Gallows Humour
And the press gang
The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and Screw-Jack by Hunter S. Thompson
The job of this review is not to convince the reader that this play is very good; nor is it the job of this review to insist that a film adaptation of this play, Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday, is even better. Instead, the job of this review is to examine the question of why both of those things are true.
They didn’t have to be.
A play about crummy, fast-talking con-artist newspapermen is not a guaranteed seat-filler. Satires on the press, even by 1928, came on the heels of centuries of other attempts. Yet this one works. A reader might wonder why.
Why, indeed, does a motormouth comedy from the black-and-white days (which people who are supposedly cinephiles refuse to watch, because anything made before their birth is ‘pretentious’ and solely for snobs who are ‘gatekeeping’ the artform) work so well? Why is it so funny in spite of its morbid themes? Why do so many people love it, who have stumbled upon it simply because it was earlier than it might otherwise have been in the public domain?
Too many questions and they do not get answered. Of course, the film works because it is funny. The play because it is satiric.
It is common enough in our own day to despise the press. More even than the government, which is amusing and a pity. Does the public hate the people who make their lives a misery, or the people who write inaccurately about it? Overwhelmingly, it is the latter. You have to laugh.
That all being said, how do you do superior press satire? For starters, you have definite targets, who are clear to those in the know but who serve as archetypes — without being tedious and quickly dated character studies of people who once dead or retired are so quickly forgotten.
Walter Burns is one of those characters. A man who is superficially appealing — debonair, charming, urbane — all synonyms for well-dressed and handsome and not without manners. But make him as devious and underhanded, as much of the devil, as a comic play can contain. A natural for someone like Cary Grant — all good looks and fine tailoring, but offering more than enough comic potential for someone with real talent to exploit.
And we have Hildy Johnson — in the play a man, in the film (and to my mind a better choice) a woman, played fabulously by Rosalind Russell. In the play, He-Hildy wants to marry the best girl the world ever saw. In the film, She-Hildy wants to marry a nice but dim insurance man, Bruce, played like a prize dullard by Ralph Bellamy. I know which one I prefer.
In The Front Page, Hildy Johnson is just about to quit the newspaper business, the train tickets in his hand, and swings by the pressroom to say goodbye to some folks. Gallows have been erected outside, for there is to be an execution in the morning. The execution of a murderer of a black policeman, because the mayor and the sheriff care quite a lot about the negro vote.
Not necessarily a great wellspring for comedy. But trust me, there’s not been much that’s funnier. And both the play and the film are in the public domain: you can find one on the Internet Archive; the other on YouTube. Be brave! Seek them out.
And, of course, we must talk about Hunter S. Thompson: a journalist in some ways, a one-off in others — although of course imitated by so many millions it’s not funny. Everyone assumes they can take some mescaline and ramble on to no good end. That the words will pour out of them and they’ll be famous. It’s not quite like that. And the man himself hit home runs very seldom. Screw-Jack being a case in point. It’s interesting enough, quite well done by turns. But it’s nothing that would have appeared, nothing that would have been read, had not the man who wrote it also put out Fear and Loathing. It’s a book publishable only because the author is famous. Like most books which actually appear in these dark, depraved days.
And who could do it but Thompson? A guy who wrote for the magazines. A lunatic. A man who satirised himself.