This 1974 version (the third of four on film) of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 play is famously loud. Really loud. Like being screamed at by Throw Momma from the Train’s Anne Ramsay for 100 minutes, watching The Front Page is at times more than a little irritating, but it’s easy enough to argue that its punishing volume helps keep viewers as wired and uncomfortable as the newsmen it portrays.

Billy Wilder would only make two more films—Fedora and Buddy Buddy —after this, and the only real risk taken here was courting redundancy, a classic take on the play (His Girl Friday) having already been made in 1940. The swingin’, lax censorship of Seventies American cinema did, however, allow Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond to fully restore the source material’s profanity and coarseness. It’s a startlingly brutal movie for a PG “comedy” (Matthau to Lemmon: “Jesus, Hildy, you’re a newspaper man, not some faggot writing poetry about brassieres and laxatives”) that is full of nothing but contempt for politicians, police, and often humanity itself.

Lemmon’s Hildy Johnson wants to quit the business and settle down in Philadelphia with his fiancé Peggy (a mousy Susan Sarandon), but his editor at the Chicago Examiner (Matthau) hates to see his ace reporter go, so he concocts a slew of cruel tricks to thwart Hildy’s plans. The newsman can’t snuff his instinct—he’s married to the sound of banging typewriters and haranguing editors—and a disastrous death-row escape at a press-packed jailhouse spits him helplessly back into the fray. From there the barbs and zings fly 10 miles a minute, usually connecting, as when a gullible Peggy, after being told by Burns that Hildy is a serial school playground flasher, tells Hildy, “I’m sorry—I should have known better, but it just sounded so convincing.” Less enjoyable are Carol Burnett’s screeching cameo as hooker Mollie Malloy and a lame, “Ain’t Freud kooky?” bit involving a Viennese psychiatrist. The film’s social messages about the cold corruption of those in power (including those in the press) hit harder and stick longer than the laughs, though, coming across with the same sense of urgency as in Wilder’s The Lost Weekend and Ace in the Hole, the latter also about the papers’ ruthless anything-for-a-Pulitzer sensationalism.

Packing no extra features outside of scene selection, this edition is all headline and no “fancy shit,” as Burns might say. The best reason to watch it at home is to be in control of the volume; a booming theater presentation with an asleep-in-the-booth projectionist could have you guzzling Excedrin, ears ringing, by the time the film’s concluding “Where Are They Now?” segment rolls.
—JUSTIN STEWART