Billy Wilder signed the popular comedic screen pair of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau for The Front Page to mock the craze and the crazy of modern society’s leading information platform: the newspaper. The result was a blast whose energy lives in the reel beyond time.
Set in Chicago in the 1920s, The Front Page features Lemmon as Hildy Johnson, an acclaimed reporter with “Chicago Examiner” who has just quit his job to get married to his fiancée Peggy Grant (Susan Sarandon). But the paper’s managing editor Walter Burns (Matthau) is ravenously chasing the coverage of a convict’s upcoming execution and hounding Hildy for one last story.
The Front Page, being an adaptation of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play of the same name, is essentially a dialogue-driven comedy and the dialogue – by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond – excels in every aspect from line length and diction to emotion and timing. It’s the theatre where you are in for every line and every single word of literally every single character until the very end.
Lemmon being the protagonist leads the play with the nonchalance of his character followed by Matthau and other supporting characters who mostly are reporters or members of the city administration. Austin Pendleton shines in his special role of Earl Williams, the death-row convict who is not as bad as depicted by the press.
Satirizing the news industry in its obsession with crimes and convictions, The Front Page very smoothly unravels the web of politics and crime through the thread of the newspaper business. The race for breaking it first and serving the most spiced-up version of a story is dissected for the viewer in Wilder’s style. It’s a ’70s gem not to miss!
