The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Screwball comedy

DIRECTOR

Howard Hawks

WRITERS

Charles Lederer (screenplay); Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur (play)

STARS

Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell

BEFORE

1931 The first movie version of the stage play The Front Page is directed by Lewis Milestone, and stars Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien.

AFTER

1941 Grant and Russell reprise their roles for a radio version of the movie, broadcast by The Screen Guild Theater.

1974 Billy Wilder directs a remake of The Front Page, starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.

Howard Hawks’s sharply scripted screwball comedy about the daily newspaper world is one of the smartest movies of the black-and-white era. Famous for its overlapping, machine-gun-fast dialogue, it portrays journalists who will stoop to anything in their hunt for a good story. The movie’s press hotshot leads lie, cheat, and connive, yet they win the viewer over with their charm, energy, and brilliant comic timing.

Play adaptation

His Girl Friday was based on a 1928 play about the corrupt world of the press, The Front Page, of which a movie version had already been made. In The Front Page, the battle of wits is between two newspapermen, but Hawks made a key change. After reading scenes from the play with his girlfriend, Hawks is said to have exclaimed, “Hey, it’s even better with a woman and a man than with two men.” And so, in Charles Lederer’s screenplay, the two newspapermen become a recently divorced couple: hard-boiled editor Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson, his ex-wife, who is an ace journalist. This switch added a romance angle to the satire, playing with ideas of what men and women want in life.

Walter (Cary Grant) schemes to prevent his ex-wife Hildy (Rosalind Russell) from marrying another by reminding her how much she loves her job.

“Who do you think I am, a crook?”

Walter / His Girl Friday

A woman’s dilemma

In the opening scene, Rosalind Russell’s Hildy, struggling to get a word in edgewise in a quick-fire verbal sparring match with her ex-husband and ex-boss Walter (Cary Grant), announces that she is about to marry insurance man Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy).

Bruce is dull, but Hildy says that she wants to escape from the beastly, corrupt world of journalism to become “a human being” who lives a “normal” life as a wife and mother. It’s a choice between home and career, but Walter is sure that the thrill of the press world is too alluring for her to quit as star reporter. The movie revolves around his efforts to remind her of this, as he involves her in an unfolding news story about the upcoming execution of convicted murderer Earl Williams (John Qualen).

Walter behaves outrageously in his efforts to win Hildy back. He barely misses a beat when Molly, the girl who has befriended Williams, leaps to her death from a window. Yet Grant endows Walter with such panache and sheer cleverness that the viewer roots for him as he reels Hildy in. No wonder Hildy says to him, “Walter, you’re wonderful, in a loathsome sort of way.” And yet Hildy matches him every step of the way, which is why, of course, they are made for each other.

The movie uses much of the script from the original play, but Hawks also encouraged the actors to ad-lib.

Howard Hawks directed more than 40 classic Hollywood movies, but it was only late in his life that he came to be recognized as one of the directing greats. Born in Goshen, Indiana, in 1896, Hawks moved with his family to California in 1910 and was drawn into the movie business, working briefly as a prop man on a handful of movies such as The Little American (1917).

After serving in World War I as an airman, he returned to Hollywood, where he wrote and directed his first movie in 1926, the silent Road to Glory. When he moved into talkies, his 1932 gangster thriller Scarface was a huge success, and there followed a string of movies, among them “screwball” comedies with Cary Grant such as Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday. Later movies included movie noir classics such as The Big Sleep, and the Western Rio Bravo (1959).

1932 Scarface

1938 Bringing up Baby

1940 His Girl Friday

1944 To Have and Have Not

1946 The Big Sleep

What else to watch: Bringing Up Baby (1938) ✵ The Philadelphia Story (1940) ✵ Roman Holiday (1953) ✵ The Seven-Year Itch (1955) ✵ The Apartment (1960)