The film’s script retained the sparkling dialogue and hard, fast and ruthless pace that characterized Ben Hecht’s and Charles MacArthur’s stage production of 1928.
The Front Page set the foundation for the “journalism genre” in the 1930s, imitated by other studios and spawning a number of remakes, among them Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940) and Billy Wilder’s The Front Page (1974).
The selection of Pat O’Brien to play the hard-bitten reporter “Hildy” Johnson was disappointing to Milestone, whose request to cast James Cagney or Clark Gable in the role was vetoed by producer Howard Hughes, in favor of O’Brien, who had performed in the Chicago stage production The Front Page.
“The Front Page surpasses All Quiet on the Western Front in being wholly a masterpiece, and one of the greatest pictures of the period. Milestone achieved a perfect marriage of film and theater. The picture has a vividness not matched in a newspaper subject until Citizen Kane.”—Biographer Charles Higham in The Art of the American Film
More than a product of Milestone’s fidelity to the play’s lively and profane dialogue, he endowed the work with expressionistic cinematic style.
Biographer Joseph Millichap evaluates Milestone’s technique: “Milestone employs “several framing devices, a quick cross-cutting between scenes, a moving camera intercut with close-ups, juxtaposition of angles and distances, and a number of trick shots…Overall, the deft combination of Realistic mise-en-scene with an Expressionistic camera draws the best out of the realistic, melodramatic and comedic elements of the original [play]…creating the most cinematically interesting, if not the most entertaining, version of The Front Page.”
Both the opening tracking shots of the newspaper’s printing plant and the confrontation between Molly Malloy (Mae Clarke) and a phalanx of reporters demonstrate Milestone’s mastery of the technique.
Critical Status
The Front Page received a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards and Milestone was listed among “The Ten Best Directors” by a Film Daily poll of 300 movie critics.
