I saw this in a double feature with “Bringing Up Baby” many years ago and it was one of my best nights at the movies. I love Cary Grant in this one because he’s young, so handsome and funny as hell. I swear he winks at me in this movie. Rosalind Russell is just amazing and an inspiration for all us working gals. One…

Poor Ralph Bellamy. And he was so good as schmucky newspaper reporter-turned-editor Al Holland with Barbara Stanwyck in the pre-code Forbidden (1932). I’d known him from His Girl Friday first, seeing it on TV repeatedly as a kid, then in Trading Places when I was a teenager. I didn’t see this picture until I was in my…

It’s also a reminder that professionalism in US newspaper journalism as we think of it today was still pretty new when The Front Page came out. 

Joyce Carol Oates with a differing (and extremely incorrect) opinion

Fun. It played on our immense like for Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon working together again, and it hit the declaring-their-love-for-each-other beat at the end quite nicely. Matthau looks the part of a scoundrel with that sour-hound-dog mug of his, but there’s something thrilling, maybe even sexy about seeing…

Yup. Ben Hecht was a newspaperman. Let’s just say he didn’t see it as a noble calling.

This was divine, Caroline, thank you.

A Baxter is a Bellamy, not the other way around.

I love this movie so much, I can practically quote it by heart. When a colleague told me that I reminded him of Hildy in this movie, it was one of the best compliments I’ve ever been given. I can’t talk nearly as fast as she does, though.

HBO = “Hey, Beastmaster’s On!”

Don Ameche for me is the super hot moustache guy from Midnight, which is my favourite screwball.

And today he’s probably best known as one of the Duke Brothers in Trading Places. That was quite a surprise the first time I noticed it.

I recently read Rosalind Russell’s memoir and was floored by her story about having hired an ad man to punch up “The Front Page”. Because it’s such a great story, especially how she later compares with Harry Cohn the original script tothe filmed result. And ALSO because I just couldn’t believe I’d never heard about…

Don Ameche’s name was regularly dropped in old movies/cartoons/television - in fact, because he was best-known for his Oscar-winning portrayal of Alexander Graham Bell, “the Ameche” was shorthand slang for the telephone for years. But referring to a character played by Ralph Bellamy as looking like Ralph Bellamy -…

I love how Rock Hudson basically does an extended Ralph Bellamy impression when pretending to be a doofy Texas rancher in order to court Doris Day, (in addition to spoofing his own role in Giant).

I guess the modern day equivalent would be movies like Zoolander becoming cult hits because even though they bombed when they were released, a bunch of basic cable stations decided to air it constantly because they had to fill up time and now they’re cult hits.  I guess the even more modern equivelant would be movies…

I remember Wilder’s movie being fine but not especially memorable - and watching it did make me feel that His Girl Friday had rendered it a pointless exercise. Jack Lemmon is good as always, but it’s not much of a stretch for him.

I think Mollie is the most sympathetic character in the film, not Earl. A woman who happened to be nice to a man once and gets dragged into the spotlight and because he happens to commit a crime. And then her spoiler moment, which shows a hell of a lot of guts and commitment.

I enjoy how two of the movies we think of canonical classic of this era, His Girl Friday and It’s A Wonderful Life, only became thought of as such due to copyright lapses and the subsequent wide availability. Makes you wonder what other films we’d hold up as greats if everyone and their mother had watched it a hundred…

I’m fifty and I still want to be Walter Burns when I grow up.