"He does, does he? How did I treat you, like a water buffalo?"
Released in January of 1940, His Girl Friday, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, is a touchstone of screwball comedies. It's also a trenchant satire of the newspaper business and political corruption. I don't claim to have enough cinematic knowledge or erudition to say it's the best, but if forced to choose a favorite comedy of all time, His Girl Friday would probably be my pick.
Charles Lederer wrote the screenplay (with a big assist from uncredited cowriter Howard Hawks), adapting it from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's 1928 play (and 1931 film), The Front Page, about a couple of hard-edged newspapermen, Walter Burns and Hildebrand "Hildy" Johnson, who were parting ways after years of journalistic partnership and combative friendship. It was directed by Hawks, whose idea it was to change the Hildy Johnson character from a male to a female (Hildegard), and to make her Burns' ex-wife--revisions that turned an inspired script into cinematic brilliance.
Hailed as an auteur by cutting edge French film critics in the early 1950s, the equanimous Howard Hawks may have been the quintessential 20th century American filmmaker. A product of the Hollywood studio system and a cinema veteran whose career began back in silent pictures, Hawks believed that the ability to tell a story well was what made a director good. And he didn't use that word, "good," lightly--to him, it described a person who did their job skillfully, adroitly, and stoically, attributes that nearly all of his leading characters had in common throughout his career, which spanned six decades. It was also an apt description of Hawks, who was himself the consummate, dependable professional. He was adept in virtually all genres, including gangster/crime drama (Scarface, 1932), comedy (Bringing Up Baby, 1938; His Girl Friday, 1940; Monkey Business, 1952), action-adventure (Only Angels Have Wings, 1939), noir (The Big Sleep, 1946), western (Red River, 1948; Rio Bravo, 1959; El Dorado, 1966), and musical (A Song is Born, 1948; Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953).
Hawks' contemporary in the directorial field, John Ford, like Shakespeare, was acutely aware of how tenuous the boundary separating comedy and tragedy is, and Hawks seems to be telegraphing that paradoxical relationship in His Girl Friday, in which the two extremes intermingle ominously. One moment we'll laugh out loud, but in the next we're reminded of what's happening in the story: a man named Earl Williams (portrayed by John Qualen), who may or may not have committed a murder due to insanity, is scheduled to be hanged in the morning, thanks to the political opportunism of the city's corrupt mayor (Clarence Kolb) and the inept but equally corrupt sheriff (Gene Lockhart), both of whom are running for re-election. Everyone around Williams--the warden, a self-absorbed psychiatrist, the sheriff, the mayor, and the "gentlemen of the press"--are coldly indifferent to him and his plight, concerned only inasmuch as his execution will benefit them in their jobs. In fact, there's quite a bit of routine cruelty in HGF, from the callous gallows humor of the members of the Fourth Estate (in the presence of a female acquaintance of Earl's, who later attempts suicide) to the casual insensitivity of the government officials to the disrespectful, disposable way Walter (Cary Grant) treats nearly everyone. That may to some degree be a result of Hawks' penchant for cool, detached professionalism, but it could also be a nod to that fine line between comedy and tragedy that we're aware of in the back of our minds but prefer not to think about.
Hildy (Rosalind Russell), Walter's ex-wife and a first-class "newspaperman," is leaving him and The Morning Post (the paper he runs) so that she can remarry and retire to a pastoral life upstate in Albany with her betrothed, a milquetoast insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin (deftly played by Ralph Bellamy, who essentially reprises his role in Leo McCarey's scintillating 1937 screwball comedy The Awful Truth, which also starred Grant). Walter ostensibly needs Hildy to do an interview with Williams before the controversial hanging as she and Bruce are due to catch the northbound train, but he has an ulterior motive of winning her back--professionally and possibly romantically--by baiting her with this big story. He hopes her inherent love of being a reporter and sense of justice won't allow her to refuse to write it and that if she does, it will lure her back to the Post. But just in case, as time is of the essence, Walter plays on Bruce's sympathies, manipulating him into trying to persuade Hildy to stay long enough to do the interview and write the story ("Hildy, we could take the 6 o'clock train if it'd save a man's life!"). It doesn't work (Hildy sees right through Walter's ploy), but she agrees to do it in exchange for his buying a life insurance policy from Bruce.
Only Cary Grant could play a cunning, white collar scoundrel in a position of power and somehow not only manage to be incredibly funny but also maintain a level of likeability, and he does just that in HGF. Part of the reason we're willing to forgive him for being such a "stinker" (aside from his sheer charisma--it is Cary Grant) is because the woman he needs to have in his orbit can give as good as she gets from him. Over his 35-year career in movies, Grant shared the screen with some very talented female costars, among them Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers, Ingrid Bergman, Deborah Kerr, and Doris Day, but none ignited anything like the firecracker onscreen chemistry that Rosalind Russell created with him in HGF. In the tradition of strong Howard Hawks leading ladies, Russell's quick-witted, sharp-tongued Hildy Johnson is not only capable of going toe-to-toe with the self-interested and charmingly brutish Walter Burns, she's also the best writer in a press room filled with the top beat writers (all of them men) in the city. She's good; her counterparts at the rival newspapers know it and they respect her for it. She's "one of the boys" in the best possible sense, in an era when such a thing was all but impossible, yet she maintains a sensitive and sensuous femininity.
But Hildy also possesses a bit of Walter's manipulative nature. After bribing the prison warden so she can get an exclusive interview with Williams in his cell, she craftily steers Williams' responses in a direction that will serve the type of story she has already decided she's going to write. While her machinations are designed to free Williams, her ultimate goal (and Burns') is to unseat the unscrupulous mayor and sheriff. While Hildy has a more humane (read: feminine) side, she and Walter are nevertheless two of a kind; they belong together. Poor nice guy Bruce doesn't stand a chance. On top of all that, she's physically tough-as-nails enough to chase down and tackle (in 1930s high heels) the fleeing warden, to get a scoop from him after Williams inexplicably escaped from police custody. It's almost unfathomable, but Russell was something like the sixth choice to play Hildy--a role she seems to have been born to play.
Besides the principles, Hawks had a cadre of top-notch character actors to fill out the supporting cast. The boys in the press room of the criminal courts building stand out in particular: Frank Jenks, Roscoe Karns (as the lecherous "Stairway Sam"), the ubiquitous Porter Hall, Regis Toomey, Ernest Truex ("Roy V. Bensinger, the poet"), and Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards are all eminently convincing as grizzled veterans of the old school (pre-24-7 news cycle era) newspaper game, displaying varying degrees of world-weary cynicism, with only the occasional hint of empathy. The diminutive Abner Biberman as Louie, Burns' go-to guy for dirty work (whether it be kidnapping, counterfeiting, theft . . . you name it, he'll do it for Walter), adds still more texture to the rich canvas of personalities, as does the perfectly cast bearer of the deus ex machina, Joe Pettibone, played to the hilt by Billy Gilbert, who was incapable of not being funny onscreen.
Perhaps the most frequently acknowledged legacy of His Girl Friday is its innovation of overlapping dialogue, incorporated at Hawks' behest to add an extra touch of realism. Impeccably executed by the cast, it not only achieved the stated goal, it also served to accelerate the action and intensify the drama, when necessary, at times reaching a dizzying 300 words per minute. According to Hawks, the sentences were structured to overlap, with the first and last few words of each being more or less inconsequential--thus, we're able to hear and understand every line from however many actors seem to be talking over each other at any given time. There are also a couple of priceless meta moments, a concept that was virtually unheard of in that era. In one of them, Ralph Bellamy's character is described as looking like "that fellow in the movies, uh--Ralph Bellamy." In another, Cary Grant uses his real name (Archie Leach) when referring to a former acquaintance who cut his own throat. The overall effect of these imaginative embellishments, along with the crisp performances of an outstanding ensemble cast and the presence of a strong, dynamic woman in a central role, makes this 86-year-old black and white movie still feel fresh and modern today.
In the decades since Hawks' comedy tour de force was released, there have been at least half a dozen additional film and television remakes of The Front Page. Receiving the most notoriety were Billy Wilder's visually elaborate but below average (for Wilder) 1974 period piece starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and an execrable 1988 adaptation with Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner, Switching Channels. The latter was an ill-advisedly "updated" rejiggering of the Hawks masterpiece. His Girl Friday remains a benchmark for screwball comedies and (though I'm loath to mention this generally flaccid subgenre in the same breath) romcoms.
Despite Cahiers du Cinéma's embrace of Hawks in the 1950s and beyond, His Girl Friday was overlooked and virtually forgotten until the early 1970s, when, like Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, it fell out of copyright and inferior quality dupes began circulating in university revival houses and on late night television broadcasts, reigniting interest in the film. A pristine print, fully restored to its unblemished 1940s glory, now resides in the Criterion Collection.
© Jon Oye, 2026
Photo sources:
http://www.movingpicturehistoryblog.com/2010/10/his-girl-friday-1940.html
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032599/mediaviewer/rm1870464000/
https://www.tcm.com/articles/89289/trivia-his-girl-friday-trivia-and-fun-facts-about-his-girl-friday
https://thenewbev.com/blog/2016/12/his-girl-friday-the-women/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Howard-Hawks/Films-of-the-mid-1930s
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