In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

0  the perfect Blendship the Front page and Avanti! I was curious to see how a bunch of empty-headed nitwits would conduct themselves. —William Powell in the title role of the film My Man Godfrey Friendship, friendship! What a perfect blendship! When other friendships have been forgot Ours will still be hot. —Cole Porter, “Friendship” In 1928 Billy Wilder was a reporter on a tabloid in Berlin that specialized in crime stories and sensational feature pieces, such as his first-person account of life as a gigolo. That same year, on August 14, playwrights Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur premiered their cynical farce about the newspaper racket, The Front Page, on Broadway. The play later reminded Wilder of his years as a young reporter; he would get around to filming it some four decades later. “I loved the 1920s,” he recalled. “A reporter back then was a mixture of a private eye and a dramatist. If you were any good, you could improve on the story” by adding some spicy details. “Then there was the round-the-clock dedication —no family life for the lone wolf—and the camaraderie of the newsroom.”1 Like Wilder, Hecht always remembered fondly his years as a young reporter, in his case for the Chicago Daily News. He was only sixteen when he got his first job as a cub reporter, he recalled in a brief essay about The Front Page in his private papers. “I quit after sixteen years of chasing fires, killers, swindles, and scandals.”2 Hecht based many characters in The Front Some LIke It WILder 0 Page on real Chicago journalists. His street-smart reporter Hildy Johnson, for example, was modeled on Hilding Johnson, a reporter for the Chicago Herald-Examiner who was not above picking locks and clambering through transoms in pursuit of a news story. As Sherman Duffy, one of Hecht’s fellow reporters, put it, “Socially, a journalist fits somewhere between a whore and a bartender.”3 Walter Burns, the domineering managing editor in Hecht and MacArthur’s play, was inspired by Walter Howey, the managing editor of the Herald-Examiner. Hecht described Howey this way: “He smiled like a wide-eyed sightseer from the sticks. But he could plot like Cesare Borgia and strike like Gengis Khan.”4 Howard Hughes produced the first film version of the play in 1931. It was directed by Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front). Pat O’Brien played Hildy, and Adolphe Menjou was Walter Burns. Wilder felt that Milestone’s version was “handicapped by the crude conditions of making early sound pictures.” In addition, it could not totally disguise its stagebound origins.5 The second movie adaptation of The Front Page was titled His Girl Friday (1940). It was directed by Howard Hawks, with a screenplay by Charles Lederer, who had collaborated on the script of the 1931 movie. Hawks said that one day, after Cary Grant was set to play Walter Burns, “I had a secretary read through one of the scenes of The Front Page with me. I realized that Hildy Johnson’s lines were better when they were read by a woman. I called Hecht and he agreed, so the part of the reporter was rewritten for Rosalind Russell.”6 Wilder, who had coscripted Ball of Fire for Hawks, much admired him. But he did not agree with Hawks’s changing Hildy’s gender. In his opinion, it placed too much emphasis on Walter’s winning back his ex-wife, rather than his ace reporter. Hawks had also moved his film up to 1940. Hence his film was not The Front Page of Hecht and MacArthur, according to Wilder.7 When Jennings Lang, a vice president at Universal, by sheer coincidence inquired whether Wilder would like to direct a remake of The Front Page, Wilder accepted enthusiastically. (For the record, this was the same Jennings Lang whose affair with Joan Bennett some years earlier was one of the inspirations for The Apartment.) Wilder was drawn to the project in part because male friendship plays an important role in The Front Page, just as it does in The Fortune Cookie and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Furthermore, Wilder’s own experience as a journalist would be reflected in the movie. “I hope to show that I have a feeling for newspaper guys,” he told Lang. “I understand their problems and their hang-ups.”8 [3.16.66.206] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 12...

Share