Lewis Milestone | The Front Page / 1931

the real news

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bartlett Cormack and Charles Lederer (screenplay based on the stage play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur), Lewis Milestone (director) The Front Page / 1931

 

I have seen the Howard Hawks film His Girl Friday, the 1940 version of the famed stage play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur dozens of times, and I have seen two productions of the play itself, difficult to encounter these days in theaters; but I don’t believe until the other day that I’d actually ever seen the 1931 film version. Since I know the play so well, I knew it how very cynical these court house news reporters were, and that their minds (as well as their newspapers) were filled with racist rhetoric and homophobia, but I never realized until I saw this particular rendition of the original just how racist, homophobic, and misogynistic the film truly was. Stereotypical slurs of “colored people,” “piccaninnies,” and other racist notions abound, spoken with a sense of absolute entitlement by most of these films characters.

       At one point, the reporters, satirizing the fact that Hildy Johnson (Pat O’Brien) is about to be married to Peggy Grant (Mary Brian) and move in with her mother (Effie Ellsler) in New York City—in His Girl Friday, they’re moving to Albany, presumably from New York City—the Chicago reporters mock the Big Apple as a rube city, accusing all its males as all being “lizzie’s” (another word for “sissies”), as Jimmy Murphy (Walter Catlett) imitates a New Yorker visiting Chicago as an effeminate queer, “Could any of you gentleman tell me where the telegraph station is?” They insist that soon Hildy will be talking just like him. 

     Within their own midst, moreover, is Ray V. Bensinger (Edward Everett Horton), who along with his reporting of crimes and murders, writes poems about the man, Earl Williams (George E. Stone), who is about to be hung. Bensinger is not only a hypochondriac terrified of all germs—

they have nicknamed him “listerine”—but a prissy fellow who, unlike the others, sits at his own desk which he refuses to share with the other males. He cannot stand even the smell of his fellow reporter’s bodies, cigar-smoking habits, and the room in which they are all cooped up in while they await the innocent Williams’ death for communist activism and murder, even though the gentle streetwalker Molly Malloy (Mae Clarke) who has befriended him one cold night knows that he is innocent.

      As several commentators have pointed out there is not a truly caring and decent person in this film, except perhaps for Molly, who jumps to her possible death instead of revealing Earl’s whereabouts—in Bensinger’s roll top desk. Perhaps Peggy is a decent person, although her mother is a monster and we know that marriage to such a woman as Peggy would destroy Hildy’s life, not engage or expand it as he imagines it might.  

     Besides, even though Hildy doesn’t know it, and in fact professes that he hates his newspaper editor Walter Burns (the always dapper Adolphe Menjou) who constantly draws him in to endlessly dangerous events in reportage, he is unknowingly in love with his Walter symbolized by his job, just as Walter, telephoning every few moments throughout the first third of this film to see if Hildy has shown up to the courthouse, cannot live without him and will do anything to stop Hildy from marrying a woman—a gender that the misogynistic Burns cannot abide.

      Throughout this film he robs his reporter of all his money, he kidnaps his mother-in-law-to-be, and lies, cheats, and cajoles Hildy and anyone who might help him escape in order to keep him near, not only because of Hildy’s obvious talent as a reporter, but because of his inability to exist without him.

      Howard Hawks recognized this so perfectly that it’s even hard to give him credit for having had the brilliance to switch Hildy Johnson to a female in His Girl Friday. His genius as a director was to make obvious what is basically coded in the 1931 version of the work, that fact that despite Hildy’s fellow reporter friends’ mockery of any queer behavior, including the mousy, nerdy anarchist Earl Williams, they’re perfectly blind to the love between two men in their very midst, or perhaps can’t imagine such a love since it’s washed over in Hildy’s apparent hate and attempt to return to normalcy by marrying Peggy.

       Walter's way to Hildy’s heart is my complementing, while also correcting, his reporting techniques and pumping him up to the excitement of possibly actually changing the corrupt world around him represented not only by the cynicism of the reporters but even more so by the corrupt governing of Sherriff Peter B. “Pinky” Hartman (Clarence Wilson) and Fred, the Mayor (James Gordon) who have framed Earl as a Commie simply to get reelected, while even trying to hide the pardon the governor sends through the confused by honest messenger.

      Although Walter may actually be married to The Morning Post, his heart belongs to Hildy, and he spends almost the entire movie trying to convince him that he truly loves him and wants the best for him. The subject of this work is not the story of a hanging, government corruption, Earl Williams’ and Molly Malone’s relationship, or even the cynical men who hang about the reporter’s room at the courthouse, but is focused on the attempts of Walter Burns to hold onto Hildy, his unknowing bride.

 

      There is, in fact, a moment when, with his arm around Hildy’s neck Walter tells him how terrible women are, describing them even as murderers, that he momentarily convinces Hildy of his love enough to force the man back to the job, ready to stay through the night (sleeping with the newspaper story becomes akin to sharing a bed with Walter Burns) to write the best story of his life. The trouble is that Hildy, unlike nearly any of the other males, has a conscience and keeps being reminded that the horrors around him do not represent normalcy, something he, like so many

queer men unable to accept who he truly is, believes he desperate desires.

       A moment after this scene Walter’s hired thug returns to report that the taxi he was in with Peggy’s kidnapped mother has been in a terrible accident, and fearful that the mother might have been killed, Hildy again temporarily abandons his relationship with Walter, calling up hospitals to discover if Peggy’s mother has survived. Whenever he encounters Peggy in the flesh, he’s also convinced he wants to leave his old life and become a new man, an insurance salesman or something of the sort. But even she knows he’s lying to himself. And she finally tells him so herself.

 

      Despite the fact that finally Walter almost admits him that he truly loves him, Hildy and, even more importantly the film itself, cannot possibly end as it does in Hawk’s version with the female version of Hildy finally agreeing to stay on and even possibly marry Walter—who promises this time to really go through with it. In films of the day obviously a man could not marry a man even if it was clear he was in love with him, and that love had to be fairly hidden if it wanted to get past the censors even in so-called “pre-code” days.

       In the 1931 version, despite all the attempts to keep him close, Walter seems by film’s end to have lost him as Hildy finally insists to Peggy that he’s leaving with her and actually does, believing that it is truly possible for him to live a “straight” life.

        But never fear, the newspaper chief awards him his personal watch as a wedding gift, calling up the police at the very first train stop that Hildy has robbed him and to arrest the man! We can be sure that Peggy and her mother—who unfortunately seems to survive all they put her through—will travel on to New York City alone, while Walter Burns will retrieve his wayward lover, dragging him back to Chicago to lie down with him in endless reams of newspaper print. Yet we know this is truly where Hildy’s heart is as well.

       As I discuss in my later essay on His Girl Friday, what Hawks did was to actually normalize what originally was a raucously queer-coded cinematic work.

       

Los Angeles, March 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).