From hack to
Hound of Heaven
Hotshot reporters as all-action heroes have been any director’ s dream ticket ever since the talkies started. Philip Josse picks over the entrails of press movies that have hit the Hollywood headlines
Hollywood fell in love with the press as the Roaring Twenties drew to a close and the age of the talkies arrived. And, of course, it was a newsman who sparked the affair. Chicago Daily News reporter Ben Hecht had quit grubby sensationalism to try his hand at legit writing – playwriting! And his The Front Page was an instant theatre hit in 1928.
It didn’ t take long for Hollywood to get in on the act. Hecht’ s hit was purloined, and became one of the first of the talkies when it was released in 1931.
Tinseltown, knowing a good story when it saw one, decided to add some glamour.
Director Howard Hawks reconfigured its characters, switching sexes of the protagonists( now ex-spouses), and a remake was released in 1940 as His Girl Friday, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell starring.
Hot on their heels in 1941 came Orson Welles who ushered in big, bad Press tycoon Citizen Kane based on America’ s first press baron William Randolph Hearst who believed news had to be sculpted to fit the actualité.
At the turn of the 19th century, he built America’ s largest newspaper chain based on“ yellow journalism”- sensationalised stories of dubious veracity.
Hearst was credited with the legendary instruction to a top illustrator sent to cover the Cuban war of independence against Spain, who telegraphed Hearst there was no fighting. Hearst responded:“ Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ ll furnish the war.”
Fast forward to 1974, and Hollywood does another Front Page makeover, reverting to type, and arguably the better for it. The genius was in the casting, with Walter Matthau playing irascible, conniving editor Walter Burns and Jack Lemmon as star reporter Hildy Johnson- who’ s on the point of doing a Ben Hecht and quitting the scumbag newspaper business.
The genius of Hecht’ s script was condensing the ultimate secret of the killer intro into one, eternal line, Matthau’ s
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