For the latest Weekend Watch Party, our critics cued up “His Girl Friday,” Howard Hawks’s fast-paced 1940 newspaper comedy about a big-city editor and the ace reporter who also happens to be his ex-wife. The romantic, journalistic and political high jinks that drive the picture defy easy summary, but there are a lot of spoilers here. The two leading players — Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson and Cary Grant as Walter Burns — have a lot to say. As did our own newsroom motormouths and, of course, the soul of any paper, printed or digital — you, our readers.
A.O. SCOTT Our predecessor Frank Nugent was not a fan of this movie. In his review for The Times, he wrote that “hysteria is one of the communicable diseases and ‘His Girl Friday’ is a more pernicious carrier than Typhoid Mary,” a metaphor that sounds even worse today than it did at the time.
Not everything about this movie has aged well. The racism baked deep into the plot and floating through some of the dialogue leaves a bad taste, and the gender politics are a perpetual source of argument.
In all that snappy dialogue is a ‘joke’ about a ‘colored’ woman giving birth to a ‘pickaninny.’ And yes, it was offensive even in 1940. And there were alternative entertainments that didn’t go there, even in 1940. Who doesn’t love Cary Grant? I know I do. So, this is not about purity tests, it is about what is and is not considered important when many Americans choose what they elevate as ‘perfect.’ — Mary C., Charlotte, NC
SCOTT Other readers responded to the movie’s snap and vivacity. After 80 years, it’s still alive. And I wonder if you’d mind putting on your film historian’s hat — maybe it’s tall and pinstriped, like one of Hildy’s — and say where you think that energy comes from.
This pic features FIVE different kinds of comedy: One: Verbal wit (She’s not an albino, she was born right here). Two: Slapstick (Hildy’s hat falls over her face, she can’t get her arm in her coat-sleeve) Three: Social Satire (the corrupt administration, fatuous and bumbling). Four: Farce (Hiding Earl in the roll-top; hauling Bruce’s mom out bodily). Five: Surrealism (naming Ralph Bellamy, Archie Leach, thus breaking the fourth wall). — Meyertune, NYC
MANOHLA DARGIS Speaking of hats — let’s start with Hildy’s. She wears two that, like her matching striped suits, say different things about her and, like everything else in this film, add meaning. The first is a jaunty, Seuss-like confection (“a co-star in its own right,” wrote one reader, BD Klinger) that sits on her head like a chimney and that she wears when she enters the film. Her second hat is a quieter number worn when she visits a press room crammed with male colleagues. Like her similarly restrained second suit, it announces that she’s getting down to serious business.
Hildy’s clothes say plenty before she opens her mouth. And so does her physicality. She powers into the film soon after it opens with a terrific whoosh. She parks her fiancé, Bruce (the invaluable Ralph Bellamy), near the entrance of The Morning Post, where she’s a reporter. Then with graceful resolve, she sails through the cacophonous newsroom, first pausing to chat up two female telephone operators and then full steam ahead toward Walter. She owns this space. And while there’s disagreement about Hildy’s character and how independent, much less feminist, she is, I think Hawks makes it clear from the start she’s a driving force — which says a lot about him.
A reader — hello Stu Freeman — chided us for not mentioning Hawks in our party invite. But of course we were going to talk about Hawks and hoping that the readers would chime in, too.
Pacing! Brilliant direction. And yes, Cary Grant is the greatest movie actor of all time.— Kim, CT
SCOTT Your description of how Hildy owns the space is a tribute to both Russell’s charisma and Hawks’s craft. Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers and a lot of others passed on the role; as reader Ira Joel Haber put it, “every female star with the exception of Lassie turned the part of Hildy down, and it finally landed in Roz’s lap.” In earlier versions of the story, Hildy was a man, a Hildebrand instead of a Hildegard. That’s how it was in “The Front Page,” Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s original play, and in the 1931 screen adaptation, directed by Lewis Milestone, with Adolphe Menjou as Walter and Pat O’Brien as Hildy.
What changes isn’t only the gender, but also the genre. A somewhat stagy newspaper picture is transformed into one of the great comedies of remarriage (to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Stanley Cavell) and also a masterpiece of cinema. The technique isn’t showy — it never is with Hawks — but the breakneck kineticism that can sometimes leave you breathless is visual as well as verbal.
Every room has its mood, every scene its particular choreography, even when (rarely) the characters are sitting down. The three-way lunch date with Walter stealing Bruce’s seat and Hildy’s hand (for now just to light his cigarette). The card game in the press room. The quiet jailhouse tête-à-tête between Hildy and poor Earl Williams, a moment more intimate than any she has with Walter or Bruce. “Production for use” may be the dubious political nostrum that landed Williams on death row, but it also could stand as the slogan for the brilliant economy of Hawks’s filmmaking.
The performances by the two principals are almost acrobatic feats: to retain clarity and sense notwithstanding a rapid-fire delivery of words and a liberal dose of sarcasm, playful insult, bemusement, innuendo, and scattered asides. That’s the chief genius of the film, to me, and it goes as much to the writing. — Jeffrey W., NY
It’s a fabulously detailed screenplay played with perfect timing and tone by even the actors with the smallest parts. — Green Tea
DARGIS Other than changing Hildy to a woman, Hawks’s genius as a director is evident in how he deals with constricted spaces that fill the film. The three-way lunch is a perfect example. It seems so simple — just three people talking — but it’s virtuosic in its staging, acting and editing, its eyeball rolling and yammering. One of my favorite moments is of Hildy simply raising a hand to quiet Walter. It’s such a small, intimate, unmistakable gesture, the sort of signal that couples develop as part of their private language. We’re just 15 minutes in and we know Bruce doesn’t stand a chance.
You also know he’s doomed because he talks so slow, at least when compared with everyone else. Readers narrowed in on the speed of the dialogue — an apparent 240 words a minute, far faster than the average speaking rate — which is another crucial Hawks choice. Most readers loved the pace, though some felt it was too fast (much like Zooey Deschanel’s character in the “Saturday Night Live” parody of the film). All I know is that it’s clear that too many latter-day screwball stylists (ahem, Aaron Sorkin) never learned one of this film’s great truths: that women are equal to men.
I haven’t seen this movie in many years and watched it last night with three generations of quarantined family. It is as charming as ever but now reads to me, in this moment, as more about people frantically trying to convince themselves that everything is okay, all evidence to the contrary. The film never goes outdoors to the streets that are teeming with Red Menace, violence, and suffering; through the windows we see a gallows and a body on a sidewalk. While Hildy and Walter joke and flirt, a state-sanctioned execution is advanced by corrupt politicians. — Victoria, MA
SCOTT About those men. There’s no question that Cary Grant’s serpentine charm wins out over Ralph Bellamy’s stick-in-the-mud decency, but not everyone is “sold American” on Walter Burns. He’s a manipulator, a bit of a gaslighter and there are hints of physical abuse in the back story. (Note Hildy’s correction of “happy” to “slap-happy” and her later reference to Walter’s having “fingerprints” on her. All in fun, of course, but still.) As Hildy herself says, he’s “wonderful, in a loathsome sort of way.” He certainly isn’t honest or nice, but he is Hildy’s equal because, above all, he’s interesting.
And that view of marriage — as a constant battle of wills that will be sometimes horrible but never boring — combines cynicism and idealism in a way that matches the movie’s jaundiced, loving view of journalism. A nest of vipers and scoundrels, but the only hope for democracy!
DARGIS A nest with a smart, hard-charging woman. Hildy is a wonderfully complex character, one that frustrates as well as delights. You can see her weeping as a defeat, true, but I think that it makes her human, certainly more so than Walter. And, unlike so many men in the movie, she is supremely competent: her jailhouse interview, for one, says more about her competency than any word of dialogue. Walter may be a great manipulator, it is Hildy who’s speedily making, talking, writing her own destiny.
This is simply the greatest newspaper movie of all time. Nothing captures how much fun it can be, how reporters can at the throats of their colleagues and rivals and suddenly band together when there’s an external threat and how facing jail, a wrongful execution, loss of the woman you love you’re only thought is “do you wanna see us get scooped?”—Mike, Houston
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
