The Front Page

Wilder's adaptation of the 1928 Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur play The Front Page is in itself stagebound and barely amusing but compared with the Howard Hawks' 1940 version His Girl Friday it is just plain drab (there is also a 1931 version by Lewis Milestone which I have not seen).

Hildy Johnson is now a man (Jack Lemmon) and the wonderful gender-based playfulness that made His Girl Friday so successful is gone, the only female presence now being Hildy's fiancée (Susan Sarandon) who is a mere background figure. Instead Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond work in jokes about "faggots" who live in Philadelphia, throw in a fastidiously tidy (read "homosexual") reporter, Bensinger (David Wayne ), and pepper the dialogue with crudities but the outcome only manages to seem crass. Lemmon, who had also starred in Wilder and Diamond's hit, Some Like It Hot, is an actor I've always found borderline annoying and his attempt to portray a streetwise newspaperman is far from convincing . Walter Matthau does a robust turn with the familiar anything-for-a-headline editor-in-chief character but overall the only moments that raise this film above the mechanical come from the minor roles, notably Vincent Gardenia as the puppet sherrif and the Gentlemen of the Press including Charles Durning, Herbert Edelman and Allen Garfield.

DVD Extras: A newly restored print is supported by the original theatrical trailer and Hollywood Remembers profiles on Matthau and Lemmon.

Available from: Madman

 

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