The Front Page was the 12th, and 9th credited, feature film directed by Lewis Milestone, Russian Jewish emigré born in what is now Moldova in 1895 whose directing career spanned from the end of WWI to the early days of the Beatles, thus the core of the XXth Century. A director of moderate talent, Milestone enjoyed disproportionate renown in his day, directing everything from screen adaptations of Brodaway comedies, inter alia the effort under review, and musicals, to prestige literary adaptations such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, for which he won an Oscar for best director, which, helás, didn´t make him a better director...) or Of Mice and Men (1939), graduating in the 50s to big budget productions like Les Misérables (1952) or Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Fun factoid: he also directed the original Ocean´s 11 (1960) the first film to feature the full Rat Pack.
The Front Page adapts to the screen an eponymous play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, about a group of hardboiled Chicago newspapermen bent on scooping on the imminent execution of a presumed subversive agitator (George E Stone), mandatory love interest provided by the scheduled wedding of journalist Hildy Johnson (Pat O´Brien, much more at ease playing Irish priests and the like) to fiancée Peggy Grant (Mary Briant), event which conflicts with the professional duties, interests and urges of Hildy.
The Front Page was one of the first films to use the rotambulator, an ancestor of the dolly, which allowed for a few press room sequences with dialogue shot in circular motion, not unlike similar scenes in much later efforts by Quentin Tarantino (viz Reservoir Dogs, 1992), providing for some relief for what otherwise comes across as excessive, undestandably in a stage adaptation and an early talkie, talkyness. The remaining relief comes from Ben Hecht´s delighful dialogue.
Supplementary sort of interest for contemporary viewers is the political and sexual innuendo, both verbal and physical, that pre-code comedy allowed. For all this, in 2010, The Front Page was included in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in consideration of it being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
All aforementioned qualities nothwistanding, the films lives of script and dialogue mostly, and direction is often unimaginative and delivery wooden. Onliners do save the show. A favourite: Hildy´s boss Walter Burns (Adolphe Menjou, best on screen) to Hildy, trying to persuade him not to folllow Cupid´s ephemeral lure and stay in the newspaper business: "Yes, I know, I too was in love once, with my third wife...".
