His Girl Friday (1940)

His Girl Friday is an American comedy romance film first released in 1940, directed by Howard Hawks.  The film stars Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy, Gene Lockhart and Porter Hall.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Newspaper editor Walter Burns is known for his ruthlessness and cunning but when he learns that he is about to lose his ex-wife and star reporter Hildy Johnson he surpasses himself.  To prevent Hildy from leaving town to get married with her fiancé Bruce Baldwin, he coerces her into interviewing a convicted murderer Earl Williams on  Death Row.   Williams is due to be executed the next morning and so when the governor issues a reprieve, Walter has to act fast to prevent the reprieve from reaching the mayor.  Luckily, the sheriff’s ineptitude allows Williams to escape, so what had been a minor news story now becomes a major scoop.  With any luck, Walter will have Hildy on the payroll for another twenty years.  She may even decide to remarry him...

The fastest, funniest and finest screwball comedy of them all.  From start to finish, His Girl Friday races along at such a pace, somewhere between that of a tornado and an express train, that if you catch half of the jokes in a single viewing you have done well.  With dialogue rattled out at 100 words per minute above the average, this is a veritable test of endurance, as much for the audience as for the actors.  The film may be hard work but it is sublime entertainment and one of the greatest comedies to sneak (or rather sprint) out of Hollywood.  

In what is unquestionably his best comedic role, Cary Grant plays a venal newspaper editor of the worst kind, and he does so with such irresistible charm that no matter what his character does (and he does some pretty rotten things) you can’t help siding with him.  Of course it helps that he is partnered with the ballsy Rosalind Russell, who belts out lines like a hyperactive machine gun on industrial strength steroids and is the perfect foil for Grant’s effortless smarm.  Russell’s Hildy is a tough cookie (you can easily envisage her landing killer blows in a boxing ring) but you can’t help pitying the poor girl for falling for such an odious schemer as Walter Burns.  It all goes to show that if you have enough charm and a nice smile you can get away with murder, and worse.

Strange as it may seem, His Girl Friday was originally intended to be a straight remake of Lewis Milestone’s 1931 film The Front Page, which was based on the popular stage play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.  During the auditions, director Howard Hawks realised that the part of Hildy Johnson sounded better when read by a woman so he requested the entire script to be rewritten with Johnson now a female character.  The rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue was also Hawk’s idea – the intention being to imitate how people spoke in real-life, which tends to be much faster than in films (although probably not as fast as the frenetic Grant-Russell exchanges, which are at a pace that most horse race commentators would struggle to beat).

A whirlwind melange of slapstick, satire and farce, His Girl Friday is Hawk’s comic masterpiece, a film that exploits the talents of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell to the full and mercilessly assails the spectator with an endless barrage of potentially lethal mirth missiles.  This is screwball at its most unremittingly manic, as fast and exciting as an Olympic marathon, but much, much funnier.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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