The Front Page dvd movie.|
The Front Page buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
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List Price: $7.98 Features • Black & White • Color • DVD-Video • NTSC In Theaters : 04 April, 1931 DVD Release : 08 May, 2001 |
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The Front Page description Howard Hughes produced this first film version of the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur play, fresh from its wildly successful Broadway engagement; it's at once a close transcription of the stage piece and, under Lewis Milestone's aggressively inventive direction (which includes using a bouncing camera to underline the rapid-fire dialogue), a typically eccentric, anything-goes bit of early sound filmmaking. Pat O'Brien, in one of his first films, flies through the role of Hildy Johnson, the ace tabloid reporter with dreams of getting married and going straight; sleek Adolphe Menjou is his boss, the wily editor Walter Burns, who's desperate to keep Hildy on staff to cover an upcoming execution. Director Howard Hawks added whole levels of thematic depth and dramatic tension when he made Hildy a woman (Rosalind Russell) in his 1940 remake, His Girl Friday, but the Milestone version has its own gritty integrity and even manages to challenge Hawks in the strength of its supporting cast: Mae Clarke, Walter Catlett, Frank McHugh, Edward Everett Horton, Slim Summerville, and George E. Stone. --Dave Kehr |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Buyer beware! Fine performance of an old warhorse, but a poor DVD edition |
| First things first: This edition is as bad as stated. I have an ancient VHS version that is better--slightly.
In the Roaring Twenties, Chicago was the most raffish newspaper town in the world. Reporters who had seen it all--and seen it many, many times--covered Prohibition-era beer wars, pin-striped gangsters several times larger than life, crooked politicians of every conceivable stripe, Red scares, labor strife, mesmerizing mouthpieces who reduced juries to tears in order to save thrill killers from their justly deserved dates with public executioners and any other mad thing that turned up by land, sea or air. Pop culture of the day was fascinated by it all and two contemporary plays have survived into our time to remind us of those hard-charging times: "Chicago" and "The Front Page." "Chicago," of course, was a hit play, that became a hit movie as "Roxie Hart," that became a hit Broadway musical, that became a hit retro-movie musical. "The Front Page" was an even bigger hit on stage in its first go-around. It was written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur who had served time in the news bullpen at the Chicago City Hall and had finally escaped to write for other venues that were not a bit more respectable but paid a whole lot better. Their protagonists were Hildy Johnson, a reporter working his last day in the bullpen before escaping into the real world and his boss Walter Burns, the amalgamation of every cynical editor who'd ever run a beady eye over Hecht and MacArthur's deathless prose. I should point out that Hildy Johnson in the play and in this movie is a man (for he would undergo a sex change in the great remake of this film and be played by Roz Russell.) There actually was a Hildy (short for Hilding) Johnson who happened to be a bullpen reporter at the Chicago City Hall. Hecht and MacArthur were acutely aware that Johnson would be in the theater on opening night to observe the antics of the fictional Hildy on stage. They must have hoped that he could take a joke. By all accounts, the real Hildy was a large and formidable Swede. In very short order, the play was faithfully transferred to the movie screen with young Pat O'Brien as Hildy Johnson and dapper Adolph Menjou as Walter Burns. Because of the fame of the remake, "His Girl Friday," the original film is largely forgotten today, but it remains well worth watching. It was the first major film of the talkie era in which the old fluid movement of the silent film camera was re-attained. (Just look at the continuous take in which Menjou argues O'Brien all the way around the press table. How in the world did the director pull that off with the technology available to him at the time?) Menjou and O'Brien are both terrific, as one would expect. To my knowledge, there have been four filmed versions of the old play and at least one made for television. Walter Burns, the most memorable character in the piece, has been portrayed by Adolph Menjou, Cary Grant, Walter Matthau, Burt Reynolds and Robert Ryan. Grant's performance is the best remembered but Menjou is formidable and much, much closer to the intent of the original authors. This is a good and completely authentic version of a great old warhorse and gem of the American theater. |
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