Shaw’s Pygmalion seems to be foolproof — actor-proof and director-proof, that is, and even adapter-proof. And so, possibly, is Ben Hecht’s and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page. Like Pygmalion, The Front Page is really built. The high-potency melodrama and the cynical farce are joined so unerringly that the play comes across no matter what you do to it. Bulging with the embellishments added by the director, Billy Wilder, and his co-scenarist, I. A. L. Diamond, the structure still stands up in the new movie version. However, this new Front Page, with Walter Matthau as the glib, unscrupulous Walter Burns, the editor who will stop at nothing to prevent his star reporter, Hildy Johnson (Jack Lemmon), from leaving the paper, is a thick-necked, broad-beamed show. Opening with a ragtime tune, it comes riding in on The Sting. It’s enjoyable, but, with about half of the dialogue rewritten for the worse — uglified — it’s enjoyable on a very low level. If one didn’t know the play, or the previous film versions, one could never guess from the new production that it is based on a classic American play. In box-office terms, this probably represents a triumph for Wilder and Diamond — the movie has no style or distinction to scare people off. But something singular and marvelous has been diminished to the sloppy ordinary. It’s quite possible that if the film had been done in a modern equivalent of the play’s original style it wouldn’t get the laughs it does. (Even so, M*A*S*H, which was close to a modern equivalent in style, was a big hit.) But it would have been worth Billy Wilder’s attempting (though the producer, Paul Monash, and the executive producer, Jennings Lang, may not agree). This way, Wilder’s got a box-office success; the other way, he might have come back in glory.
Hecht and MacArthur had intended to write a hardboiled exposé of the tabloid journalism of their youth, but, as Hecht said in his autobiography, A Child of the Century, “our friendship was founded on a mutual obsession.” They went on into other fields, but “we remained newspaper reporters and continued to keep our hats on before the boss, drop ashes on the floor, and disdain all practical people.” And so, as they admitted, The Front Page turned into a “valentine.” But it’s a hardboiled valentine: ribald, caustic, prankish — a celebration of a profession that once had its own wisecracking camaraderie. People became reporters because that’s what they’d dreamed of being. The rewards certainly weren’t financial; Sherman Reilly Duffy, another newspaperman of the period, noted, “Socially a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender, but spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.” There are reporters from eight rival Chicago papers in the one-set play; it all takes place in the pressroom of the courthouse on the night before a timid, dazed anarchist is to be hanged for murder. The play lovingly satirizes the addiction to excitement that the newspapermen felt in the era when competitive papers, itching for scoops, tried to outreach each other in sensationalism; the reporters — razzing musketeers — play poker, bait the mayor and the sheriff, and run out after hot leads. Celebrating the lowdown talk of a cynical, male profession, Hecht and MacArthur achieved what American dramatists had long been trying to do: they demonstrated the expressive vitality of plain American speech. The rapid-fire dialogue that rips along can be so faultlessly rhythmed that the words snap into place. And when the phrasing is right The Front Page can give audiences the sharp pleasure that one gets from a perfectly orchestrated feat. It can be, and has often been, almost intoxicatingly skillful — a sustained high. That’s what the new movie version isn’t. It keeps you up, all right, but in the way that, say, TV’s Kojak does — just because there’s so much happening all the time. In Wilder’s Front Page, the sound keeps blasting you. The engineer seems to have rammed the microphones into the performers’ faces, as if to cover the noise of the slot machines at Vegas. The overlapping, hollering lines, which were funny in the past because they were so precise, are bellowed chaotically now and turned into sheer noise. I don’t know whether the movie (which is still mostly set in one room) was actually post-synched, but it has that sour, dead post-synch tone, and with such extreme variations that in order to hear some of the actors at all you have to have Matthau’s lines blistering your eardrums. Godard got sensitive live sound in the sixties on minuscule budgets, and Altman proved in California Split that audiences would respond to multiple-track “overheard” humor — why this barbaric, hog-callers’ track? I won’t deny that it works with many in the audience, but I imagine that it will also keep others away. The sound is insulting: it assumes that we’re deaf to actors’ verbal styles.
Suppose that instead of remaining a journalist a man like H. L. Mencken became a movie director. Would he stop warring with boob taste and try to satisfy it? And after a while would he be as divided as Billy Wilder, sometimes complaining that the public won’t accept finesse anymore, and at other times deriding those who attempt it? Billy Wilder is a smart, sharp-toothed, sixty-eight-year-old venomous wit; he’s too smart and too old not to know what he’s doing here. He’s debauching the Hecht-and-MacArthur play, exploiting a beautiful apparatus to produce a harsh, scrambling-for-laughs gag comedy. There are additions, such as having Walter Burns go to see Hildy’s fiancee (Susan Sarandon), that are totally out of character: Burns wouldn’t go to see the woman; she was no more than an obstacle to be brushed aside. And every once in a while Wilder slips into attitudes that pass beyond tough-guy cynicism into cretinous misanthropy. In one scene, the other reporters start pummelling Hildy, as if to beat him to death, and in the scene in which the streetwalker Mollie Malloy (Carol Burnett), whom the reporters have been jeering at, leaps out the pressroom window, the reporters’ exclamations, which in the original express stupefied guilt mixed with the recognition that she’s provided them with a story, have been altered to such unfeeling dumb cracks that the spirit of the play is violated. One can’t deny Wilder his right to make a happy, high-spirited play more acrid, but this is Three Stooges acrid. Most of the performers seem badly in need of a director; you feel they’ve been told to shout, and not much else.
Walter Burns, the egomaniac who doesn’t care about anything in the world but his newspaper, would seem to be a perfect Wilder hero — the Satan of the double-cross, the funny mean guy. And Burns, who knows that Hildy secretly wants to be saved from the boring respectability of marriage and a job in advertising, is an ideal role for Walter Matthau. It should be a cinch for him. One of the best hyperbolic comedians in movies since W. C. Fields, Matthau has the witty body of a caricaturist, and as Burns he should be able to uncoil to his full height and use the aplomb he’s been storing up. Here’s his opportunity to be suavely funny, and to develop in us the awe in which Walter Burns is held by newspapermen; Burns’ maniacal spirit should itself be awe-inspiring. One would think that Matthau was already prepared for the role and that practically all he needed to do was to watch out for his squashed face, which can look waggish even when it isn’t meant to, and be careful not to be droll and not to be facetious. He should be perfectly self-possessed for this character, who is a cartoon and yet mythic. How many great roles are there for Matthau? Walter Burns, maybe Saul Bellow’s Tamkin — not very many. Yet, with this chance to play a really classy American character, he plays it like a rerun of other Matthau parts, with growling distortions. He mugs along cheerily, booming out the expletives and gags and jokes about flashers that Wilder and Diamond have contributed. What’s funny about Walter Burns is his dapper confidence, his mad nonchalance. Matthau isn’t the legendary Herald Examiner editor the play is written around; he’s more like a whistle-stop Bear Bryant. Matthau doesn’t even use his body for its line, for its design factor. He was infinitely better as Whiplash Willie, in the only performance that made Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie worth sitting through. Is it possible that he’s one of those performers who look great in crap and can’t rise to real occasions? Or is it that he has got too lazy to work out a role the way he used to?
Matthau, however, still gets his laughs; Jack Lemmon doesn’t. He’s about fifteen years too paunchy for the role of Hildy, but maybe he could get by if he didn’t look so logy and heartsick. Maybe he’s played the tenderhearted fall guy so often that by now he takes one look at Matthau’s dirty grin and figures that once again he’s stuck playing the guy who doesn’t have it and can’t make it — the guy who lets himself be used. But that’s not what Hildy Johnson is meant to be: Hildy isn’t a schnooky victim — he’s the top reporter in Chicago, he’s cock of the walk. Anyone who saw the newspaper movies of the thirties knows the style in which Hildy Johnson is meant to be played. Lee Tracy, who created the part, never got to play it on the screen, but he brought Hildy to his performances in dozens of movies (Blessed Event, Dinner at Eight, Bombshell), and just about everyone else who played a newspaperman learned from Tracy’s strutting style. Tracy could point up a line with a jabbing forefinger or a jiggle of the thumb, and you knew the raffish, cocksure pride that a reporter took in being a reporter. Hildy is conceived as an ace word-slinger who has a sense of showmanship about his profession. When he rants at Burns on the phone, he’s proud of his invective, he gets a swingy rhythm to his insults; he’s a virtuoso playing the violin — spiccato — when he tells off his boss. Lemmon’s Hildy Johnson isn’t big-time; Lemmon has been playing the patsy so long that even his most manic lines droop. There used to be a breezy, euphoric craziness in him; he had it when he played the drums in Bell, Book and Candle, and he certainly had it in Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. Maybe it’s not good for an actor to play so many defeatist roles; Lemmon carries them with him and plays Hildy Johnson like a mortuary assistant having a wild fling.
A great many fine performers are poorly used (like Carol Burnett) or not quite brought out (like Herbert Edelman and Doro Merande). And a little of Vincent Gardenia goes too far with me. (He looks strikingly like Mayor Daley here, but he plays the sheriff.) But if one needs a reason to see the movie, there is one freshly felt performance — Austin Pendleton’s, as the nut-loner, the condemned man, Earl Williams. In this production, Earl is a fuddled court jester out of Woody Allen. Sniffling from a cold, speaking softly but hurriedly, the words tumbling together in a touching slight stammer, he has his own madman’s sweetness and dignity. Pendleton provides the only touch of innocence in this loud production; he provides a luminous bit of nonsense — almost a pastoral touch. He’s like a rabbit paralyzed by the noise of the locomotive coming at it. I wonder how Wilder let even this much innocence get through.
[January 27, 1975]