More from Criterion: His Girl Friday

Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday.

The complicated saga of the funniest comedy ever written by Americans began in 1928, when Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page opened on Broadway. It’s a newspaper play, an especially flavorful version of the hard-boiled comedy, a genre that flourished in the Roaring Twenties. (The other signature samples are the war play What Price Glory? from 1924 by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings; Chicago, set mostly in Cook Country Jail, from 1926; and Once in a Lifetime from 1930 by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, a burlesque of Hollywood’s rocky passage from silent movies to talkies. Chicago, of course, got new life as a Broadway musical nearly half a century after Maurine Watkins wrote the original version.) In The Front Page, the best reporter in Chicago, Hildy Johnson, quits his job – and his sly, manipulative editor, Walter Burns – to get married, move to New York and launch himself into a less disreputable career. But he never gets there because on his way out he gets embroiled in a sensational story about a convicted murderer who escapes from his jail on the eve of his hanging due to the incompetence of the sheriff, who has also colluded in the burying of his reprieve from the governor. This is prime hard-boiled comedy: the press corps may be expert fabricators, but the forces of law and order and the local government are truly corrupt. At the end Hildy realizes what we – and Walter – knew all along: that he’s a reporter to the bone. Plus Burns whips up one final trick to keep him from leaving, prompting one of the most memorable curtain lines in Broadway history.

In the free-wheeling, uncensored days before the Hays Code tamed down American movies for decades, Lewis Milestone made a terrific movie of The Front Page with Pat O’Brien as Hildy and Adolphe Menjou as Walter, roles created on stage by Lee Tracy and Osgood Perkins. Released in 1931, it was an early model for how sound would bring the crackling wit of the Broadway stage to the screen in the great era of the screenwriter (the thirties and very early forties), and it marked the first time overlapping dialogue was heard in the moviehouse. That dialogue, of course, was the innovation of Hecht and MacArthur. And then, in 1941, Howard Hawks remade The Front Page under the title His Girl Friday, with Charles Lederer polishing up the already gleaming script and uncredited additions by Hecht and Morrie Ryskind. How do you improve on a work of sheer genius? Take a gander at the Criterion disc if you’d like an object lesson.

The alteration from The Front Page to His Girl Friday was unpredictable; in fact, it would seem to be a contradiction of the principles of hard-boiled comedy, the toughest, most cynical and most misanthropic subgenre of comedy this side of satire. (Satirical is, in fact, one of its tones.) Hawks and his team of writers gender-flipped Hildy Johnson and turned the play into a romantic comedy – actually a variation thereof that the film scholar Stanley Cavell later dubbed the comedy of remarriage. In a conventional romantic comedy the hero and heroine begin as adversaries and wind up as lovers after the final fade-out, an ingenious solution to the Hays Code dilemma of writers who weren’t allowed to bring the sexual act into the mix. The romantic comedy premise, which Shakespeare had invented in Much Ado About Nothing, preserves sexual tension by postponing its resolution while it’s being enacted by some of the most gifted and varied comic stylists ever to appear on a screen: Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night (the first of the movie rom-coms), Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in The Shop Around the Corner, Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve. In a comedy of remarriage, the central couple used to be married but broke up, and it’s the job of the screenwriter to bring them back together by the last reel. That’s what happens in The Awful Truth with Grant and Irene Dunne, and in His Girl Friday, where Hildy (Rosalind Russell) is not only a one-time star reporter working under Walter (Grant) but also his ex-, bent on leaving town so she can settle down with a nice, genteel insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy).

Niceness and gentility are what Hildy thinks she wants: she’s charmed when Bruce, a devoted puppy-dog of a fellow, croons to her, “Even ten minutes is a long time to be away from you.” We know that this union is doomed because Bruce, who abstains from liquor at lunch and carries an umbrella because it looked like it might rain sometime during the day and lives with his bossy, humorless mother (Alma Kruger), will end up boring Hildy to distraction – and because, for all his double-crossing and convenient fictions, Walter Burns represents the life of excitement to which she’s addicted. That’s the secret at the heart of romantic comedy: the hero and heroine are already in love but they haven’t figured it out yet (or, in a comedy of remarriage, haven’t figured out how to fix the mistake they made by marching away from what should have been the ideal match). The classic romantic comedy ends in a waltz, as the hero explains to the audience at the top of Lanford Wilson’s lovely two-hander Talley’s Folly: the pair of protagonists earn their happy ending by compromising. His Girl Friday fudges this conclusion by making it look like Walter is going to change without ever providing evidence that he will. It takes some fancy footwork on Hawks’s part to make it work but he does, and what would seem to be an unholy meld of two comic visions at other ends of a spectrum turns out to be inspired. A brilliant woman reporter who can hold her own with the men in the press room – she’s the only female journalist in town – carries through the liberating principle of pre-war romantic comedy, that the women are in every way the equal of the men. Because how could stars like Colbert, Hepburn, Stanwyck, Sullavan and Rosalind Russell be anything else? Yet at the same time, a female presence in a room full of rude, insensitive, essentially misogynistic dudes has a subtly gentling effect. That’s clear in the scenes between Russell and Helen Mack as Mollie Malloy, the prostitute who has befriended the poor, befuddled convicted murderer Earl Williams (played, with the damnedest milquetoast charm, by one of John Ford’s favorite stock players, John Qualen).

Russell is so good as Hildy that she even triumphs over those awful big-shouldered striped suits Hollywood used to stick on career women in the 1940s – when she shows up in one with a matching wide-brimmed hat she wears it proudly, like a steeple. Her technique is miraculous, as in the scene where she keeps up conversations on two separate phones simultaneously; it’s a pity that in her later pictures, like Auntie Mame and Gypsy, she became so stentorian and shrill. And Cary Grant may have been as good as this – in Holiday and Charade and in darker, off-the-beaten-track roles in None but the Lonely Heart and Notorious – but surely he was never better. It’s a gleeful, seat-of-the-pants feat of locomotive clowning where he rides on the speediest patterns of gab ever perpetrated on the human ear to run over everyone in his way. He and Hildy are a pair just because no one else can get out her words as fast as he can; but of course she’s been trained to keep up with him. He’s like an LP played at 78 r.p.m.

I love a lot of Howard Hawks pictures: The Dawn Patrol, Scarface, Twentieth Century, Bringing Up Baby, Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Red River, Rio Bravo. But there are many more I don’t care for; I’m not one of the faithful. His Girl Friday is, I believe, his masterpiece, one of the high points in the history of Hollywood entertainment. Hawks’s staging and camerawork are on par with the heaven-sent dialogue. The choreography – or is it orchestration? – of the press room scenes is so dazzling it’s almost hard to get your breath while you’re watching. Sometimes the visual touches are wild, like Kruger’s ignominious exit on the back of Walter’s gangster buddy Diamond Louie (Abner Biberman) when Burns wants to get her out of the way. But just as often they’re pure sleight of hand, like the moment when Grant points out Bellamy to Biberman – another task of removal for Louie – while Bellamy is chatting on the phone to Russell. The third essential element, of course, is the ensemble, which includes Ernest Truex, Porter Hall, Gene Lockhart, Cliff Edwards (a.k.a. Ukelele Ike), Roscoe Karns, Billy Gilbert, Clarence Kolb, Regis Toomey, Frank Jenks, Frank Orth and Edwin Maxwell. And it’s easy to undervalue Ralph Bellamy, perhaps he’d played similar roles in The Awful Truth and the Astaire-Rogers musical Carefree, and because we never root for the dupe. But the romantic comedy wouldn’t work as well without Bellamy’s sweetness and slowed tempo; he’s Grant’s opposite number.

The thrill of the chase is what get the press corps in His Girl Friday high. For us, the blissed-out viewers, it’s the perfectly calibrated Rube Goldberg mechanics revved up to unimaginable speeds.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.