The Front Page **** (1974, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Susan Sarandon) – Classic Movie Review 1987

Following Lewis Milestone’s 1931 classic The Front Page and the vintage 1940 Cary Grant version His Girl Friday, Billy Wilder’s delightful 1974 hit comedy The Front Page is the more than welcome third version of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s venerable 1928 newspaper play.

Remade again in 1988 as Switching Channels, it is filmed here as an entertaining, slightly coarse and farcical period romp. The show is as robust and entertaining as ever, and it proves a perfect showcase for the magnificent comedy team of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in their third pairing out of ten movies together.

Matthau plays the scheming, sourpuss 1920s Chicago tabloid newspaper editor Walter Burns. Lemmon stars as the fed-up ace reporter Hildy Johnson he manipulates into covering one last story before quit his job to get married to sweet and patient Peggy Grant (Susan Sarandon). 

The action is set on the day before the guilty and insane murderer Earl Williams (Austin Pendleton) is due to go to the gallows. The death row convict escapes and shows up at the office trying to establish his innocence, giving the editor a golden opportunity to prevent his top reporter from retiring by tempting him to stay and write the story.

The starry character actor support cast all get their chances to shine, particularly Sarandon, Pendleton, David Wayne, Carol Burnett, Vincent Gardenia (as the Sheriff), Allen Garfield, Herb Edelman, Charles Durning, Harold Gould (as the Mayor), Dick O’Neill, Cliff Osmond, Jon Korkes and Martin Gabel.

The TV version cuts the four-letter words, which in any case seem anachronistic and jarring in a film set in 1929, so it is no great loss, though censorship is always wrong. Wilder was inspired to make The Front Page after seeing the British National Theatre’s stage version at London’s Old Vic theatre.

The original Broadway stage version opened at the Times Square Theatre on 14 August 1928 and ran for 278 performances.

Burns’s idea for Johnson to snap a death photo of Williams’s execution by strapping a camera to his ankle with the shutter release in his pocket happened for real on January 12 1928 when Chicago Tribune reporter Tom Howard used a camera strapped to his leg to take a picture of murderer Ruth Brown Snyder at the moment of her death in New York’s Sing Sing prison.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1987

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