MOVIE · 1974

The Front Page

ComedyDramaRomance105 min

In a Chicago pressroom, editor Walter Burns won’t let his best reporter walk away quietly: with a killer’s execution approaching, he schemes to pull Hildy Johnson into one last crime story before retirement. Walter Matthau’s Burns is all manipulation and momentum, while Jack Lemmon is Hildy, the newspaperman trying to get out before he’s dragged back onto the front page. Billy Wilder’s version of the Hecht and MacArthur story stays locked on the scramble between newsroom ambition and personal escape, with crowded desks, fast talk, and a city headline no one wants to miss.