309 - The Front Page, United States, 1931. Dir. Lewis Milestone.

Sunday, November 6, 2017

309 - The Front Page, United States, 1931.  Dir. Lewis Milestone.

Lewis Milestone started making movies in the 19-teens.

By 1930 he had made All Quiet on the Western Front and had won the Academy Award for Best Director, as the film won the Academy for Best Picture.  It was nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Writing.

He would go on to direct Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman in 1936's Anything Goes, Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney Jr. in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1939), Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan in additional scenes of William Wyler's The Westerner, Dana Andrews in A Walk in the Sun (1945), Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin in The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers (1946), Myrna Loy and Robert Mitchum in John Steinbeck's The Red Pony (1949), his own version of Les Miserables (1952), Gregory Peck in Pork Chop Hill (1959), Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Peter Lawford in Ocean's 11 (1960), and Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).

Coming off that great Oscar win in 1930, Milestone next made a comedy based on a popular play written by former newspapermen Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

Two days ago we watched Howard Hawks 1940 film His Girl Friday, starring Cary Grant as Walter Burns and Rosalind Russell as Hildegard "Hildy" Johnson.  Burn and Johson were ex-husband and wife who also worked together on the newspaper.  The original Burns and Johnson, however, were both men.  In this version, Adolphe Mejou plays Walter Burns and Pat O'Brien plays Hildebrand "Hildy" Johnson.

In this first version, Hildy is also quitting the business, in this case to get married.  They are also holed up in the Chicago Criminal Courts Building.  Earl Williams also escapes the Cook County jail before being hanged, crawls through the open upstairs window to the news room, and hides in the roll top desk.

The fast witty language was adapted by Bartlett Cormack, with additional dialogue by Charles Lederer (who would later adapt Hawks' version His Girl Friday).

Folks assume that the Howard Hawks 1940 version His Girl Friday is automatically faster paced.  However, Hawks himself did not believe so.  He believed they were about the same speed.  He set up two projectors side by side and played both The Front Page and His Girl Friday onto screens alongside each other.  He determined that the two films ran at about the same rate.

Check out the wit and physicality of 1931.

It is a different film.

But it is also funny.