Stop the Presses!

It is always a surprise when a play can be revived after 40 years without its looking and sounding like a doddering idiot. If The Front Page has a certain cornball, period flavor, it simply seems to add relish to a high-spirited and persistently amusing evening. The Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur saga of newspapering in the Chicago of the 1920s is the liveliest public relations handout ever issued on the newspaper game. It makes a newspaperman seem like a combination of knight, sleuth, adventurer and liquored-up, hard-bitten prince of the realm -- the Fourth Estate seen in the guise of the First Estate.

While scoops no longer have the urgency that they did in those days, many of the basic assumptions of journalism have changed very little. The most basic of them all is the primary loyalty of a newsman to his paper come hell or high water. A good newsman will let his grandmother burn if a hotter story turns up across town--or so the Hecht-MacArthur legend has it. Hildy Johnson (Bert Convy) is a classic of his breed, a red-hot superscooper. Suddenly he threatens to do the unthinkable. He tells the boys in the city room that he is going to get married, desert his raffish calling and go square in a New York advertising firm. His boss, Walter Burns (Robert Ryan), the managing editor of the Chicago Examiner, dresses like an Edwardian dandy and has the ethics of Genghis Khan. There is no device that he will not employ to hang on to his ace reporter.

That is one plot, and it is worth a laugh every other minute. Along with it goes a co-plot about a manhunt for a murderer whom the sheriff (Charles White) has labeled a Red Menace. With an election pending, the mayor has a certain cynical interest in corralling the law-and-order voters. John McGiver plays him with the voice of high-pitched dismay and the countenance of flinty melancholy that make all his appearances comic delights. Naturally, this plot thickens and quickens as the rival newsmen cook up story angles and bait the mayor and the sheriff as knaves and boobs. The notion that journalism radiates intelligence and innate purity is fairly amusing all by itself.

When the time comes to put the paper to bed and bring down the final curtain, an adroit cast and the briskly coordinated timing of Director Harold Kennedy have stirred up such breezy merriment that the audience may well feel sorry that it has to go home.

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