The Front Page

“It's the hottest story since the Chicago fire...and they're sitting on it.”

Hildebrand Johnson (Jack Lemmon), the best reporter at a Chicago paper, is on his way out the door to marry and leave the business. His editor, Walter Burns (Walter Matthau), will say or do almost anything to keep him on one more big crime story before he goes. Billy Wilder sets it in a single crowded press room and lets the talk run fast and overlapping, in a grainy, lived-in 1920s.