The Front Page

The 1928 Hecht and MacArthur play had already been filmed twice, once in 1931 and again as Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday in 1940, where Hildy became a woman. Billy Wilder made it a third time knowing all that, and he started out reluctant. His own formulation: if a picture is good you should not remake it, and if it is lousy, why remake it. What won him over was nostalgia for newspapers. Unlike the two previous versions he refused to update the setting and left it in 1920s Chicago, with a clear reason: by 1974 the daily paper was no longer the dominant news medium. The one genuine advantage this version had was profanity. Language the Production Code had kept off screen could finally be used as written. Jack Lemmon plays reporter Hildy Johnson and Walter Matthau plays editor Walter Burns. Exteriors were shot in San Francisco because its architecture passed better for 1920s Chicago. On a 4 million dollar budget it took 15 million, Wilder's first real box office success in years, while reviews split. Who it is for: fans of fast-talking newspaper comedy and of Lemmon with Matthau. Who it is not for: people who love His Girl Friday. The tempo and the idea that made that film are hard to find here.