The Front Page (Howard Hughes—United Artists). Adolphe Menjou, a peaked and spindling personage suited to tailcoats and equipped with a devilish little mustache, has long been identified in the cinema with the roles of enervated clubmen, sleek playboys, roues too tired to be dashing. Required to impersonate, in The Front Page, a city editor addicted to coarse epithets and unscrupulous behavior, he does so with surprising success, without even removing his boutonniere. In order to retain the services of a reporter who wants to leave town for a more respectable position, he arranges for police to arrest the reporter. "The son of a —* stole my watch," he says.
Actor Menjou makes "son of a —" sound even more opprobrious and gutter-snipish than the term sounded in the mouth of Osgood Perkins who created the managing editor's part in the Broadway Front Page of onetime Chicago Newshawks Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Items more impolite than any which have previously appeared in cinema are faithfully reproduced from the play's stage version. The scene, which changes rarely through the picture, is the press room of a "Mythical Kingdom's" criminal courts building. Eight reporters are gathered to report the execution of a murderer. Hildy Johnson, the reporter who wants to quit his job, is just leaving when the murderer escapes from jail and makes his way into the press room through a window. Overcome by the opportunity for a scoop, Hildy Johnson hides the murderer in a rolltop desk, stays to write the story.† Finally the murderer is reprieved, Hildy Johnson (Pat O'Brien) entrains with his girl (Mary Brian) for his new job.
Director Lewis Milestone makes The Front Page triumph magnificently over a few trivial defects.
Tabu (Paramount). This film, if translated from pictures into words, would emerge in the form of a bare and gloomy island ballad. It tells the Polynesian legend of a love affair between an island boy and a girl who has been selected by her tribe for vestal consecration. The boy, Matahi, and the girl, Reri, escape from their own island to a more civilized one where he becomes the best pearl diver in the harbor. One night he dives into dangerous water to get a pearl which will enable them to go further away from the pursuing warrior Hitu. When Matahi gets back, Hitu has already prevailed on Reri to return. He sees their boat, swims after it, sinks as the boat grows small across the water.
There is no dialog in Tabu. The story is told entirely by pictures, helped by infrequent and skilful subtitles, accompanied by Composer Hugo Reisenfeld's synchronized "musical setting." Three of the five actors are natives of Bora Bora, one of two Southern Pacific Islands where Director Fred W. Murnau spent 18 months making Tabu. Best shot: Matahi coasting down a waterfall.