Trailer
Plot summary
In 1920s Chicago, Hildy Johnson is the best reporter on the paper, and he has had his fill of the work. He has already quit so that he can marry Peggy Grant and begin a different career. His managing editor, Walter Burns, has no intention of losing him. Earl Williams, convicted of murder, is due to be put to death the next day, and the press has painted him as a communist threat, with the city eager to see him die. Burns tempts Hildy with that story and urges him to cover it. Peggy waits with their train tickets, wanting to leave.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Front Page (1974)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Allen Jenkins, who had appeared in the original 1928 production of The Front Page, turns up in Billy Wilder's version in a small part as a telegrapher. It was the last film role of his life; he died in July 1974.
- Production designer Henry Bumstead talked Wilder out of Los Angeles for the exteriors, arguing that San Francisco's buildings passed better for 1920s Chicago. The closing train scene was shot there too, in a vintage railway carriage provided by a railway enthusiast.
- Wilder shot so little spare footage, cutting in the camera as he went, that editor Ralph E. Winters had a rough cut of the whole film assembled four days after principal photography finished.
- Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond salted the script with in-jokes, among them editor Walter Burns still smarting over losing his star reporter Ben Hecht to a Hollywood studio. Hecht had genuinely been a Chicago newsman in the 1920s.
- The film has an odd afterlife in Dolemite Is My Name, the 2019 Rudy Ray Moore biopic. Eddie Murphy's Moore sits baffled through a screening of The Front Page while the audience roars, and the experience pushes him into making Dolemite in 1975.
