Programme notes CH 04 — The Matinee
The Front Page
A star reporter tries to quit for marriage on the night a condemned man escapes into the press room.
Nine years before Hawks made Hildy a woman, Milestone shot Hecht and MacArthur’s play straight, and in 1931 that meant something closer to a raid. The camera will not sit still: it tracks down the row of reporters at their phones, each lying to a different city desk, and swings the room around them as if the walls were on castors. Adolphe Menjou plays Walter Burns as a dandy with the morals of a weasel, and Pat O’Brien’s Hildy is fighting a losing battle with his own pulse. Watch the roll-top desk. The whole third act happens around it, and nobody in the room is allowed to look at it.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Lewis Milestone
- Photographed by
- Tony Gaudio
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
The same play twice in nine years: Milestone’s Hildy is a man trying to get married, Hawks’s is a woman trying to stay divorced. The escaped prisoner, the roll-top desk and Walter Burns’s conscience survive the trip unchanged.
Two newsrooms a year apart. In one the reporters are married to each other and the paper comes between them; in the other the paper is the marriage, and Hildy Johnson cannot get out of it.