The Front Page
The Front Page was originally a play written by
Ben Hecht and
Charles MacArthur.
The play is set in the City News Bureau in
Chicago,
Illinois, a joint office/club house where reporters from all the city papers work. Hildy Johnson, one of the reporters, is about to get married and move to New York. His boss, newspaperman Walter Burns, is trying to keep him around. The two men respect each other but continually spar. All the reporters are covering the scheduled hanging of Earl Williams, who escapes from custody. Burns and Johnson manage to put aside their differences to get the scoop.
|
promotional poster for The Front Page (1974) |
The Front Page has been adapted to film several times:
*The
1931 feature film
The Front Page was one of the first movies nominated for the
Academy Award for Best Picture that year. Its screenplay was written by
Bartlett Cormack.
Lewis Milestone directed, and it starred
Adolphe Menjou,
Pat O'Brien,
Mary Brian,
George E. Stone,
Matt Moore and
Edward Everett Horton. The movie is a "
screwball comedy" about an
investigative reporter (Pat O'Brien) and his fiancee (Mary Brian), who hope to cash in on a big story involving an escaped accused murderer (Stone) and hide him in a
rolltop desk while everybody else tries to find him. The movie was also adapted into a one-hour episode of
CBS radio's
Academy Award Theater with O'Brien and Menjou.
[ ]* In
1940,
His Girl Friday starred
Cary Grant and
Rosalind Russell.
* In
1974,
The Front Page was directed by
Billy Wilder and starred
Jack Lemmon and
Walter Matthau.
* In
1988,
Switching Channels starred
Burt Reynolds and
Kathleen Turner, with the newspaper reporters updated to television reporters.
His Girl Friday and
Switching Channels took the unusual twist of changing the sex of acharacter, from a male Hildy Johnson to females Hildegaard 'Hildy' Johnson and Christy Colleran respectively.
John Varley's
1991 science-fiction novel Steel Beach takes the story—and the change of sex—to another level. In the novel, the plot includes a sex-change by a male reporter named Hildy Johnson.
There have also been four television productions, all under the title
The Front Page:
*
1945, in the US,
*
1948, in the UK,
*
1949–
1950, in the US as a series,
*
1970, in the US
The
musical Windy City (book and lyrics by
Dick Vosburgh, music by
Tony Macaulay), which premiered at the
Victoria Palace Theatre,
London,
England on
July 20,
1982 and ran there for 250 performances, is also based on
The Front Page.
For the real-life background to the settings, and for a character, of
The Front Page, see
City News Bureau of Chicago, where MacArthur had worked, and
Chicago's American.
*
List of United States comedy films*
*
The Front Page at the
Internet Movie Database
