DVD Review: His Girl Friday

Perhaps the fastest-paced comedy ever made, Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday is often credited with being the first film to use overlapping dialogue, but is best known for the machine-gun rapport between its two leads. Rosalind Russell stars as Hildy Johnson, ex-wife and former ace reporter of newspaper editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant), who's come back to inform him that she's marrying insurance salesman Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) and moving - to Albany. Burns uses every trick at his disposal to keep Bruce in and out of jail and Hildy on the story of a murderer scheduled to hang in the morning. This is one of the best comedies you'll ever see.

Although he is in retrospect listed as one of the elite directors in the history of cinema, Howard Hawks was largely ignored, or at the very least taken for granted, by his peers. His resume is one of the most prolific of all time, yet he was only nominated for one Oscar (for 1941's Sergeant York) and three Director's Guild Awards. According to the Internet Movie Database, the only major award he ever received was a Honorary Oscar in 1974. This is the man who started in silent films, directed the original Scarface (1932), had a career that spanned nearly fifty years, and did an uncredited rewrite on The French Connection (1971), but here he shows a deft comic touch.

Hawks encouraged his actors to ad-lib and improvise and set a frenetic pace to match the natural rhythms of both the dialogue and the newspaper world it reflected. The shots are simple, with very little editing — essential in preserving the fluidity of the scenes. The breakneck speed of the dialogue is enough to hold the audience, and the amount of editing required to film the conversations in anything other than a master shot would be distracting, so Hawks doesn't try to force anything. He's smart enough to put the camera on a tripod and let his actors go.

Of course, it helps to have Cary Grant at his devious best. He's a fast-talking, conniving, egotistical, selfish bastard and no one could have played it better. This is a role he was born to play. You don't trust him - you'd have to be foolish to - but you sure do like him a lot and he sure is convincing and in a position like that of newspaper editor, he's more than willing to throw his considerable weight in any direction necessary to get the story. That includes getting Bruce arrested three different times in the span of a couple of hours on trumped-up charges and hiding a convicted murderer in a desk for the sole purpose of scooping his rivals.

Article Author: Lucas McNelly

Lucas McNelly runs the film collective d press Productions. Both his films and his writings about film are enjoyed by audiences worldwide.

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