The Front Page
Sometimes, when I don’t really know what to say about a film, I end up reading another blogpost and find myself agreeing with it practically 100%. In this case, Movie Outlaw perfectly hit the nail about the film’s strengths and weaknesses. I have never read the original play nor watched the 1934 movie, but I saw “His Girl Friday” and without a doubt, that didn’t help. “His Girl Friday” is stripped of the unpleasant cynism and a story on its own. I love the chemistry between Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, and the story gets a whole new meaning as a love triangle where the main character has to choose between excitement and passion and, well, a nice but utterly boring guy promising a lovely but dull lifestyle. Throughout most of the film, Walter and Hildy are presented as equals, where neither can really live with the other and both have a bunch of good lines to beat the other with.
“The Front Page”, as it was originally conceived and where the main characters are male, is totally not a story about how someone loves their job, it’s rather about how someone – for some practically inexplicable reason – is unable to get away from their job and subsequently gets screwed around by his idiot boss over and over again. In “The Front Page”, marriage seems to be a perfectly valid reason for Hildy to leave that shithole (and Susan Sarandon plays a perfectly lovely lady), so it boggles my mind as to why he couldn’t. Why are these workaholic stories always about journalists, I wonder? “Hataraki Man”, perhaps the only good anime for adults and about adult life, features a main character who destroys her private because she is too focused on her reporter career. What’s the point?
Coming back to the cynism I mentioned earlier, I think it was the biggest drawback of the film. I understand the point, and perhaps this is (to some degree) really how the journalistic world is, but this “hatred towards the world”, as the aforementioned Movie Outlaw post puts it, is not exactly pleasant to watch, isn’t it? The scene where six journalists were ganging up on that girl to the point that she jumped out of a window just feels out of place in a comedy. I can’t laugh when I feel that kind of disgust towards its characters, I am sorry to say. In general, the film had a few funny scenes at the beginning (especially with Dr. Eggelhofer, ahaha) but the last 45 minutes of the film were basically some mean-spirited people chasing a man who had to defend himself and Hildy driving away his fiancee. I think it’s a miracle that a movie by one of the best directors ever and starring some of the best actors ever could have failed so much to live up to expectations. Perhaps this is proof that the devil exists.