His Girl Friday (1940)

Director:

Howard Hawks

Writers:

Charles Lederer (screenplay)
Ben Hecht (play) ...

Release Date:

18 January 1940 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama | Romance

Tagline:

She learned about men from him!

Plot:

A newspaper editor uses every trick in the book to keep his ace reporter ex-wife from remarrying.

Plot Keywords:

Editor | Newspaper | Reporter | Newspaper Editor | Mayor

Awards:

1 win

Cast

Cary Grant	...	Walter Burns
Rosalind Russell	...	Hildy Johnson
Ralph Bellamy	...	Bruce Baldwin
Gene Lockhart	...	Sheriff Hartwell
Porter Hall	...	Murphy
Ernest Truex	...	Bensinger
Cliff Edwards	...	Endicott
Clarence Kolb	...	Mayor
Roscoe Karns	...	McCue
Frank Jenks	...	Wilson
Regis Toomey	...	Sanders
Abner Biberman	...	Louie
Frank Orth	...	Duffy
John Qualen	...	Earl Williams
Helen Mack	...	Mollie Malloy

Also Known As:

Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday (USA) (complete title)

Runtime:

92 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English | French

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Mirrophonic Recording)

Certification:

Australia:G (TV rating) | Argentina:Atp | USA:Approved (PCA #5823) | USA:TV-G (TV rating) | Finland:K-3 (video rating: 1993) | France:U | Portugal:M/6 | South Korea:15 | UK:U (1996) | Australia:PG | Finland:K-16 | Germany:12 (DVD rating) | Spain:T | Sweden:15 | UK:A (original rating) | UK:U (video rating) (1994) | West Germany:o.Al. (original rating)

Filming Locations:

Warner Brothers Burbank Studios - 4000 Warner Boulevard, Burbank, California, USA

Company:

Columbia Pictures Corporation

Trivia:

The restaurant scene was written directly for the movie and took twice the time to shoot than expected: four days. The difficulty resided in the editing, since the characters had to eat, and the background actors kept walking around.

Goofs:

Continuity: Hildy wears black heels throughout the movie but when Earl Williams is hidden in the desk, she is pacing behind the table and is wearing white flats. The next time her feet are shown, she is wearing the black heels again.

Quotes:

Walter Burns: Bruce, I, uh... let me get this straight. I must have misunderstood you. You mean you're taking the sleeper today and then getting married tomorrow?
Bruce Baldwin: Oh, well, it's not like that.
Walter Burns: Well, what's it like?
Hildy Johnson: Poor Walter. He'll toss and turn all night. Perhaps we better tell him Mother's coming along, too.
Walter Burns: [to Hildy] Mother? Why, your mother kicked the bucket!
Bruce Baldwin: No, my mother, my mother.
Walter Burns: Oh, your mother. Oh, well, that relieves my mind.
Hildy Johnson: [to Walter] It was cruel of us to let you suffer that way.
[to Bruce]
Hildy Johnson: Isn't Walter sweet? Always wanting to protect me.

Movie Connections:

Featured in Shot List (2009)

That Unseen Power That Protects The Morning Post

Whoever had the bright idea to turn the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur play, The Front Page into a boy and girl comedy ought to get a Nobel Prize for comedy if such an award had been available at the time.

Of course it helps when one of your two main characters has an ambiguous first name like Hildy. Short for Hildreth when Pat O'Brien plays it, Rosalind Russell is all female in this one. Russell bites off a huge chunk of Katherine Hepburn career woman territory here and she digests it well.

She's the best reporter on the staff of the Morning Post and her editor Cary Grant doesn't want to lose her no way. At one time he even married her, but that didn't take. They're divorced now and Russell is fed up and decides she wants a home and children and security and Ralph Bellamy is going to give her all of that. Plus a home with his mother Alma Kruger for a year in Albany.

As her friendly rival reporter Regis Toomey says, there ain't no way that Russell could ever leave the newspaper game. She proves it when she goes to work on that one last assignment to cover an execution at the state penitentiary.

Even though Howard Hawks did add a romance into The Front Page he did not sacrifice one iota of the biting satire from Hecht and MacArthur. If you watch the either The Front Page or His Girl Friday or even the remake from the eighties Broadcast News you will swear the world is made up of boobs and nitwits and the only smart people around are journalists. Too often however that's proved to be the case.

Poor meek John Qualen who was listening to some radicals speaking and got caught up in the moment and accidentally shot a black police officer. Back then ethnic politics were played to the hilt and a law and order mayor, Clarence Kolb, wants to see Qualen executed. His brother-in-law, sheriff Gene Lockhart means to see the sentence is done.

Cary Grant's paper is against capital punishment at least for this poor schnook. Of course when Qualen escapes all kinds of complication arise and Russell's on the job to report them.

As he was in The Awful Truth, Ralph Bellamy is there to be the slightly befuddled doofus who loses the girl to fast talking Cary. Bellamy's performance is a brilliant piece of work itself. He's so funny because he plays the part absolutely straight and the humor falls around him.

Howard Hawks assembles a really grand cast of memorable character actors. My favorite however, brief though his scenes are is Billy Gilbert who is a messenger from the governor who is delivering a sentence commutation. The poor man gets waylaid and involved in all kinds of intrigue that is all going on over his head. You have to see him to believe how funny he is and he does it without a sneeze.

His Girl Friday successfully combines screwball romantic comedy with biting satire and no seams show it all in the stitching. It's a blueprint on how to do successful cinema comedy.