The Front Page is one of those theater properties that apparently is not tiring with the public any time soon. Either remaking it as a period piece the way
Billy Wilder did or updating it like this film and switching it to broadcast television
journalism the laughs are there and the issues are the same. The Broadway play
and first film adaption with also talked about bloviating politicians who campaign
on law and order. If anything it's worse now.
Howard Hawks saw the possibilities in The Front Page as a boy/girl romance by
making the original role of the reporter as a woman. What he got was one of
my favorite Cary Grant films. Switching Channels is a remake of His Girl Friday
and the roles Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, and Ralph Bellamy played are now
done by Burt Reynolds, Kathleen Turner, and Christopher Reeve. And of course
Reynolds is now a news producer, Turner his ace reporter, and Reeve the handsome rich doofus she wants to marry.
Again it's an outrageously corrupt Ned Beatty playing the Cook County District
Attorney who primarying the ineffectual Governor of Illinois Charles Kimbrough. He got a conviction on Henry Gibson for murdering a cop and
he's looking to see that as Gibson burns in the electric chair, he can become
governor and more. Kimbrough is the kind who takes a poll before he goes
to the bathroom. But Gibson escapes on the night he's to die and sets off a
whole chain of events in which elected officials are toppled, romance gets
redirected, and corruption exposed.
It is fascinating how on track Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur were when they wrote The Front Page. We could remake it again updating it with
internet journalism without too much of a change in the plot.
Start thinking of who could be the stars in yet a 21st century remake of this
classic.
