His Girl Friday: Movie, DVD Review

(Originally published 2004)

It's the energy of "His Girl Friday" that grabs you, its heated lines of dialogue that leave you satisfied and spent. Howard Hawks directs with such surefooted ease, he blasts through his film with an air of precociousness. There's the sense that he's showing off here, with a "look at what I can do" attitude that might have sunk a lesser film if it didn't have the goods to back it up.

This movie has the goods.

The film is dense and complex, with scenes stacked against each other with such admirable speed, much of the movie's pleasure comes down to the sheer craft of its production.

This is a movie about the art of moviemaking, made by people who love movies. Excellence rings through its direction, Charles Lederer's script, and the lead performances by Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, who are backed by one of the best supporting casts in an American movie.

Based on Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play "The Front Page," "His Girl Friday," released in 1940, is one of the great newspaper satires, with Grant as Walter Burns, managing editor of New York's Morning Post, and Russell as Hildy Johnson, his star investigative reporter and former wife who is on the verge of moving on with a new life -one that happily doesn't involve newspapers or Walter.

But Walter isn't having any of that. He and Hildy may be divorced, but in his own way, he still loves her, and really, who can blame him? Headstrong, attractive and smart, her cutting barbs right in line with his, Hildy is indeed his girl, with Walter deciding upon seeing her soon-to-be husband, the perfectly nice but perfectly benign insurance salesman Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), that he won't do for her.

Hildy has other ideas about that, but soon is lured back to the job she loves when the film, dipping into the noir movement of the time, extends to include Earl Williams (John Qualen), a convicted felon about to be put to death for killing a black policeman. It's the timing of his lynching that raises eyebrows. Just days after it takes place, the current sheriff and mayor will be up for re-election. Should they succeed in hanging Williams before then, they presumably will appeal to minorities and thus garner their much-needed vote.

It's the very sort of story that a good reporter, backed by a good editor, could expose and wash clean, particularly with such dirty politics involved - and the idea that Williams might have shot the cop accidentally. What ensues is slapstick comedy struck through with moments of dark drama, the likes of which give "Friday" surprising depth and, somehow, heartier laughs.

Sustaining the peak she achieved in 1939's "The Women," Russell is terrific here - her mouth deserves a ticket for the speed it breaks. She nicely complements a very sly and dapper Grant, who would sail through 1940 with one of the best years of his career - he also would appear in "The Philadelphia Story." Watching them eat up the screen and spit it out for each other's pleasure is pure dessert for them, yes, but also for us.

Grade: A