HIS GIRL FRIDAY

His Girl Friday

1940 Columbia 92m

Speed. Timing. Delivery. These are the three most important words whenever Howard Hawks's 1940 comedic masterpiece His Girl Friday is discussed. Adapted from a stage play co-written by long-time Hawks collaborator Ben Hecht, His Girl Friday had already been filmed in 1931 by Lewis Milestone as The Front Page (the title of the original play,) a scathing satire of the media, and newspapers in particular. The story, in both the play and the films, centers on a reporter and an editor who try to get the jump on a big story involving an escaped death row prisoner who probably shouldn’t even be there in the first place. Before long, our heroes have "captured" the prisoner and are hiding him (right in the middle of the action, of course) from the authorities to further their story.

When Howard Hawks decided to give the play a try, he first opted to fundamentally change one of the two main characters by switching his gender. He became a she, and consequently not just another reporter opposite the manipulative editor Walter Burns, but his ex-wife Hildy Johnson. This provided Hawks with a great deal of situational material, some of which makes up the best of the finished film. For this love-hate couple, Hawks, of course, cast Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, both of whom are flawless in the movie.

By keeping the satiric media stuff from the original, and adding the pressure Walter feels to convince Hildy to abandon her bumbling, straight-laced fiancée Bruce (Ralph Bellamy), Hawks had a recipe for success with his re-make. There was one more ingredient to be added, though, and this was pace.

Nearly all of the humor in His Girl Friday hinges on the delivery - specifically the pace - of the dialogue. At the time, the film featured the fastest dialogue ever recorded for a movie, Hawks’s goal from the outset. Making the film, the actors feared that their dialogue, much of which overlapped (unheard of at the time), would be unintelligible, thereby ruining the film. Their concerns were misplaced. His Girl Friday is enormously successful in drawing us into the dizzying world of fast-talking reporters, a group that would come off as selfish and inhuman if we weren’t so caught up in it all. Many of the gags and even the lines would be considerably less effective, even failures, if it weren’t for the pace of their delivery. Essentially, this is a film about speed.