The Front Page

The Front Page was originally a play written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

It has been adapted to film several times:

• The 1931 film The Front Page was one of the first movies nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, in 1931. 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 (O'Brien) and his fiancee (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.
• 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 a character, 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 by having the plot include 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 U.S.,
• 1948, in the U. K.,
• 1949-1950, in the U.S. as a series,
• 1970, in the U.S.

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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.

External Reference

[Movie Data Base]