Old Play in Manhattan

The Front Page (by Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur; produced by Hunt Stromberg Jr. & Thomas Spengler) is still, after 18 years, a good show. Last week it proved it the hard way--by withstanding a half-botched production. Despite rather limp staging and several performers who seemed in the wrong roles or even in the wrong profession, Hecht's and MacArthur's rowdy salute to their Chicago newspaper days has brash, improbable life and gaudy, slapdash color.

It had lost something, of course; but much of its humor still clicked and much of its melodrama still crackled. It caught the atmosphere of a press room in the days when all reporters were cynics and when Chicago's chief industry was crime. Its profanity had not dated, though it no longer seemed daring.

Experts in the Trade. Its crack reporter Hildy Johnson (nicely played by Lew Parker) and its cold-blooded managing editor Walter Burns (badly muffed by Arnold Moss) still lived up to the public's conception of the Fourth Estate: they buried the hatchet to bring off a beat; Hildy kept his girl waiting at the altar, as a good reporter should; and Burns double-crossed Hildy to keep him, as a good editor must.

Broadway saw another Ben Hecht opening last week--a propagandist pageant for free Palestine called A Flag Is Born. It swelled to five the current Hecht attractions in Manhattan: a third play, Swan Song (with co-author MacArthur), and two movies (Notorious and The Specter of the Rose).

Written in hot protest over the plight of Europe's homeless Jews, A Flag Is Born paints their present sufferings, relights their gorgeous Biblical past, lashes out at the "strong Jews, rich Jews, high-up Jews" who stood by in frightened silence, excoriates the British, breaks off on an inflammatory note of armed resistance.

Parts of A Flag Is Born are colorful theater and parts are biting propaganda; there is nice music by Kurt Weill and nice acting by Paul Muni as an uprooted old Jew who dies on the road to Palestine. But the evening is only fitfully effective. Hitting from all sides, working in all moods--now pathetic, now heroic, now angry, now scornful--A Flag Is Born lacks singleness of impact.

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