The editor who never lets a story go
In The Front Page, released in 1974 and directed by Billy Wilder, Walter Matthau plays Walter Burns, the ruthless, hilarious editor of the Chicago Examiner, a man who will lie, bribe, kidnap and blackmail to keep his star reporter from quitting. That reporter is Hildy Johnson, played by Jack Lemmon, who has decided to leave journalism, marry his fiancée Peggy and take a respectable job in advertising. Burns has other plans. Over the course of one frantic night in a Chicago press room, as a condemned murderer escapes from custody and a political scandal explodes around the city, Burns does everything in his power to drag Hildy back into the story, and back into the newspaper life they both love and hate. Matthau plays Burns as a force of nature, a cigar-chomping schemer with a heart he would deny possessing, and the result is one of the great comic performances of his career.
The film was adapted from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s classic 1928 play, which had already been filmed memorably in 1931 and as His Girl Friday in 1940. Wilder, directing with his usual cynical brilliance, returns the story to its original setting: a 1920s Chicago press room full of wisecracking reporters, corrupt politicians, a scheming sheriff and a condemned man, Earl Williams, whose fate becomes a pawn in everyone’s game. Matthau, who had already won an Oscar working with Wilder on The Fortune Cookie, was born to play Burns. He has the voice, low, fast and gleefully amoral, the face, a map of late nights and bad decisions, and the timing to deliver Hecht and MacArthur’s dialogue at machine-gun speed without losing a single joke.
Burns and Hildy: a love story in disguise
At its heart, The Front Page is a love story, although neither Burns nor Hildy would ever admit it. Burns loves Hildy the way a general loves his best soldier, and the way a man loves the only person who understands his jokes. He sabotages Hildy’s wedding plans, hides Peggy’s train ticket, gets Hildy arrested, and frames his fiancée’s mother, all while insisting he is doing it for the paper. Lemmon plays Hildy’s exasperation beautifully, but Matthau gives Burns a vulnerability underneath the scheming. Watch his face when Hildy finally walks out, or when he realises he may have gone too far. For a second, the grin drops, and we see a lonely man who is terrified of losing his best friend to respectability. Then the grin returns, because Burns never stays vulnerable for long, but the moment matters.
Wilder understood that Matthau could play that duality without softening Burns. In Wilder’s cinema, nobody is purely good, and Burns is no exception. He exploits a condemned man’s escape for headlines, he manipulates a sheriff, he treats Peggy with cheerful cruelty, and the film never pretends otherwise. Yet audiences love him, because Matthau makes Burns’s energy infectious. He loves newspapers, he loves a good story, and he loves the chaotic, ink-stained world of the press room, and that love is genuine even when his methods are appalling. It is the same quality that made his Willie Gingrich in The Fortune Cookie so enjoyable: a scoundrel who is honest about being a scoundrel, and who invites the audience to enjoy the scam.
A press room full of noise
The Front Page is also a showcase for Wilder’s ensemble direction. The press room is crowded with reporters, played by a superb supporting cast including Carol Burnett as Mollie Malloy, a prostitute who tries to protect Earl Williams, and Susan Sarandon as Peggy, and the film’s rhythm is that of a newsroom: overlapping dialogue, ringing telephones, typewriters clattering, men shouting for copy. Matthau dominates that noise without shouting over it. He barks orders, he whispers conspiracies, he delivers insults with the speed of a man who has been insulting people professionally for thirty years, and he never loses the thread of a scene. His Burns is always thinking three moves ahead, which is why he is always winning, at least until the final scene, when Hildy turns the tables in a way that is both funny and oddly tender.
The film’s 1920s setting allows Wilder and Matthau to indulge in period detail: fedoras, press cards in hatbands, cigars, whisky in desk drawers, and a Chicago of elevated trains and political machines. But the film’s target is timeless. It is about the press, about politicians who manipulate justice for votes, and about editors who manipulate reporters for circulation, and Wilder’s cynicism feels as fresh now as it did in 1974. Matthau, who had lived through the golden age of newspapers as a New York boy, plays Burns as a man who knows exactly what he is doing and does it anyway, because the alternative, a quiet life, terrifies him more than any scandal.
Why Walter Burns endures
Walter Burns endures because he is the ultimate Matthau character: the schemer with a conscience he keeps hidden, the boss who is also a friend, the cynic who believes in something, even if that something is only a good front page. Later audiences would see echoes of Burns in Matthau’s later roles, from the coach in The Bad News Bears to the grumpy neighbours of Grumpy Old Men, men who complain, manipulate and grumble, but who show up when it matters. Burns shows up, in his own appalling way, for Hildy, and that is why the film’s ending works. When Burns gives Hildy his watch, a gesture of genuine affection disguised as a trick, Matthau plays it straight, and the joke and the feeling land together.
The Front Page was not Wilder’s greatest commercial success, and some critics at the time found it too broad, too noisy, too faithful to the play’s farcical roots. But it has aged well, and Matthau’s performance is a large part of the reason. He is at his most energetic here, his most verbal, his most delightfully unscrupulous, and he reminds us that comedy, at its best, is about characters who want something desperately and will do anything to get it. Burns wants Hildy back, and he wants the story, and he wants them both at the same time, and Matthau makes that want hilarious, exhausting and, in the end, rather moving.
For Past Tunes readers, The Front Page is the film where Walter Matthau and Billy Wilder, two of the great cynics of American cinema, meet at full strength. It is fast, funny and gloriously amoral, a press-room farce that still has bite, and it features Matthau in a role that seems written for his voice, his face and his timing. Watch it for the jokes, which come thick and fast, and stay for Burns himself, the editor who never sleeps, never apologises and never, ever lets a good reporter get away.