie is filmed.

The Front Page's director, Lewis Milestone, was an ostentatious attention-grabber who liked to make every use of the technology at hand. But all his showing-off was for a purpose. As oppose to the limited dimensions of the stage, Milestone is always staging things in extremes of width and depth, especially when introducing major characters. A really neat manoeuvre is when a cop visits the newsroom during a game of poker. The camera sits on the middle of the small table and pans round as each reporter is harangued in turn. A man walking round a table is a fairly low-key bit of business, but this technique makes it simply whirl. There is only one point where I feel it's too much, when the camera "bounces" up and down on the faces of the reporters as they sing a taunting song. But the great thing is Milestone also knows when to tone it down and let the players shine. He often uses a long, still take for a key scene, such as Pat O'Brien and Adolphe Menjou's talk at the bar.

But an equally important contribution is the sense of realistic camaraderie between the principle members of the cast. The atmosphere in the newsroom straddles comedic exuberance and realistic banter, and as such is absolutely in the spirit of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's original work. Adolphe Menjou shows impeccable control, with movements that are almost cartoonish, such as the little backward lean into his stride off after announcing "I'll kill him!" It's a fresh approach, but one that would catch on, being very much the vein of Clark Gable's Oscar-winning performance in It Happened One Night (1934). Lead man Pat O'Brien is at his most extrovert and, in the process, his most likable. Walter Catlett is unflappably brilliant, and there is also a chance to see Edward Everett Horton honing the persona that would make him a fixture throughout the next decade.

The result is probably the most vibrant and effective stage adaptation of the early talkies, and it set the tone of much of what was to come, straddling the gap between the wild farce of the Marx Brothers and the sophisticated comedies like Dinner at Eight. Later directors (George Cukor, most notably) would learn to tone down Milestone's approach and create stage-to-screen adaptations that flowed smoothly and were purely cinematic, but The Front Page was nevertheless an important jolt to an industry still trying to find its way, and a lesson in how to make a script low on action and confined in space into something dynamic and brassy.