By mid-February 1974, Wilder and Diamond had completed the first draft of the script; by mid-March, the shooting script was ready. Lemmon and Matthau were appearing in their second Wilder film, eight years after he had teamed them in The Fortune Cookie. In rounding out the cast during preproduction, Wilder chose Carol Burnett to play Mollie Malloy, a harlot who befriends Earl. Molly is another hooker with a heart of gold, recalling Gloria from The Lost Weekend and, of course, Irma la Douce. Carol Burnett, like Arlene Francis, who appeared in One, Two, Three, was a popular television personality. So she gave the picture additional marquee value. By contrast, Wilder selected the young film actress Susan Sarandon to play Peggy. The Front Page was only her third picture as a supporting player.
For production designer, Wilder picked Universal’s Henry Bumstead. He had won Academy Awards for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and, more recently, The Sting (1973), for that film’s “meticulous recreation of 1920s cafés, bookie joints, and train interiors.”12 Hence Bumstead was an ideal choice for The Front Page. Wilder also snagged a top-notch film editor, Ralph Winters, who was likewise a two-time Oscar winner, as editor of King Solomon’s Mines (1950) and coeditor of Ben Hur (1959).
Principal photography was scheduled to start on April 3, the day after the Academy Award ceremony at which Lemmon won an Oscar for Save the Tiger (1973), his second Academy Award. At the Oscar party afterward, Wilder said to Lemmon with tongue in cheek, “Congratulations! But don’t be late for work tomorrow.”13
Some exteriors were shot on location around Chicago, but the bulk of The Front Page was filmed at Universal in Hollywood. The citywide manhunt for Earl Williams was shot on Chicago streets, conjuring up the opening scene of Some Like it Hot.
The film’s principal set is the press room of the Cook County criminal court building, where the reporters gather to wait for the latest developments in the Earl Williams case. Bumstead constructed the press room on stage 24 in all its “pristine squalor”: There is a half-empty mustard jar nestled among the ragged playing cards, cigar butts, and an ancient Remington typewriter on the long center table, plus “a propeller fan revolving slowly overhead.” Joseph McBride, who visited the set, describes Wilder as “a perpetual motion machine, his language as salty and sarcastic as the reporters in the story, his thick Viennese accent filtered through a mouthful of gum,” now that his doctor had taken him off cigarettes.14
In general, the dialogue proceeds at “a rapid-fire pace,” and the “machine-gun delivery of the lines” recalls the staccato pace of the dialogue in One, Two, Three.15 But Wilder had learned when One, Two, Three was released that audiences simply could not keep up with the hectic tempo of the dialogue. He therefore decided, while making The Front Page, to give the audience a breather by having the dialogue of some scenes spoken at a more leisurely pace.
Matthau commented that he liked working with Wilder because “he is from the old school, where every shot is preplanned. He doesn’t waste time covering a scene from multiple angles.” Matthau explained, “Most directors don’t know what they want, so they have a lot of takes. Wilder cuts the cloth as he sees it.” Wilder concurred: “When the script is finished,” he said, he knew “roughly how it will look on film.” Lemmon also found Wilder pleasant to work with. “The kind of rapport that comes from making several films with a director is invaluable,” he said. “It’s like shorthand, he doesn’t have to get more than one sentence out before I know what he has in mind.”16
The picture wrapped in mid-June after a ten-week shoot. Since Wilder had planned with Winters how every scene would be cut, the editor did a preliminary edit of each scene right after it was filmed. As a result, Wilder and Winters put the finishing touches on the final cut less than a week after Wilder finished shooting.17
In 1974 Richard Heffner was appointed chief of CARA. “Wilder availed himself of the new freedom of speech” permitted by the revised code, “but just enough to stay within the boundaries of the PG rating.” Hence Wilder avoided the expletive fuck, “which in 1974 would have meant an automatic R rating.”18 The PG rating, Heffner said, “would make the film available to a wider, younger audience than the R rating would have allowed.”19 Consequently, when Hildy announces he is leaving Chicago to take a job in Philadelphia, he exclaims, “Am I glad to get out of this friggin’ town!”
The musical score for The Front Page was provided by Billy May, the music supervisor on the film. May stitched together melodies from popular songs of the Jazz Age, much as Matty Malneck had done for Some Like It Hot. He did so with the kibitzing of Wilder, the resident expert on jazz. For old times’ sake, Wilder included in the movie “Button Up Your Overcoat,” whose lyrics were cowritten by Buddy De Sylva, who had been a lyricist before he became production chief at Paramount during Wilder’s tenure there.
A blast of ragtime music, resonant of the Roaring Twenties, introduces the movie’s opening credits. The front page of the newspaper is shown being set in type: it is the morning edition of June 6, 1929. As the newspaper rolls off the presses, we see that the masthead declares, “Nothing but the Truth.” Below that, the headline proclaims, “Cop Killer Sane, Must Die!”
Walter Burns, the domineering and unscrupulous editor of the Chicago Examiner, is bent on keeping Hildy Johnson, his star reporter, from marrying Peggy Grant because she insists that Hildy renounce the newspaper game and take a job with an advertising firm in Philadelphia. Walter craftily talks Hildy into postponing his departure from the Examiner so that he can cover the execution of Earl Williams, an anarchist convicted of killing a cop. Walter is confident that Hildy subconsciously wants to be rescued from a dull marriage and a boring job in advertising. Hence he is betting that, once he gets Hildy to put off leaving the Examiner, he can manipulate him into abandoning his plans.
Of course, Burns’s subconscious motive is that he does not want to lose his best friend, any more than he wants to lose his ace reporter. Therefore The Front Page rightly belongs among those Wilder films that focus on a strong male relationship. George Morris comments that “the friendship between Hildy and Walter evolves obliquely” in the course of the picture. “They never express their mutual feelings in words,” only in gestures.20 For example, in the scene in which Hildy feverishly types out his article on Earl Williams, Walter intuits that Hildy wants a cigarette; he lights one and puts it in Hildy’s mouth. This gesture, of course, recalls the way that Walter Neff shows his regard for Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity by lighting Keyes’s cigar for him. It is a gesture of friendship that Keyes reciprocates at the end of that film by lighting Walter’s cigarette.
In the present film, Wilder beefed up the role of Mollie Malloy from the play. Mollie takes Earl in after he has been beaten by the police for handing out leftist leaflets on a street corner. She later accuses the reporters of writing trashy copy about her relationship with Earl. She resents their saying that she was willing to marry Earl on the gallows; they respond with verbal abuse. Morris comments, “Mollie may be a whore, but her impulses are among the more decent and honest in the film.”21
After Earl escapes because of the incompetence of Sheriff Hartman (Vincent Gardenia), the mayor (Harold Gould) organizes the manhunt for Earl. The mayor, in collusion with the sheriff, has connived all along to railroad Earl just before an election, in which the mayor and the sheriff are campaigning on a law-and-order ticket. Since the mayor wants Earl dead, he authorizes the police to shoot him on sight.
Meanwhile, Earl seeks sanctuary in the deserted press room. Hildy finds him there and conceals him in a rolltop desk. Convinced of Earl’s innocence, Hildy tells Walter that he plans to publish an exposé on the mayor and sheriff’s conspiracy to employ Earl as a scapegoat in their plans for reelection. But Earl is soon discovered, and Sheriff Hartman arrests Hildy and Walter for harboring a fugitive. Walter and Hildy turn the tables on the sheriff and the mayor by revealing the incriminating evidence they have about both of them. Walter announces in a solemn tone, “There is a Divine Providence that w
atches over the Examiner!”
As the picture nears its conclusion, it seems that Walter’s plot to hold on to Hildy has failed. Hildy and Peggy head for the depot to board the next train for Philadelphia. But Walter, as resilient and irrepressible as ever, has not yet played his last card. He shows up at the train terminal, ostensibly to wish Hildy a fond farewell. He even bestows his own watch on Hildy as a token of his abiding esteem for his favorite reporter. But once the train has left the station, Walter shows his true colors. He sends a wire posthaste to the police in Gary, Indiana, the train’s first stop. He demands that Hildy be arrested, explaining, “The son of a bitch stole my watch.”
Ever since the play opened on Broadway, the final line of dialogue has ranked among the most celebrated curtain lines in theater history. It was blipped in Milestone’s film and excluded from Hawks’s movie because of censorship restrictions on the use of profanity. But the censorship code had been revised by the time Wilder made his movie. When a columnist asked Wilder during filming whether he planned to delete the play’s closing line, he replied, “That would be like rewriting ‘To be or not to be,’ for God’s sake. It’s a classic.”22
Wilder pointed out to me that he added “a printed epilogue that tells what happened to the characters after the end of the story. We took that idea, of course, from the epilogue of American Graffiti [1973].” The audience is informed that Hildy Johnson eventually became managing editor of the Examiner; Walter Burns, after he retired, occasionally lectured at the University of Chicago on “the ethics of journalism”; Roy Bensinger and Rudy Keppler opened an antiques shop in Cape Cod; and Dr. Eggelhofer, after Earl shot him in the balls, wrote a best-seller, The Joys of Impotence. Bernard Dick writes that the epilogue “is rather like an alumni newsletter, only wittier.”23
The Front Page premiered on December 17, 1974, at the Century Plaza Theatre in Los Angeles. The reviews were a mixed bag. Pauline Kael delivered herself of her meanest notice of a Wilder picture since One, Two, Three. This time she said that Wilder had a “sharp-toothed, venomous wit. He’s debauching the Hecht and MacArthur play to produce a harsh, scrambling-for-laughs gag comedy. . . . It’s enjoyable on a very low level.”24 Joseph Morgenstern in Newsweek opined, “Wilder is out of touch with the temper of the times.”25
Perhaps in response to Morgenstern, Andrew Sarris noted that Wilder’s brand of cynicism “seems much more contemporary than it ever did.” He continued, “It is refreshing to see a director . . . who still believes in the spoken word as a vehicle of expression.”26 Sarris later wrote, “I must concede that I have greatly underrated Billy Wilder, perhaps more so than any other director. His twilight resurgence in the 1970s,” with films like The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and The Front Page, “made me rethink Wilder.”27
Richard Armstrong states baldly that, when The Front Page was released, it “met neither box office success nor critical favor.”28 On the contrary, the movie had its champions from the outset, most notably Sarris. Moreover, it was a box office success, “earning $15 million against a cost of $4 million.” The Front Page was Wilder’s biggest commercial hit since Irma la Douce.29
The Front Page evokes the screwball comedies of the 1930s. It is laced with brittle humor and at times approximates the rough-and-tumble spirit of the golden age of screwball—as when the cop cars make a madcap dash through the streets of Chicago, dutifully following up one ridiculous false lead after another as to the whereabouts of Earl Williams.
Avanti! (1972)
Wilder made another film with Jack Lemmon around this time. In endeavoring to find a viable project, he followed his old practice: when in doubt, choose a Broadway play. This time he turned to Avanti! by Samuel Taylor, whose hit play Sabrina Fair Wilder had successfully adapted for the screen in 1954 as Sabrina. Avanti! had not been a success on Broadway in 1968—it ran for only twenty-one performances. Nevertheless, Wilder was confident that he could improve it in adapting it for film, just as he had done with Sabrina Fair and other plays.
Wilder was committed to one more film for the Mirisch Company, so he pitched the project to Walter Mirisch, who acted as executive producer on Wilder’s films for the Mirisch brothers. Although Wilder had made some flops in recent years, Mirisch’s regard for Wilder and his talents had not diminished, so he green-lighted the project.
Taylor’s play deals with the relationship between a couple who first become friends because of a common bond. Sandy, a straitlaced Baltimore industrialist, and Alison, a carefree London boutique clerk, cross paths when they come to Rome to claim the bodies of his father and her mother, who have been killed in an auto accident after a ten-year clandestine summertime romance. As the story gets going, Sandy and Alison become bosom buddies, not to say soul mates. Indeed, they are destined to become lovers and will consequently extend their parents’ love affair into the next generation.
In retooling Taylor’s play into a film script, Wilder decided to do a major overhaul on the source story. He even changed the names of the principals: Sandy became Wendell Armbruster Jr., and Alison became Pamela Piggott.
Wilder began work on the screenplay in the late fall of 1971. Diamond, who had scripted the movie version of Cactus Flower for Columbia, was called back by the studio to adapt 40 Carats, another Broadway hit, into a movie. Consequently, Wilder teamed with screenwriter Philip Epstein (Casablanca) on Avanti! “I started out with Billy Wilder and couldn’t do anything with it,” Epstein remembered. “It was not a fruitful collaboration.”30 Meanwhile, Diamond was getting nowhere with 40 Carats. So in January 1972, he returned to work with Wilder.
Taylor’s single-set play takes place in a hotel room in Rome. Wilder opened it out for the screen by relocating the action at a health resort on the Italian island of Ischia. What’s more, in reimagining the story for the screen, Wilder kept only Taylor’s premise (the deaths of the couple’s parents, which bring them to Italy) and the resolution (their adopting their parents’ annual romantic ritual). “It is a bittersweet love story,” said Wilder, “a little like Brief Encounter,” which had given Wilder the basic concept for The Apartment.31
Indeed, Wendell Armbruster Jr. is the same kind of corporate executive that Linus Larrabee is in Sabrina. “There are lots of them in America,” Wilder explained, “these young executives who drink a lot, drive Cadillacs, go to the club, play golf. They lead a luxurious life, have a telephone in the car”—one remembers Linus making phone calls in his limo. “Suddenly they discover that their existence is empty. They have no one to talk to and nothing to say on the telephone. And it wouldn’t make much difference if their stock rose or fell three points. That is the reevaluation of our materialistic values that this film addresses” by examining Wendell’s life.32
Wilder decided to drop Wendell’s dour wife, Emily, from the lists. In the play, she shows up in Rome to ascertain why Wendell has not come home to stage an elaborate funeral for his father, only to find Wendell bogged down in the red tape generated by the Italian bureaucracy. The screenplay replaces her with a more comic figure, a U.S. State Department official named Joseph J. Blodgett. In the film, rather than going to Italy herself, Emily Armbruster dispatches this bumbling duffer to expedite her husband’s return. Blodgett is described in the script as “a diplomat who has been working for the State Department as a trouble shooter. He has yet to be on target.”33 Running true to form, Blodgett will not be on target in coping with Wendell, who bamboozles him. “I painted Blodgett like a humorous character,” said Wilder. “Even though I exaggerated a bit, he still wasn’t very far from the people I knew at the State Department.”34
Wilder maintained a beach house near Malibu; his next-door neighbor happened to be Jack Lemmon. “I gave him, as a friend, the first half of the script to read, and he asked me for the role of Wendell Armbruster,” Wilder recalled. “At first I was thinking of casting someone in his thirties. So I had to adjust the character to fit his age,” which was forty-seven at the time. “Then I wrote the second half.”35
For the role of Carlo Carlucci, the worldly and wily manager of the Grand Hotel Excelsior, Wilder considered Alberto Sordi, an Italian comic actor. He had come to prominence in Federico Fellini’s early films. “But Sordi did not possess a sufficient mastery of English, and would therefore have slowed down the action,” said Wilder. “He wouldn’t have hit the ball back fast enough to Lemmon on the other side of the net.” Wilder instead chose the British actor Clive Revill, “who could play an Italian like he played a Russian ballet master in Sherlock Holmes.”37 Carlucci is described in the screenplay as “a gentleman of the old school; he runs the hotel with discipline and aplomb, and with the precision of Toscanini conducting a symphony orchestra.”38 Both Revill and Edward Andrews, who played Blodgett, offer fine, broad characterizations.
Some Like It Wilder Page 44