The Front Page (1974)

The movie His Girl Friday is fairly well known, especially among fans of classic movies. The fact that it's a remake of the 1931 movie The Front Page, but with a gender switch in one of the key roles, is also well known. Having fallen somewhat through the cracks is the 1974 remake, again called The Front Page and reverting to the gender roles in the original play and movie. That 1974 remake is going to be on TCM tonight at 6:00 PM.

It's 1929 in Chicago, and anarchist Earl Williams (Austin Pendleton) is scheduled to be executed tomorrow morning for the murder of a cop, a crime Pendleton insists was an accident. All of Chicago's newspapers are covering the story. But Walter Burns (Walter Matthau), managing editor of the Examiner, is in a spot. His star reporter Hildy Johnson (Jack Lemmon) would be perfect for the story, especially to try to get a last-minute interview with Williams. But Hildy is unavailable.

The reason for that is because Hildy is schedule to leave Chicago on the midnight train for Philadelphia, together with one Peggy Grant (a young Susan Sarandon), on their way to get married with Hildy then taking a job at an advertising agency in Philadelphia. Hildy is insistent that he's done with the newspaper business, but if you've seen either of the two earlier versions of the movie, you know that's not quite the case....

Walter tries every trick in the book to get Hildy to do this one last story, from the mild of pointing out that Hildy would have the time to do it before getting on the train, to the more extreme of trying to drive a wedge between Hildy and Peggy by posing as a probation officer and telling Peggy that Hildy is on probation as a sexual deviant! Frankly, if I found out my boss did something like that to me, there's no way I'd ever work for him again, but then we wouldn't have a movie, would we.

The actual story Walter wants Hildy to cover gets more complicated when a psychiatrist, Dr. Eggelhofer (Martin Gabel) is brought in to interview Williams to see whether he's competent to be executed. Eggelhofer's unorthodox methods give Williams a chance to get the sheriff's (Vincent Gardenia) gun and shoot his way out of custody, eventually winding up in the pressroom, hidden by Hildy in a roll-top desk. Williams knows a prostitute with a heart of gold, Mollie Malloy (Carol Burnett), who also shows up looking for Williams.

But then, you've probably seen one (or both) of the earlier movie versions of the story so know more or less what's going to happen. Director Billy Wilder did change things up a bit, in part by adding a cub reporter (Jon Korkes) to cover the execution for the Examiner, which really serves as Walter's means of playing on Hildy's pride -- this young reporter is so unfit for covering the execution that Hildy is just not going to be able to countenance the kid doing it, and take over himself. I think the Mollie Malloy role is also made bigger and given a resolution I don't remember from either of the previous two versions.

If Billy Wilder had found an old 1920s play and dusted it off to make an original movie out of The Front Page, what we get on screen wouldn't be a bad little movie, although some fans of studio-era movies might be less than pleased with the language. However, there's the well-known and deserved classic His Girl Friday sitting there, and that's a problem for any subsequent movie version. As a result, this 1974 version pales somewhat and it's easy to see why it hasn't stood the test of time the way His Girl Friday has. Wilder allows Carol Burnett to play her part too broadly, and Martin Gabel's antics don't work at all.

Overall, however, this version of The Front Page really isn't bad, and it's also the chance to see Allen Jenkins in his final film role, along with some other veterans getting smaller parts. It is available on DVD should you miss the TCM showing.