JohnHowardReid Director: GREGORY LA CAVA. Dialogue director: Frank Reicher. Screenplay: Walter De Leon. Dialogue: Frank Reicher. Adapted by Jack Jungmeyer from the stage play by George S. Brooks. Photography: Arthur Miller. Production manager: Lucky Humberstone. Assistant director: Paul Jones. Sound recording: D.A. Cutler, Clarence M. Wickes.Copyright 26 September 1929 by Pathé Exchange. New York opening at the Colony: 5 October 1929. 7 reels. 6,028 feet. 66 minutes. Available on a 9/10 Grapevine Video DVD.COMMENT: Like the stage play, the whole action of the movie takes place on the one set. Admittedly, it's quite a large set, much bigger than a theatre could handle, but it's not very glamorous and does tend to out-stay its welcome. Nonetheless, I'm told that this is what a real newspaper office actually looked like back in 1929. More surprising still is the information that the reporters and their behavior are accurately depicted. Certainly - with a notable exception - the movie is competently acted. The exception, sad to say, is Carole Lombard who does absolutely nothing with her role at all, and looks about as glamorous as a street cleaner. Maybe she could point a finger at the wardrobe mistress and photographer, Arthur Miller, for her drab appearance, but her lack of spark and animation can surely be blamed on the director, Gregory La Cava. Yet some years later, she and La Cava got together for a movie that turned out to be the highlight of both their careers - My Man Godfrey (1936). But while La Cava's handling here is no more than routine, cameraman Miller brilliantly overcomes many early talkie, sound-proof booth problems.

mark.waltz The snap, crackle and pop you are hearing isn't your cereal bowl. It's the soundtrack of this nearly 90 year old film that is trying really fast to capture the magic of the Broadway play "The Front Page". The only thing it really offers is a glimpse into the early days of sound films and early appearances of future stars Robert Armstrong ("King Kong") and 30's superstar Carole Lombard, here without that unique "e" at the end of her first name. This deals with the daily goings on at an oddly run news room where there seems to be more drinking going on and playing around than actual journalism. Static camera work can't help a lot of pre-code dialog, much of it recited by an initially funny butch newspaper woman who is told by the editor not to be so "gay". After a while, this obvious novice becomes a real pest. Lombard really gets nothing juicy to work with as Armstrong's divorce seeking wife, while he really overacts.

bkoganbing Big News casts Robert Armstrong and Carole Lombard as a pair of reporters married to each other but working for rival papers. If you expect to see the gifted comic Lombard from such future classics as My Man Godfrey and Twentieth Century Big News will disappoint you greatly. This one is strictly the show for Armstrong.Armstrong drives his editor Charles Sellon to distraction with his drinking and carousing and it certainly is wearing on his marriage to Lombard. But as he says speakeasies are great place to pick up stories and Armstrong has been successful.A particular speakeasy owner Sam Hardy is the leader of a narcotics ring in their town and Armstrong has the goods on him. Hardy tries something stupid, he goes to the newspaper office and murders the editor and frames Armstrong for the crime. But naturally our intrepid reporter is too smart for Hardy.Big News is little more than a photographed stage play and the original play was no world beater either. It never holds your interest in the way such other films like Detective Story, Dead End, Rope, or Rear Window do that are all almost exclusively on one set.Big News is directed by Greogry LaCava who also did My Man Godfrey. Whatever he brought out in Lombard for that film stayed buried here. In fairness to Carole, she was not given much to work with.Still it's 1929 and movies were learning to talk. Films like Big News show how much was left to learn.

MartinHafer Robert Armstrong and Carole Lombard star in this early talky about the newspaper business. Armstrong plays an obnoxious drunk who, inexplicably, Lombard loves. He constantly shoots off his mouth and you wonder why the paper puts up with him. By the end of the film, however, he's redeemed himself and shows that he's a darn find newspaper man.The film is odd in the way it portrays Armstrong as a relatively high-functioning and lovable alcoholic. In some ways, it seems to excuse his addiction and presents a very odd and convoluted message. It's also odd in that one of the characters seems to be that of a very manly lesbian. Both are things you never would have seen in a Hollywood film once the toughened Production Code was enacted in mid-1934--when alcoholism needed to be punished and lesbians needed to vanish.So is the film any good? Well, in spots it's quite good and in others it lets the viewer down. A few of the performances are poor (such as when the murder is discovered near the end of the film) but the overall plot is engaging and worth seeing. But, for 1929, it's actually quite good--had it been made a year or two later, I would have given it a slightly lower score.For folks like me who simply watch too many movies, it also was a thrill to see Tom Kennedy play a SMART policeman—as he almost always played very stupid ones!