Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day Six: A Good Journalist never reveals his sources

With no LoveFilm DVDs present I turn to the one film available in their 'Watch Now' selection - The Front Page. Adapted from a play of the same name this apparently is considered a Screwball Comedy but frankly I didn't find many laughs until the final scene. I could tell it was a play adaptation straight away as the action was very insular, it being almost entirely set in a small and stuffy newsroom at the court building overlooking the gallows at the county jail. The whole thing is given a sinister edge straight away by the theme of hangings almost being mentioned every five minutes. Public executions it seems were pretty commonplace at the time and the crime in particular in this film is that a man is accused of killing a black policeman. Top reporter Hildy Johnson is about to move to New York with his new wife but his plans change when he is forced to help Earl Williams, the man who is about to be hanged, to escape. With its themes of race relations and political espionage the film could've been a top class thriller but for me it just feels pretty dated. Part of the reason may have been that the film hasn't been particularly well kept and the print was pretty dodgy. But another reason is that this was the era in which sound was first introduced and it seemed that a lot of the actors were still getting used to that phenomenon, The Front Page was definitely what you would call a talkie, one of the first films to appear following the advent of sound at the films. That's not to say there's not much to like in The Front Page, all the performances and the banter between the reporters is very good indeed as are the film's basic plot structure.

I think that if I'd have watched it in 1931 I would've been impressed but in 2010 I would have to give it a must try harder. The film has been remade twice since once under its original title in a version starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon and one where the story was slightly tweaked so that the character of Hildy Johnson became a woman and was played by Rosalind Russell acting alongside Cary Grant as the newspaper editor the film was the classic, His Girl Friday. In terms of its Oscar success it was nominated for three awards - Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Adolphe Menju who played the newspaper's editor, a role today that I would consider more supporting than lead. However it did not win a single one of these awards and Best Picture that year went to Cimarron. I would have to say though, in terms of Oscar nominations, I think it did well to recieve all three.

Later on in the day, trying to find more of these films on google videos etc. I stumble across a YouTube page where the user in question has loads of these Oscar nominated films uploaded. I think a lot of these I would never have been able to find without the help of this certain user, but at the same time I'm never one to play nark and reveal the name of this certain user or indeed the films I have obtained from YouTube but suffice to say its a great relief to say that I will be able to watch more films than I first intended.