“Front Page” & “Girl Friday” On Criterion
It’s material that never quite becomes dated. “The Front Page” is finishing its hit run on Broadway. And Criterion has just released a fine edition showcasing “The Front Page” (1930) and “His Girl Friday” (1940). The latter is in a new HD restoration, and the earlier film, long crawling around in disgraceful public-domain bootleg, now has a 4K glow–maybe looking better than it did at the time. The extra fillip is that it’s a version that director Lewis Milestone preferred to the familiar one. In Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s musings about the material, I learned (and was glad to know it) that ‘“My Girl Friday†was a spicy 1929 play about flappers who drug tycoons at a party and then convince them that the worst has happened. Consisting largely of scenes with chorus girls in bathing suits, it was dubbed by Variety “out and out smut.†Unsurprisingly, it found success on Broadway. During some weeks its BO take rivaled that of The Front Page, also on stage then.’
