(1930; b/w) Set in Chicago during the '20s at a newspaper, this filming of the Broadway comedy by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, directed by Lewis Milestone, produced by Howard Hughes, is a riot of raucous humor. No sensitivity for political correctness here - "Oh, shut up!" - its humor includes sexist, racial, and homophobic japes; on the wall of the press room to the left of the door are several pinups of naked women - all realistic of the period.

The opening credits feature photos on the pages of a newspaper, identifying each cast member, before a scene of the gallows being prepared for the next morning's hanging of Earl Williams (George E. Stone), accused of having shot dead a colored policeman. In addition to the execution being exploited for the colored vote, Williams is being portrayed by the political machine as a radical Red menace in the run-up to the next election: "We're gonna reform the Reds with a rope."

In the press room, where reporters from each of the city's newspapers congregate and play poker, Roy V. Benzinger (Edward Everett Horton) of the Tribune, aka Listerine, sits at his roll-top desk taking abuse from the others for his aversion to germs. The Morning Post's editor, Walter Burns (Adolph Menjou) keeps calling asking for Hildy Johnson (Pat O'Brien), the only reporter he trusts to cover the hanging. Hildy's with his fiancée, pretty Peggy Grant (Mary Brian), getting ready to catch a train to New York City for their wedding in the morning.

The "double-crossing maniac" Burns flushes Hildy out by setting off a false fire alarm. Over drinks, Hildy admits to Walter that after 15 years of being a newspaperman he wants to settle down with a wife and kids in a home; he's got an offer to write advertising copy ("poetry about ladies' panties," teases a colleague). In the press room where he's bidding his fellow reporters adieu, Hildy reels off his reasons for wanting to quit the business: "Journalists! Peeking through keyholes! Running after fire engines like a lot of coach dogs! Waking people up in the middle of the night to ask them what...," living inside the gray columns of print - he's in love with a smart, spirited gal.

Meanwhile, Williams, who claims he's innocent and an Anarchist, not a Bolshevik, sits awaiting execution. From the press room a reporter claims sheriff Peter B. ("for brains") Hartman (Clarence H. Wilson) has written four more letters (all having similar misspellings) threatening his own life. In walks Molly Malloy (Mae Clark), a streetwalker, complaining to the newspapermen of all the falsehoods in the articles published about her being Williams's girlfriend in a love nest, making "a tramp out of me," just because she appeared as the only witness in his defense, and their cracking jokes while Earl sits beside the angel of death.

Just as Hildy's collected his things and ready to leave, gunfire outside announces a jailbreak: Williams has escaped. Hildy leaps into action, corners Jacoby with a bribe of $260 (all the money he has) for an exclusive: when Professor Max J. Egelhoffer from Vienna handed Williams the sheriff's pistol, asking him to re-enact the crime, Williams shot the doctor and fled. After the governor remarks from the statehouse on the mayor (James Gordon) and the sheriff as being "a couple of eight-year-olds playing with fire," he sends Irving Pincus (Slim Summerville) with an order giving Williams a reprieve. But the mayor bribes Pincus not to deliver his message.

Having negotiated with Diamond Louie (Maurice Black), Burns's thug, for partial reimbursement (at a high commission) of the bribe he paid for the exclusive so that he can depart with Peggy, Hildy's alone in the press room when Williams slips in through the window with an empty gun and surrenders: "I'm ready to go. I don't care. I ain't important." Realizing his good fortune, Hildy gets on two phones at once, speaking alternately with Burns and then Peggy, trying to win a little more time.

Molly shows up; Hildy hides Williams inside Benzinger's roll-top desk; Peggy's mother arrives to fetch Hildy, but Burns orders Louie to remove her; the other reporters rush in wanting to know where Williams is; Molly jumps out the window; the sheriff and the mayor enter, finding Williams and arresting Burns and Hildy for harboring an escaped criminal and kidnapping; only to be undone when Pinkus makes his appearance: "You can't bribe me." Burns commands: "Tear out the whole front page" for the biggest story, with Hildy's by-line, exposing crooks in the administration.

This film has been remade as His Girl Friday (1940), then an updated version of The Front Page (1974) with Jack Lemmon, and another male/female pairing in Switching Channels (1988).

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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