Film review: The Front Page (1931)

This is the film version of the play that was remade as His Girl Friday.  It's a very early talkie, but you wouldn't know it (apart from the fairly poor quality of the film stock) because it's very fast-talking and with amazingly modern and sophisticated camera-work.  The camera moves around rooms as if it were a modern steadycam instead of an ancient giant thing.  I don't recognize any of the actors, which (along with their quality) suggests to me that they might have been the actors who performed these roles on stage.  As with HGF, the basic plot is a bunch of newspapermen (and it is all men in this case - the innovation of HGF was to genderswitch one of the two main characters to Rosalyn Russell (not hard when he's called "Hildy")) sitting around waiting for a condemned man to be hanged.  He's Earl Williams, an accused communist who killed a "colored" policeman "in a town where the colored vote matters".  (Turns out he's not a communist, he's an anarchist, a reminder that the US of the 20s and 30s was more politically diverse than before or since.)  The film is almost breathtakingly cynical - the fact that the execution is to be public and has been postponed until right before election day by the mayor who is in cahoots with the sheriff, and who is counting on this ensuring his re-election.  The only character with a genuine heart is Molly Molloy, a "streetwalker" who was the only witness who came forward to defend the accused at trial.  The newsmen sneer at her and imply that Earl's her lover, when in fact she just likes and feels sorry for him.  Molly is a thoroughly tragic figure who may or may not die (the film doesn't tell you) because she jumps out of a window in an attempt to distract pursuers from Earl's hiding place (which, as with HGF, is in a desk).  Hildy is a the star writer for the Morning Post, who is trying to avoid its editor, Walter Burns, because he wants to elope with his fiancee and knows that Burns has a history of doing anything to retain his writers.  (Turns out he is right, as Burns sets him up at least twice in the film, including pretending to give him his pocketwatch as a wedding gift and then phoning the police to say that Hildy's stolen it.)  There are plenty of entertaining scenes of reporters from different papers reporting the same event completely differently, with wild embellishments (turns out "fake news" is not a new accusation), as the film's view of the newspaper business is just as jaundiced as its view of politics.  It's interesting that the film is even more cynical and just as fast-paced as HGF.  Hildy and Burns deserve each other - Hildy is ready to give up his fiancee and consign her mother to a kidnapping (and a falsely-rumored death, from which he recovers remarkably quickly) for the glory of a regime-toppling story.  I think perhaps that is the mark of a pre-code film, as HGF seems almost tame by comparison.  They would make a good double-bill.  Now we need to watch the Billy Wilder-directed 1974 version with Walter Mathau and Jack Lemmon...