‘Friday,’ I’m in Love

Everything in “His Girl Friday” happens so quickly that there’s hardly any time to stop and admire its skills, or its faith in the audience’s ability to keep up with it. The dialogue – which even for a screwball comedy is pretty fast – is as spirited as it is intelligent, but there’s never a moment where it feels as if the movie’s outrunning us. As a matter of fact, one of the movie’s great pleasures is how its characters make being witty look easy, as if they had one-liners ready for almost anything. What’s more is that they always knock it out of the park, even when the plot throws them a curveball. Any movie that starts with a title card saying “Ready?” is sure to have lots of them.

Actually, that title card also makes it clear that even though the film takes place “in the ‘Dark Ages’ of the newspaper game…you will see in this picture no resemblance to the men and women of the press of today.” That should give you an idea of the nerve of our hero, an editor from the Chicago Morning Post named Walter Burns (Cary Grant), who’ll stop at nothing to get his hands on a story. His most prized reporter, who happens to be his ex-wife Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), tells him she’s quitting and getting hitched with her fiance Bruce (Ralph Bellamy) in the morning. Walter has grown so accustomed to bending everybody to his will that when he fails to make Hildy stay, he starts to get desperate.

As a last resort, he convinces Hildy to cover one more story: A convicted murderer’s (John Qualen) being hanged the next morning, and Walter needs her to get an exclusive interview with him. In case such a big story isn’t enough to win her back for good, he gets a con man (Abner Biberman) to plant a watch on Bruce and have him arrested for theft, and although it’s a pretty outrageous scheme, Hildy should’ve expected as much from a guy whose cunning is so extreme that she can’t help but admire it. “Walter,” she tells him, “you’re wonderful, in a loathsome sort of way.”

The chemistry between these two is a big part of the film’s spirit, and it uses the muted sexual tension of early ’40s cinema (it was released in the first month of the decade, in fact) to give their already heated dialogue an edge. What’s funny is that its inspiration, a play called “The Front Page,” was originally written with two men in the lead roles. In an era where nearly all Hollywood comedies made room for romance, director Howard Hawks turned Hildy into a woman, taking her love-hate relationship with Walter to a new level. (It also opened the movie up to a broader audience – its tagline, “She learned about men from him!” makes it seem like a romantic film noir.)

You’d think that with so many filmmakers inspired by Hawks’ work (the most famous of which is probably Quentin Tarantino, whose ear for dialogue seems to have picked up where Hawks’ left off), a movie like “His Girl Friday” would’ve lost some of its luster, but like all classic films, its wrinkles are part of its charm. Knowing this material wouldn’t have the same magic if it’d been shot today makes “His Girl Friday” seem like a rare thing of beauty, one that actually works better than many of its followers. With a running time of only 92 minutes, it indicates how right Hawks was when he explained what a great film should be: “Three good scenes, no bad scenes.”