‘The Front Page’: A Picture Worth a Thousand Words

Young people sometimes ask me what caused me to seek a career in journalism. I can answer them unequivocally. It was a movie.

In 1931, when I was an impressionable kid, I saw “The Front Page” at the Fox Theater in Whittier.

The movie was a word-for-word version of the virile play written in three white hot days by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. It was set in the dingy press room of the Criminal Courts Building in Chicago. It starred Pat O’Brien as Hildy Johnson, Mary Brian as his fiancee and Adolphe Menjou as his editor, Walter Burns.

My wife and I saw the play again the other night at the Colony Theater, on Riverside Drive (through Jan. 10). The plot was untouched. The dialogue rang true. The acting was excellent. The play had the pace and vitality of the original.

The story concerns the sheriff’s press room reporters’ deathwatch for Earl Williams, a prisoner who is condemned to be hanged at 7 o’clock in the morning. Reporters representing the city’s several newspapers are shown as cynical, duplicitous low-lifes who would lie, cheat and steal for a story. The villains are the corrupt sheriff and mayor.

The hero is Hildy Johnson, ace reporter for the Examiner. Hildy has decided to quit the newspaper business, marry his fiancee, Peggy, go to New York and get into advertising. He has train tickets for himself, Peggy and her mother.

Opposing this idyll is Walter Burns, tyrannical managing editor of the Examiner. He doesn’t want to lose Hildy. When Williams escapes and surprises Hildy alone in the press room, Hildy is hooked. He realizes he has the story of his life. He hides Williams in a roll-top desk and the game is on.

In the 1931 movie, Pat O’Brien’s Hildy was brash, fast-talking, quick-thinking, irreverent and dedicated to his job (up to a point). At my tender age I decided that I wanted to be just like Hildy, and that’s pretty much what I became.

Hildy is less than attentive to his fiancee, leaving her and her mother to wait in taxicabs and at the railroad station, and in fact unintentionally subjecting his fiancee’s mother to violence, while he pursues his reportorial heroics. I believe my wife can testify that she has often played second fiddle to my newspaper.

As Hildy’s fiancee says at one point in the play, “You never intended to be decent and live like a human being. You were lying all the time!”

I never had an editor as ruthless as Walter Burns, but I believe I would have done almost anything any of them asked me to. As the play suggests, I have even wheedled photographs out of mothers whose children have been raped or murdered.

Once a photographer and I called on a woman whose husband was in jail for shooting at her, through a window, while she was in bed with a neighbor. We sweet-talked her into letting us take her picture. I believe I have honestly lived up to the Hildy inspiration.

The play at the Colony graphically exposes the tawdry aspects of my profession. Not only the reporters but their papers are exposed as underhanded, deceitful and exploitative. In one scene Burns is exhorting his desk man to tear up the front page for the Williams story. His desk man protests. Burns says, “To hell with the Chinese earthquake! . . . I don’t care if there’s a million dead. . . . What’s that? To hell with the League of Nations! Spike it!”

Many readers might argue that today’s newspapers are still like that. Most good newspapers today present a more balanced version of the news. But as someone once said, news is “wine, women and wampum.”

There have been at least three other movie versions of “The Front Page.” In one, “His Girl Friday” (1940), Rosalind Russell plays Hildy (Hildegard) Johnson, and Cary Grant her boss. Despite the role reversal, the show loses none of its humor and vitality. In 1978 Billy Wilder made “The Front Page” with Jack Lemmon as Hildy. In a third remake, “Switching Channels” (1988) Kathleen Turner played Hildy (no loss), but the scene is a television station, not a press room, and some of the grittiness is lost.

Anyone who has seen the play knows that the tag line is one of the greatest in show business. It’s a line Burns comes up with to get Hildy back after he has caught the train to New York with his fiancee and future mother-in-law. Just in case anyone doesn’t know it, I won’t repeat it.

When Billy Wilder was making the second movie version, I happened to visit the set, and I asked Wilder whether he intended to keep the last line intact.

“Are you crazy?” he said. “That’s the whole picture!”

It’s nothing less than sacred.