Cinema: Weakened Update: THE FRONT PAGE

SWITCHING CHANNELS

The machinery still works. Sixty years after The Front Page hit Broadway, the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur farce retains its manic energy and toxic bite. Gags still pinwheel out of the plot — the one about a managing editor trying to scoop the world on a big story while keeping his ace reporter from deserting him to get married. And, as three previous movie incarnations have proved, The Front Page turns briskly whether the reporter is a man (Pat O’Brien in 1931, Jack Lemmon in 1974) or the boss’s ex-wife (Rosalind Russell | in the 1940 His Girl Friday).

This time, the setting is a satellite TV network where Anchorwoman Christy Colleran (Kathleen Turner) is the best newsman in town. Screenwriter Jonathan Reynolds needn’t change much else. Even with their pampered hair and fractured prose, these journalists can be as rapacious and fallacious as the old guys. Just watch the media line up avidly for the first televised electrocution, then blow the story when the warden blows a fuse. What you won’t see here is the daft equipoise Howard Hawks brought to His Girl Friday. The new film’s director, Ted Kotcheff, is content to push everybody into a small space and hope they’re funny.

Well, sometimes. Burt Reynolds is amiable and, for once, animated as Turner’s boss, who will hide a convict in a photocopy machine to protect his exclusive. Christopher Reeve brings a nice macho wimpitude to the role of her new beau — he’s Clark Kent with a preening ego. And Turner, her wit percolating through that great womanly laugh, struts in high style. Now if only the movie could match her suave maneuvering. That would be front-page news.