Most of the time, journalism is not that exciting (trust us, we know). But these movies do a superb job of making the business look glamorous, dangerous and fun.
The 1930′s had enough reporter movies to fill this whole list. Every actor capable of spitting out snappy dialogue was given a fedora and a press card to stick in his hatband; nearly every actress played some frail being pursued by a newsman. In this Frank Capra-Robert Riskin romantic comedy, a flighty heiress (Claudette Colbert) runs out on her father to join her fiance in Florida. A wiseguy reporter (Clark Gable) gets wind of her whereabouts, trails her for a scoop and discovers true love. That, and the heiress’s millions, will beat a $5 bonus any week.
A clever romantic comedy with not one, but two mistaken secret identities, It Happened One Night was the only genuine newspaper movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture; it also grabbed Oscars for the director, writer and lead stars. The film was remade as a Hollywood musical in the ’50s and several times — faithfully but without credit — as a Bollywood musical.
As a winsome crackpot awaits execution for murder, the most cynical bunch of reporters in movie history crack jokes. One paper’s managing editor, Walter Burns (Cary Grant), will do anything (including kidnapping an old lady) to get an exclusive — and to win back his star reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), who is also his ex-wife about to marry an insurance-peddling lump (Ralph Bellamy). It was director Howard Hawks who had the inspiration to switch sexes on the male Hildy from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s famously misanthropic whirlwind Broadway farce, thus adding romantic chicanery to Walter’s rap sheet. Fast-fast and funny-funny, the film moves with a pickpocket’s grace and the morals of a…wait, journalists don’t have morals.
New system launch games are usually pretty dismal — look at what happened to the Nintendo 3DS — but the PS Vita’s looks unusually promising. Here’s a rundown of the seven Vita games we’re most looking forward to (and why).
In light of the Material Girl performing at Super Bowl XLVI, TIME takes a look at her life and career, both of which have been lived firmly in the public eye.
