The Front Page

The press room of a Chicago jail. A man is to hang the next morning and the reporters are playing cards while they wait. Hildy Johnson is about to quit and get married; his editor Walter Burns does not want to let him go. Then the condemned man escapes and hides in the press room itself. Hildy alone knows and tells nobody. The subject is not the story but reporters having got used to hanging day. Not one of the men in the room is thinking about the person about to die; all of them are thinking about the front page, and the film gives that as observation rather than as a joke. The form is nearly a single location: one room, one table, a row of telephones. The dialogue overlaps and the pace never drops. It is counted among the films demonstrating that such speed was possible in the first years of sound. The source is the play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, both of whom had genuinely worked as reporters in Chicago; the men in the room are drawn from people they knew. The same play was later remade as His Girl Friday with Hildy rewritten as a woman, and that version is better known. Lewis Milestone directs. Adolphe Menjou plays Walter and Pat O'Brien plays Hildy. Who it is for: viewers who like fast dialogue and newspaper stories. Who it is not for: anyone who will be caught on technical quality; the early sound recording is hard to follow in places.