Newspaper Comedies
Wednesday May 11th | 6 Movies
As screwball comedy flourished in the 1930s, so did “newspaper movies,” a large proportion of which fell into the screwball genre. It makes sense that so many films of the era would be set in and around newsrooms, reporters, editors, and their leads, scoops and deadlines. The frantic pace of a newspaper office—and of a newspaperman’s (or woman’s) lifestyle—was a perfect fit for a genre that depended on fast movement, eccentric characters, witty and quick verbal barbs, and poking fun at the differences among social classes. With a battle-of-the-sexes storyline thrown in, the tension between love and cynicism made for even greater comedy.
The granddaddy of all newspaper comedies, The Front Page (1931) was based on the hit 1928 Broadway play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, both of whom were former newspapermen. The film was a massive hit for United Artists and scored three Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Director for Lewis Milestone, and Best Actor for Adolphe Menjou, who only got the part of editor Walter Burns after Milestone’s first choice, Louis Wolheim, died shortly before production. The story centers on Burns and his star reporter Hildy Johnson, played by Pat O’Brien. Hildy wants out of the news racket so he can marry his fiancée (Mary Brian), but Burns is determined to keep him around and tricks him into covering one more case, that of an accused cop-killer named Earl Williams (George E. Stone) who is scheduled for hanging. Eventually, Williams escapes and a massive manhunt is launched, making the story even more sensational.
The Front Page in many ways set the mold for newspaper comedies to follow. Its tone, look and style established a template that these movies would continue to emulate and play with, including this film’s first remake, His Girl Friday (1940). (It was remade again in 1974 as The Front Page, and in 1988 as Switching Channels.) His Girl Friday, in fact, proved so perfect that this perfectly fine original version has become somewhat neglected.
For Warner Brothers’ breezy 1935 comedy-drama Front Page Woman, the studio paired Bette Davis and George Brent for the fourth of eleven times. The movie was made under the working title Women Are Born Newspapermen. The two stars are rival reporters—and in love. But Davis refuses to marry Brent until he concedes that she is as talented as any male reporter. As a murder story unfolds, Brent tries to undermine Davis’s reporting through a series of fanciful plot turns. (“So far-fetched,” declared Variety, “it’ll hand news scribes around the country a constant run of ripples.”)
Front Page Woman was one of five films directed by Michael Curtiz to be released in 1935, as well as one of five for Bette Davis that year. Davis biographer Ed Sikov later noted, “As a hard-headed 1930s newspaperwoman ... Davis gets to develop her independent, driven persona: the career woman who doesn’t give a damn if she ends up single. And she even manages to wear one of those skinny, weasel-like furs with the head still on it without looking camp.”
MGM’s Libeled Lady, released in October 1936, stands as one of the finest pairings for William Powell and Myrna Loy, who actually appeared in fewer Thin Man movies they did in other films like this one. But they make up only half of the superlative star power of this film: Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy appear along with them. (“Enough star wattage to light the state of Texas,” wrote film scholar Jeanine Basinger in “The Star Machine.”)
The four stars’ distinct personas are well blended and play off one another smoothly, as the story has them play two bickering couples. Loy, a filthy-rich heiress, is suing a newspaper for libel. Powell plays the cynical reporter who is tasked with drumming up a way to compromise her reputation for real so as to derail the lawsuit. The editor who assigns him this task is played by Tracy, who is desperate to ward off matrimony with his marriage-minded girlfriend, Jean Harlow.
Libeled Lady features one of Powell’s finest comedy sequences, in which he must catch a fish to impress Loy’s father (Walter Connolly). He takes fly fishing lessons in his hotel room, snagging various bits of furniture and then Jean Harlow’s rear end. When he finally goes fishing for real, Powell turns the sequence into a bravura, extended episode of physical comedy. Powell and Harlow, real-life lovers, also have the chance to play a screen wedding. Harlow receives top billing, and this film was a clear return to the “old” Harlow, who had made her name with brassy pure-comedy performances in movies like Platinum Blonde (1931) and Bombshell (1933) but had lately strayed from that kind of comedy. Libeled Lady was a massive hit, taking in $2.7 million and drawing an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. It also boosted Harlow’s stardom even further, but she would act in only two more films before her shocking death in 1937 at age 26.
A month after Libeled Lady, MGM released another newspaper comedy, Love on the Run (1936), with further star power in the form of Clark Gable and Joan Crawford. The film was a clear attempt to emulate It Happened One Night (1934), the little Columbia film that had wound up (along with Twentieth Century [1934]) kickstarting the screwball comedy genre and winning all five major Oscar categories, including Best Actor for Gable. Like It Happened One Night, Love on the Run concerns a runaway heiress paired with a reporter. In fact, there are two reporters here, rivals played by Gable and Franchot Tone. Unlike It Happened One Night, the characters don’t travel on a public bus up the east coast but rather fly around Europe in planes. (This was MGM, after all.) The script also works in an espionage plot, and director W. S. “Woody” Van Dyke brings his usual rapid pace to the proceedings.
Gable and Crawford had co-starred in six previous films, displaying fine chemistry, but most had not been comedies. They also had a prior love affair and by the time of this film were simply friends. Gable was now involved with Carole Lombard, and Crawford was newly married to co-star Franchot Tone. Crawford later recalled of this film: “I enjoyed the hell out of it. Not a big picture, but everyone I know who saw it seemed to love the thing.” According to the AFI Catalogue, Gable’s delivery of a “knock knock” joke may be the first such joke ever filmed, as “knock knock” jokes are thought to have been invented in 1936.
The following year, United Artists released another landmark screwball comedy, Nothing Sacred (1937), in which a reporter (Fredric March) is sent to Vermont by his New York paper to cover the story of a woman (Carole Lombard) diagnosed with a terminal case of radium poisoning. She has since learned that the diagnosis was incorrect and she is not actually at risk of dying, but she likes the idea of a free trip to New York (at the invitation of the paper, which wants a circulation boost) and gets her doctor to play along with the ruse that she is indeed soon to perish. March, however, had previously been demoted by his editor for writing fake news stories, and once he realizes he is part of yet another hoax, the comic complications multiply, and the battle of the sexes becomes a literal, physical one.
David O. Selznick produced Nothing Sacred in three-color Technicolor, with Ben Hecht once again writing the screenplay (based on a story by James Street). Hecht included a part for his friend John Barrymore, but Selznick refused to hire him because Barrymore was already descending into alcoholism. Hecht and Selznick continued to spar, especially over the story’s ending, to the point that Hecht left the project and Budd Schulberg and Dorothy Parker came on board (uncredited) to write the ending that Selznick desired.
Lombard had already starred in Twentieth Century and My Man Godfrey (1936), two of the greatest screwball comedies, and was perfectly at home in this one. March gives one of his best performances, and the supporting cast is a wonderful selection of fan-favorite character actors including Walter Connolly, Charles Winninger, Sig Rumann, John Qualen and Monty Woolley. The film’s comedy is energetic and uninhibited, poking fun at some point at practically everyone in the American population. Reporters and editors especially get roasted, as when Winninger, talking about newsmen, memorably says “the hand of God, reaching down into the mire, couldn’t raise one of them to the depths of degradation!”
In 1939, Howard Hawks wanted to direct a new version of The Front Page for Columbia Pictures. To prove that the dialogue was still razor-sharp, modern and funny, he started reading the script aloud; as there wasn’t another male around to read the part of Hildy, he asked his female secretary to step in. Thus hatched the brilliant idea that resulted not only in a rare case of a remake being better than the original, but in one of the very best comedies ever—and by extension, arguably the best newspaper comedy ever. The new film was titled His Girl Friday, and changing Hildy from a man to a woman—and even making her Walter Burns’s ex—brought exciting and hilarious new dimensions to the story. This time around, Walter is desperate to keep Hildy on the job because she’s his ace reporter and he wants to win her back, even as she seems through with Walter and is set on quitting the paper to marry Bruce Baldwin, played by Ralph Bellamy as the actor’s definitive “dumb oaf” character.
Ben Hecht liked the idea for the change and worked with Charles Lederer on a script. Lederer was a friend and protégé of Hecht’s and had even contributed to the screenplay of the original 1931 film. It was Lederer’s idea to make Walter and Hildy a divorced couple, and he finished the script on his own (with a script polish from Morrie Ryskind) after Hecht left to write another picture.
Hawks had just worked with Cary Grant on two prior films, Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and cast him here as Walter Burns. To play Hildy, Hawks and Columbia went out first to Jean Arthur, then Ginger Rogers, Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert. All of them passed. With filming set to start, Hawks was desperate for an actress and borrowed Rosalind Russell from MGM, where she was coming off a brilliant turn in The Women (1939). Russell may have been the sixth choice to play Hildy, but she took the opportunity to create the ultimate wisecracking reporter of the era, and one of the greatest female characters in comedy. Hildy is an independent, self-possessed working woman—typical for Howard Hawks pictures.
Also typical of Hawks is his use of overlapping dialogue, perhaps never deployed to greater effect than here. Hawks had noticed that in real-life conversations, people tend to interrupt and talk over one another. While the idea came out of a desire for realism, it also contributes mightily to the comedy as characters lie, manipulate and insult one another with otherworldly speed. This makes for especially delicious contrast with Ralph Bellamy’s character, who talks very slowly. “I savored every line while those characters chattered all around me,” Bellamy recalled.
Bellamy is also the object of a classic line ad-libbed by Cary Grant, who describes Bellamy’s character as looking like “that fellow in the pictures, you know, what’s his name, Ralph Bellamy.” A second meta moment occurs when Grant refers to “Archie Leach,” Grant’s real name.
Hawks oversaw the editing of His Girl Friday with rapid speed; the finished film premiered three months after shooting had commenced. It received no awards or nominations, but has had the last laugh in being recognized as one of classic Hollywood’s pinnacle achievements.
