The Girl on the Front Page

Harry Beaumont does his usual fine job of directing and gets a sterling performance out of Edmund Lowe (an entertaining fellow, but one occasionally given to offering ham as the main course, instead of as a side) for this movie. Despite some problems with the script, it remains highly watchable throughout.

Gloria Stuart's father, a newspaper publisher, dies at his desk, and Gloria and mother Spring Byington return from Europe to find Lowe the managing editor with right of first refusal for purchase of the paper; neither can he be fired, and he doesn't like society dames interfering with his paper. So Miss Stuart puts on a pair of glasses, gets a job on the paper and gets hazed.

That's the first forty minutes, and it proceeds like a rocket, not quite at the screwball level, but offering us some glimpses of the horrors that reporters really see. Then, at the halfway mark, the second plot, about chiseling and blackmailing servants comes into play, and suddenly the actors begin doing things that are totally out of character -- usually because it seems very funny for them to do so. Unfortunately, the script doesn't really cover these shifts, or perhaps editor Philip Cahn nodded, or perhaps the copy I saw was incomplete; there were a couple of jump cuts that led into plot changes.

Even these problems, it's a fine cast and I had a good time sitting through it.