(1940; b/w) Comic calamity in a New York City newspaper from director Howard Hawks - based on the play, The Front Page, by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) returns to the Morning Post to tell her former husband, managing editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant), who had been her boss before she divorced him and left her job as a top-notch reporter, that she's engaged to Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), an insurance salesman, whom she'll be marrying the next day. She refuses his every inducement to come back to the newspaper, explaining that she wants a normal life with a home and children, reminding him of how their honeymoon had been ruined by his having to cover a cave-in at a mine.

When he meets Bruce, whom he later describes as looking "like that guy in the movies, Ralph Bellamy," and hears that the newly weds will be living with Bruce's mother for the first year, he exclaims: "Home with mother, in Albany, too!" Charming, double-crossing Walter brings up the murder trial of Earl Williams, for shooting dead a colored policeman, trying to win over Hildy's social conscience to cover the story of a poor, unfortunate man (recently fired after 14 years with the same company) headed for the gallows. Finally with an offer to purchase a life-insurance policy from Bruce (making his ex-wife his beneficiary) if Hildy agrees to write the piece, Walter gets his reporter back temporarily.

The dialogue is loud, sharp, and zingy, rapid fire from machinegun mouths, at times hilariously involving two simultaneous conversations on different topics.

Mollie Malloy (Helen Mack), who for befriending Williams has been labeled the killer's girlfriend, accuses everyone in the press room of writing lies. To keep Bruce out of the way, Walter has his tough guy Louie arrange to have the fiancé arrested for stealing a watch, for attempting to procure the services of a blonde, and for passing counterfeit currency.

Meanwhile, Williams escapes from the county jail while re-enacting the shooting, at the request of Eglehoffer the psychiatrist, using incompetent sheriff (Gene Lockhart) Peter B. Hartwell's pistol; he ends up hiding inside Tribune poet Benzinger's roll-top desk in the press room, where Walter orders him: "Get back in there, you mock turtle!"

With votes hanging on the hanging of Williams, in a splendidly funny scene of innocence confronting corruption, the mayor (Clarence Kolb) tells the governor's messenger Joe Pettibone (Billy Gilbert), who has a reprieve for the prisoner based on the man's insanity: "You never delivered this." Everyone seems certifiably insane. Mollie leaps out the press room window, falling to the sidewalk below; Bruce's mother gets kidnapped; and Bruce announces he's taking the nine-o'clock train.

Once again realizing she's been conned, Hildy tears up her piece as Walter pleads: "This is war; you can't desert me now." Comments about Communists and the Red menace get mixed in with everything else as the murder story becomes an opportunity to clean up the city's administration, the biggest thing in two years, "bigger than the European war."

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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