Slim Summerville – Movie Musings

Original and (perhaps) best version of the pioneering cynical journalism story

Director: Lewis Milestone

Cast: Adolphe Menjou (Walter Burns), Pat O’Brien (Hildy Johnson), Mary Brian (Peggy Grant), Edward Everett Horton (Roy Bensinger), Walter Catlett (Jimmy Murphy), George E. Stone (Earl Williams), Mae Clarke (Molly Malloy), Slim Summerville (Irving Pincus), Matt Moore (Ernie Kruger), Frank McHugh (McCue), Clarence Wilson (Sheriff Pinky Hartman), Fred Howard (Schwartz)

Unscrupulous newspaper men fling fast-paced banter at each other, caring less about the truth and far more about how the copy sells. In many ways the deeply cynical The Front Page hasn’t really aged at all. Probably why it keeps coming back round again-and-again, in different forms for different eras (most famously of course, spiced up with a gender-swopped Hildy as the screwball romance His Girl Friday). I’ll make a confession – not a surprise for those who know my heretical views on His Girl Friday – it’s never been my favourite play and I’ve never found it as funny as others. But, despite my doubts, it’s hard to deny the flair and energy of Milestone’s early talkie.

Star-reported “Hildy” Johnson (Pat O’Brien) has decided the time is right to give up the newsprint game and find happiness with sweetheart Peggy Grant (Mary Brian). But his ruthless editor Walter Burns (Adolphe Menjou) doesn’t want to hear it from his star reporter. Burns is determined to drag Hildy back into the game, and the press-stopping story of an anarchist who escapes hours before his scheduled execution is just the thing to tempt Hildy away from those wedding bells.

And so we get the ultimate cynical press story, adapted from a play that practically invented the image of the newspaper man as a heartless adrenalin junkie more interested in the scoop than the truth. The Front Page is all about the process of collecting the news, and how easily and casually this can be spun into what an audience wants. If the truth does out eventually, it barely happens as a result of the journalists. In fact, our heroes largely end up pushing it because it will get them out of a tight spot and shift a hell of a lot of copies tomorrow morning.

Milestone’s film for years existed as only a bastardised version of the international print: made up of Milestone’s third choice takes and angles with re-edited lines. Restored into his original vision, it’s striking how dynamic and cinematic The Front Page is. While His Girl Friday has it beat on pace (giving us the same story and almost the same amount of dialogue in twelve fewer minutes), arguably Milestone’s film has the edge on cinematic technique. Milestone uses dynamic camera angles and set-ups to inject pace, from the long tracking shot of Burns prowling his newsprint rooms to the rotating camera that roves around the film’s primary location, the courthouse press-room.

It uses fast-cuts and zooms to great effect: the opening shot of a sack of flour, crash zooms out to reveal it’s being used to test a gallows; the ‘yo-yo’ effect as the camera bounces rapidly up-and-down to take us from one reporter’s face to another during a harried reporting scene. Milestone makes large chunks of otherwise single-location farce, come to life through witty angles and blocking, knowing when and when-not to include an actor in the frame to make a joke work. It’s fast-cutting gives it an early screwball style that further accelerates its sense of momentum. It’s a very astutely, very skilfully directed movie that feels several years ahead of its time, and certainly a whole other level above some of the stilted play adaptations Hollywood was churning out.

Even though the script has never been my favourite, it also picks up a lot of screwball dynamism (and healthy dose of pre-Wilder cynicism) in its bones. It’s chorus of newspapermen, all corrupted to various degrees, are finely delineated, each with their own clear characteristics. From Frank McHugh’s shallow cough to Fred Howard’s banjo, via Edward Everett Horton’s prissy germaphobia and half-hearted attempts at woeful poetry, they each have complementary personalities that helps the comedy spark even more. That’s even without their utter disinterest in the personal lives and tragedies of those they are reporting on, or their shameless gilding of the facts of every story (a lovely audio montage sees them all reporting wildly different versions of an arrest).

The Front Page has a strong performance from Adolphe Menjou as the debonair Burns, here embodied by Menjou as a heartlessly ambitious Mephistopheles-type, constantly throwing titbits of temptation in the way of Hildy. Milestone even films him with a Devilish-Murnau strength, popping up seemingly everywhere he needs to be at any moment in time. Add in Menjou’s suave delight in some ruthlessly amoral lines and you have a genuinely spot-on piece of casting. This is less of the case for Pat O’Brien, the sort of actor more familiar as the best friend to a real star, here showing he doesn’t quite have the charisma to carry a dynamic part like Hildy (in fact, O’Brien would have been perfect casting for the male-version of Peggy: dependable, sturdy, dull).

Nevertheless, he and Menjou bounce off each other well in a film that has more than a little homoerotic energy in it (surely the idea for the gender reverse spun from this!) Even Peggy points out Hildy seems as least as excited as the thought of inconveniencing Burns as he does in marrying her (“you’re going to marry me to spite Mr Burns?”). Hildy isn’t just a man fighting against his urge to report on any events happening around him (a potential fire sees him bemoaning he doesn’t have a camera to hand). There is a life and energy to him when riffing ideas with Burns, that he just doesn’t have with anyone else. The two of them burst into life like naughty kids in each other’s company, in a way they just don’t with anyone else.

Hildy may end the film heading into the sunset, but you suspect Burns’ scheme to bring him back (a witty typewriter ping covers a sensor banned piece of naughty language as Burns calls Hildy an SOB on the phone to an underling) is going to succeed with very little hinderance. Because these guys are made for each other and, just like the rest of the cast, they need the buzz of being in the room where it happens far more than the dull dependency of a job in advertising for Peggy’s Dad’s firm.

That The Front Page does very well and while I’m still not an admirer of a play I found overly cynical and glib, Milestone’s dynamically staged version of it may (ironically) be the best of many committed to the screen.

War is hell in one of the greatest and most influential war films ever made

Director: Lewis Milestone

Cast: Lew Ayres (Paul Baumer), Louis Wolheim (Stanislaud Katczinsky), John Wray (Himmelstoss), Slim Summerville (Tjaden), Arnold Lucy (Professor Kantorek), Ben Alexander (Franz Kemmerich), Scott Kolk (Leer), Owen Davis Jnr (Peter), William Bakewell (Albert Kropp), Russell Gleason (Muller)

Franklin Roosevelt once said “War is young men dying and old men talking”. Perhaps no film shows that more truly than All Quiet on the Western Front. The first truly great film to win Best Picture at the Oscars, it’s a profoundly influential and unflinching look at the horrific cost of war. Specifically, it looks at how a younger generation buys into dreams of glory and destiny, only to arrive at the front lines and discover they’ve been sold a pup. A sense of glorious purpose collapses into death, mud and misery. War, it turns out, is hell.

All Quiet on the Western Front follows a company of German soldiers during the First World War, plucked from their college to lay down life and limb for the Kaiser. Their unofficial leader is Paul Baumer (Lew Ayres), an intelligent and thoughtful young man. They soon find the frontline is a world away from what they expected, and death moves through the boys like a flu. Over time Paul, with the mentorship of experienced soldier Stanislaud Katczinsky (Louis Wolheim), finds his naïve view of the world torn away with each bullet and failed attack.

In many ways it was brave to make such a large-scale Hollywood epic that placed the side America had actually fought against in the sympathetic role (on the other hand, much easier to look at the losing side and say “you’re fighting for a hopeless cause”). But that makes the film’s message even stronger: it doesn’t matter about sides, war claims young men regardless. The deaths come thick and fast on the Western front – and the gains are negligent. While the boys’ Professor (a pompous Arnold Lacy) sings a familiar hymn of glory and success by Christmas, life on the front line is actually continual terror. Mud, rats, debris and the constant chance the next step you take could be your last. Shelling is non-stop and every inch of the rickety, ramshackle trenches shakes with each explosion. Never mind going over the top, just being there shreds the nerves.

When the attacks come, the film is striking in its modernism and visual invention. Milestone frequently uses intriguing angles and long tracking shots to present an uninterrupted vision of hellish conflict. The film is full of crane shots, urgent camera movements and judicious cutting. The horrors are shown clearly – at one point a soldier literally explodes while cutting through barbed wire, his hands left clinging to the wire, the rest of his body gone. Milestone intercut shots of machine guns firing an arc with the camera moving in a smooth tracking shot as men run towards it and collapse in death. The film is literally shredding its soldiers.

The debris filled, fox-hole spotted no-man’s land the film presents is hellish. It’s a literal minefield of death, with bodies charging backwards and forwards depending on the tide of battle, the camera moving alongside them. For hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches, Milestone shoots the action with a tracking crane shot above the trenches, which stretch like a jagged flesh wound in nature, overflowing with people trying desperately to kill each other. During one charge, Paul lands in a fox hole with a French soldier, who he mercilessly wounds with his bayonet – then spends a dreadful night watching him slowly die. There isn’t any glory here and attack and retreat are both equally pointless. All that really happens is the body count ticking slowly up.

Most of the company are dead well before the film hits the half-way point. After the first big attack, the company goes behind the lines for a meal. Their meal is almost denied them as it was made for a company twice the size of the one that actually reports. It’s a sign of the suffering and hardening to death, that the reaction of the survivors is joy at the unexpected double rations. Later Milestone follows the fate of a single pair of boots, in a beautifully edited sequence that constantly visually focuses on a pair of good boots, while their successive owners meet their deaths.

It’s all so different from how we started, with an Eisenstein-inspired series of cuts to cheering faces as the students sign up. The horseplay at the training camp – where they deal with an officious postman turned corporal Himmelstoss (a puffed up and preening John Wray), overly aware of his own rank and determined to rub the boys faces in it – in no way prepares them for what is to come. This is all too clear from their confused faces at the staging post, a chaos of mud, soldiers and shelling. No wonder no one at home understands what’s happening here – as Paul discovers on leave, when he is repeatedly shocked and disgusted by the casual triumphalism of old-armchair-Generals utterly ignorant of the realities at the front.

All Quiet on the Western Front is so beautifully shot and edited – you can see its influence on so many war films to come – that it’s a shame some of its dialogue and ‘acting’ scenes are now either a little too on-the-nose or overstay their welcome. There are some big themes handled in the dialogue: why are we fighting, what is the point of war, how do we live our lives when they could end at any time – but the dialogue is sometimes a little stilted. It’s also where the film reverts to something more stagey and theatrical and less cinematic and visual. It’s also a slightly overlong film – already a sign that Hollywood had a tendency to equate “important” with “long”. Most of the films’ points are well made by the first hour, and the second hour or so often repeats them.

However, those concerns are outweighed by how much there is admire. Lew Ayres is very good as the noble Paul – the film had such a profound effect on him he became a life-long pacifist, a conscientious objector in WW2 who served as a front-line medic. Louis Wolheim is superb as the rough-edged but decent and kind Kat, a senior soldier taking the new company members under his wing and teaching them nothing is more important than the next meal and no unnecessary risks.

All Quiet on the Western Front takes place in a naturalistic quiet, with no hint of music to interrupt the mood. It is an overwhelmingly powerful movie about the pointlessness and cruelty of war – and the lies that young men are told to fight it. When Paul returns to the homefront – and sees another class of boys being inspired to die for their country by his Professor – he denounces the whole thing (and is promptly branded a coward). War is a cycle that eats everyone it comes into contact with and has no logic behind it. Directed with verve and imaginative modernism by Milestone, this is a brilliant picture, one of the first sound masterpieces – and still one of the greatest war films ever made.