Some words concerning His Girl Friday (1940)

As you know, Jim, Howard Hawks’s classic comedy concerns a newspaper editor’s (Cary Grant) attempts – most of them immoral, illegal, or unethical in various combinations – to prevent his star reporter and ex-wife (Rosalind Russell) from leaving town and her job to marry the most boring man alive (Ralph Bellamy), whose main attraction probably is that unlike our editor, he isn’t a total prick. Or really, it nominally concerns this plot, for the narration spends as much time on – rather bitterly – satirizing the fourth estate (lying hyenas without conscience), politicians (lying, corrupt hyenas who haven’t even heard of a conscience), and generally pretending there are no cynical elements in here at all, no Mister Hays, sir.

The case Grant’s Walter Burns uses to drag Russell’s Hildy Johnson back into the fold is the sort of thing crime melodramas were (and still are) made of but the characters – even Hildy who comes closest to a person with an actual conscience here – treat the whole thing with bluff cynicism that only goes near compassion when it’s time to get the newspaper readers to weep or put one over on the competition. There’s a suicide in the film the characters at best shrug off, for Cthulhu’s sake. It’s not as if the film doesn’t know its main characters are pretty shitty people, either; in fact, this seems to be rather one of the points of the whole affair. There’s an interesting tension in the movie here. As everybody knows, Hawks was all about showing professionals at work doing said work well, generally presenting this with the true admiration of a fellow professional. So there are scenes in here, particularly when Hildy drifts off into writing trance or handles three problems at once, when Hawks can’t help himself but love her for it, even though he’s not blind to her considerable character flaws. Of course, say what you will about Hildy and Water, they do share one virtue: they very much prefer putting down the big guy than the little one, and are therefor earn Hawksian admiration as people who do their jobs in spite of their flaws.

This is very much Rosalind Russell’s show, by the way, making this also a film about a professional woman standing at the crossroads between a job (and a man) she’s oh so very good at but that brings out the worst in her and the sort of cloying conservative domesticity she couldn’t survive for year. What can we say about Bellamy’s character who apparently loves her, but can’t even understand this most obvious of things about her?


The film is incredibly good at distracting its audience from all this though – clearly it distracted the censors or otherwise nothing of this could have flown – by the sheer virtue of how incredibly funny its morally dubious protagonists are together. Especially Russell is throwing herself into the ever faster overlapping dialogue of Charles Lederer and Ben Hecht with abandon and precision. All the while, the film demonstrates her increasing departure from her future of boring domesticity through the decreasing state of her hat. Particularly the film’s final third uses its era’s love for overlapping dialogue to incredible effect, sometimes having discussions about three different things going on at once, winning comedic effect at once from this structure, the sharpness of the writing, and the sheer energy surrounding the characters.