NFR Project: 'The Front Page' (1931)

NFR Project: ‘The Front Page’

Dir: Lewis Milestone

Scr: Bertlett Cormack, Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur

Pho: Glen MacWilliams

Ed: W. Duncan Mansfield

Premiere: April 4, 1931

101 min.

When sound came in, it finally made sense to adapt dialogue-heavy source material for film. One of the first great sound adaptations was this, the 1928 hit play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

In it, a self-confessed anarchist is sentenced to be hung, unjustly, in an unnamed big city suspiciously like Chicago. A covey of reporters sits around the Press Room at the city courthouse, angling for new information on the impending proceedings.

One of the ace reporters, Hildy Johnson, enters. He is disgusted with the cheap, cynical world of newspapering, and is quitting to get married, move to New York, and work in the advertising industry. The only problem is, his boss, editor Walter Burns, wants to keep him on the staff and will do anything, no matter how unscrupulous, to get him to stay.

The condemned prisoner breaks free, Burns comes to the Press Room to take command, and Hildy keeps getting blocked from leaving. All this is done with quick patter and overlapping dialogue, a heady rush of words between people trying to put one other on each other. It’s a proto-screwball comedy with serious underpinnings.

Hecht and MacArthur’s world view is pretty bleak. Journalists themselves, they conjure up a view of reporters as crass, cynical, and opportunistic, fabulists who think nothing of making up a story better than the one they’re working on. It’s a stereotype that’s been promulgated ever since in countless movies and TV shows. (Unfortunately, it is spot-on – as a former journalistic misfit, I can attest to it.)

The play is performed on a single set, a discouragement for a director used to moving the camera like Milestone. He cleverly escapes a few times from the Press Room set, but he is tasked primarily with making something dynamic out of a bunch of people yammering at each other.

This he does by unmooring the camera from its tripod and maneuvering around the room. Periodically, a character will paces around the set’s central table, and the scene crackles on as the camera does the loop-dee-loop, tracking the moving object. The camera swoops in on the ribald faces of the reporters.

And what faces! The casting is top-notch, with solid performances from Adolphe Menjou as Burns and Pat O’Brien as the rapid-fire Hildy. Add great character actors such as Walter Catlett and Edward Everett Horton. Even and especially biting are the portrayals of the sheriff (clarence Wilson) and the mayor (James Gordon), a perfect pair of conniving fools.

The play ends with the immortal line, “The son-of-a-bitch stole my watch!” This wouldn’t fly with the censors, so a typewriter is casually dropped to blot out the offending word. Still, this sprawling farce dealing with death, justice, and politics is edgy for its time, and certainly relates attitudes that, with the advent of stricter censorship codes, would be squelched.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Public Enemy.