New restored print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 play is one of the most durable comedies in the American repertory and Lewis Milestone’s 1931 brash and brisk screen adaptation deserves a place of pride alongside it. Set in Prohibition-era Chicago, this is a cynical valentine to the ink-stained wretches of the world. The 1931 film version was the first and the one most contemporaneous to its depicted events. It is a pre-Code marvel with a machine-gun stride, capturing a sense of nihilism that the country was getting dragged into as the Depression kicked off. Its success started a cycle of cynical newspaper films. In 2010 the film was selected for the United States National Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and in 2016 the film was finally restored by the Academy Film Archive to the original American release version for the first time in decades. The version you will see is this restoration.