geezer cinema: the front page (lewis milestone, 1931)

This is the twenty-seventh film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2021-22", "A 33 week long challenge where the goal each week is to watch a previously unseen feature length film from a specified category." This is the 7th annual challenge, and my third time participating (my first year can be found at "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-20", and last year's at "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2020-21"). Week 27 is called "Best of the Best (Picture) Week":

It's no secret, the vapid pageantry that the Oscars facilitate; but I thought it might be an interesting exercise to see what would've happened had the Letterboxd community been the voting party each year.

This week's challenge is to watch a previously unseen Best Picture nominated film considered to be the best by the Letterboxd community.

As is clear from the directions for this week's challenge, The Front Page was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in 1931 and didn't win. Director Lewis Milestone was also nominated, as was Adolphe Menjou for Best Actor. (Neither of them were winners. The winners were Cimarron, Norman Taurog, and Lionel Barrymore. Milestone could take solace from the fact that he had won directing Oscars the two previous years.)

The Front Page was a successful Broadway play in 1928, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. It was a perfect choice for a movie version, since talkies had just arrived, and the fast-paced dialogue of the play would work well on the screen. Like the play, much of the movie takes place in one setting (a press room populated by reporters), which helped with the newish technology, but Lewis Milestone was also willing to try things that might be lively. (David Thomson refers to Milestone's "inventive, flashy technique that passed for style".) The Front Page is never visually stodgy, and the sound is also exemplary (this is nothing like what we see in Singin' in the Rain). Still, it was the dialogue from Hecht and MacArthur that drove the film.

The film has suffered from a couple of things it had no control over. First, there was another version of the play in 1940, His Girl Friday, that is a cinema classic. Director Howard Hawks had the idea to change the character of Hildy Johnson from a man to a woman, which changed the dynamics of the plot. Hawks also used overlapping dialogue to make his film seem even faster than it already was (Hecht and MacArthur intended for this, but Hawks pushed it to an extreme). There is no shame in being a lesser movie than His Girl Friday, but when that film is a remake of your own, the comparisons are unavoidable.

Another problem for The Front Page is that it fell into the public domain, resulting in a surfeit of versions of low quality. Luckily, the film was restored a few years ago, so we can see it in its best light.

The Front Page is enjoyable ... the stage play may be indestructible. But I admit I spent much of my viewing time wishing I was watching His Girl Friday for the umpteenth time.

Comments

[Robin]

I agree on His Girl Friday. The male - female interaction in that enhanced the story.