His Girl Friday
Directed by: Howard Hawks - 1 hour, 32 minutes - 1940 - USA - B&W - DVD - 1.33:1
Starring: Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy, Gene Lockhart, Porter Hall
Hildy Johnson is a star newspaper reporter who’s giving up the business to marry Bruce Baldwin, an insurance man from Albany. She stops by her old newspaper to tell her ex-husband and ex-editor, Walter Burns, about her plans. Walter has just received the scoop on the story of an accused murderer who has been sentenced to hang the next day. Walter wants his best reporter Hildy to cover the story, and sets off to do everything in his power to prevent her from leaving the city and marrying Baldwin the following day. ‘Everything in his power’ includes bribery, kidnapping, and planting false evidence, with the poor, earnest Baldwin getting the brunt of the abuse. Luckily, he’s Cary Grant, so the whole thing is kind of charming.
Of all the fast-talking comedies of the 1930s(ish), this is the fast-talkingest. This film was overlapping dialogue years before Robert Altman ever picked up a camera. I can’t imagine how many takes each scene must have required, much less how people performed it on stage beforehand. His Girl Friday was adapted from The Front Page, a play that was first adapted for the screen in 1931. In the original play, Walter and Hildy were both men, but when Hawks proposed a remake to the studio he wanted to change Hildy’s character to be Walter’s ex-wife, and now it’s hard to imagine the story without that dynamic. As funny as it is, His Girl Friday manages one of the more cynical portrayals of the newspaper industry, the default environment for cynical portrayals. While Cary Grant’s character is wicked, the word we use for evil people we like, most of the rest of the reporters are straight up dead-eyed sociopaths, playing an interminable game of poker while discussing tomorrow’s hanging. Their approach is brutal, but it’s all worth it for a good story.