His Girl Friday (1940)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

His Girl Friday (1940) – H. Hawks

One of the fastest talking screwball comedies that there is, with Howard Hawks directing Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell to tread all over each other’s lines and to mutter a few zingers almost under their breath.  She plays a star reporter on the paper where he is the editor.  They used to be married.  Now she has returned from some time away, declaring that she is leaving the paper to marry Ralph Bellamy (who plays the gentle slow-talking patsy, just as he did in The Awful Truth, 1937).  Grant wants none of this and tries to entice Russell to work on his latest scoop, an interview with a death row inmate who may or may not be insane but is expected to be hung the next morning.  As is typical with Hawks, the press room at the courthouse is a boys’ club where chummy camaraderie is highlighted, despite Russell fitting right in and trading wisecracks with the best of them (a delightful gender twist introduced into the original play, The Front Page, by Hawks and his writers).  Grant does everything he can to throw cold water on the Bellamy/Russell engagement and Bellamy suffers indignity after indignity, until this winds up being another example of the “comedy of remarriage” genre.  You know that Grant and Russell are made for each other and Hawks makes you feel the underlying sentiment beneath the sarcastic barbs flying furiously between the two.  Of course, the “plot” (focused on the poor sap in prison) is just an opportunity to create chaos and confusion and to roll out a host of comic character actors who flit in and out while Grant and Russell fall back in love (if they were ever out of it).