| Collector's Corner January 2004
 His Girl Friday
- Starring: Cary Grant,
Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy, Gene Lockhart
- Directed by: Howard Hawks
- Theatrical release: 1940
- DVD release: 2000
- Video: Academy Ratio (1.33:1)
- Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 mono
- Released by: Columbia TriStar
Fast-talking newspaper editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) has
just lost Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), his best reporter -- and his wife. Hildy has
decided to marry boring Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) and leave the newspaper business so
she can settle down to a quiet, pampered life. Walter has to pull off something quick,
because Hildy and Bruce are scheduled to leave at four o’clock that afternoon. Walter
decides to try to win her back by offering her a reporter’s dream: a story about a
man falsely convicted of murder who is scheduled to be executed the following morning.
His Girl Friday was to be a re-make of the very
successful 1931 film The Front Page. In the original film, Walter was trying to
retain his star reporter, Hildy, who was going to leave to work at an ad agency. In The
Front Page, however, Hildy was a man. The thrust of the hilarious movie was an attack
on yellow journalism and red-hating politicians. When Howard Hawks was hired to direct the
remake, he wanted to make Hildy a woman. The original writers, Ben Hecht and Charles
MacArthur, were unavailable, so Hawks brought in writer Charles Lederer to make the
changes. After a lot of work, the screenplay still seemed a bit flat. Then Lederer had an
idea: make Walter and Hildy ex-lovers who have been recently divorced. Watching both films
shows what a brilliant addition the marriage was. In The Front Page, Walter seems
selfish in trying to keep Hildy at the paper. In His Girl Friday, we can excuse the
selfishness because we know that Walter is still head over heels in love.
Lederer’s hilarious rewrite unfolds at hyper-speed,
funny lines spraying across the screen like bullets from a submachine gun -- first-time
viewers marvel at the extravagant number of jokes. A TV show today might spend an entire
episode building up to just one joke of the quality that His Girl Friday delivers
at about 250 words per minute. On top of the fleet pace, Hawks decided to have the actors
step on each other’s lines, talking like real-life humans. But you’ll notice the
genius, at least when you’ve watched the movie enough times, that the writers not
only gave us hilarity, they set up most of the lines of dialogue so that the zinger is in
the middle -- the beginning and end of each line is unimportant. I’d love to see
today’s writers match that.
During the filming, one of the producers complained to
Hawks that the dialogue was too fast. To prove his point, Hawks shot a scene at standard
speaking speed (around 100 words per minute), then at his preferred pace, and showed them
both to the producer. The verdict: slow equals boring.
For most of his career, and for many years after, Hawks was
considered a hack. He helped this perception by always claiming to be a craftsman, not an
artist. But by the 1960s, a new generation of critics and directors saw the genius in
Hawks’s films. David Thomson, film critic for The Independent, plays the old
"What would you take off a sinking ship?" game in his book A New Biographical
Dictionary of Film. After admitting that most critics would answer with a combo of the
usual suspects (Ophuls, Sternberg, Renoir, etc.), he answers his own question with ten
films by Howard Hawks. I don’t know if I would go that far, but there’s a
compelling case to be made.
Take the year 1940, when His Girl Friday was
released. Four of film’s greatest directors were nominated for Best Director that
year: Alfred Hitchcock for Rebecca, William Wyler for The Letter, George
Cukor for The Philadelphia Story, and John Ford for The Grapes of Wrath.
Although Hawks wasn’t nominated, the quality of his work belongs near the top of that
list, alongside Ford and Hitchcock. Hawks was the only one of the bunch to excel in nearly
every film genre. His list of classic comedies (His Girl Friday, Bringing Up
Baby, Twentieth Century, Ball of Fire) is matched by unforgettable
westerns (Red River, Rio Lobo), war movies (Sergeant York, To Have
and Have Not), crime films (The Big Sleep, Scarface), and science
fiction (The Thing from Another World). He even made a pretty good musical (A
Song Is Born). Along with Hitchcock and Ford (and perhaps Orson Welles), Hawks is one
of the most-influential directors on later generations of filmmakers.
Most of his associates, luckily, did see Hawks’s
genius. Consider Cary Grant. His Girl Friday was the third film Grant made with
Hawks in as many years, all of them big hits. Writers, photographers, and producers all
stood in line to work with Hawks. But one person didn’t believe in Hawks -- Rosalind
Russell. Jean Arthur had been the producers’ first pick for the role of Hildy, but
she and Hawks didn’t like each other. Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, Ginger Rogers,
and Carole Lombard were all offered the role, but none was interested. Russell had already
had a career as a second banana. She wrote in her autobiography, Life Is a Banquet,
that "At MGM there was a first wave of top stars, and a second wave to replace them
in case they got difficult. I was second in line of defense, behind Myrna Loy." When
she found out she was Hawks’s sixth choice for the role, she was incensed.
 Hawks mollified her, and Russell
finally gave one of the best performances of her life. On the set, she quickly found out
that Hawks liked to see his actors ad-lib, thinking the talk was more natural than the
stilted stage diction then popular (think of Leslie Howard’s Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind). Eventually, Russell got into the
ad-libbing, but still felt Cary Grant was getting the best lines. Her brother-in-law, an
ad executive, put her onto his best ad writer. She paid him $200 a week to shuttle funny
zingers to her, and pretended that they were her own ad-libs. Hawks never caught on,
though Grant did, and eventually got a few written for himself. But Russell’s
investment paid off. Hildy is one of cinema’s great screwball heroines -- sassy,
smart, sexy, and secure. It’s no wonder she ended up as the poster child for the
women’s liberation movement.
DVD is the perfect medium for His Girl Friday -- the
side-splitting lines go by so fast that you’ll need to see the film two, three, or
four times before you can hear them all. But caveat emptor -- the copyright to His Girl
Friday has expired, and a flood of terrible DVD editions has hit the market. Some look
so bad, you might think they were dubs from third-generation EP-speed VHS tapes. The one
to buy is the one pictured at the top of this article, released by Columbia TriStar. The
film looks crisp and clean, if not up to the standards of Citizen
Kane or the new two-disc version of Casablanca.
The picture quality alone would be enough to make it the best of the many choices.
The icing on the cake is this edition’s exceptional
group of extras. There are fascinating mini-documentaries on Grant, Russell, and Hawks, as
well as a nice piece on the history and various versions of The Front Page. We also
get some old ads, as well as the principals’ filmographies. The best extra is the
enlightening commentary by film critic Todd McCarthy, author of the definitive Howard
Hawks: The Gray Fox of Hollywood.
January 18th marks the 100th anniversary of Cary
Grant’s birth. For those of you thinking I’ve omitted an appreciation of Grant,
well, I was saving the best for last. For a real appreciation of what Grant brought to His
Girl Friday, try watching the entire movie while watching only Grant. Notice his eyes,
how they draw you to what he’s looking at, or give away his plans or his feelings.
Watch his physical work, as he pounces and glides like a hungry cougar. Notice his
elegance as he shaves, or puts on a tie. His work in His Girl Friday was some of
the best of his life.
I speak from experience. Several years ago, after seeing
quite a few of Grant’s Golden Era comedies and all of his Hitchcock films within two
weeks, I began wondering if Grant had ever made a bad film. I embarked on a heroic
quest to see if I could find one. I’ve now seen 45 of his 76 movies, and have found
exactly one dog: Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942), a poor piece of WWII propaganda
masquerading as a romance. The other 44 films range from fine divertissements to some of
Hollywood’s best films. For the record, I think he did his best work with Hitchcock
(four films) and Hawks (five).
Like Hitchcock and Hawks, Grant never won an Oscar.
Luckily, as with Hawks, the Academy finally realized they had screwed up and gave him an
honorary award. Grant, characteristically modest and self-effacing, had this to say in his
acceptance speech.
"You know that I may never look at this [Oscar]
without remembering the quiet patience of directors who were so kind to me, who were kind
enough to put up with me more than once, some of them even three or four times. I trust
they and all the other directors, writers, and producers, and my leading women, have
forgiven me for what I didn't know. You know that I've never been a joiner or a member of
any particular social set, but I've been privileged to be a part of Hollywood's most
glorious era."
His Girl Friday is one of the best films from
Hollywood’s most glorious era. It’s classic Grant, classic Hawks, and classic
Hollywood. Enjoy it soon.
...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com |
