Wonderful in a Loathsome Way

You’ve never heard people speak like the journalists in Howard Hawks' classic screwball comedy His Girl Friday.

Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday: TCM

Grade: A

The title sounds silly and it looks even sillier once you’re watching the film. The protagonist’s name is Hildi Johnson not Friday and she’s not working for a PI like how Grace Kelly said she should be in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. She’s a newspaperman (in her own words and her bosses). I’ve got no idea why Howard Hawks or Charles Lederer, who wrote the screenplay, changed the title (Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play they adapted the film from was titled The Front Page) but after watching His Girl Friday, you’ll feel like you’ll never want to watch anything else. Watching this film is like the moment you leap from eating hamburgers to eating steaks or from drinking milkshakes to drinking champagne. You can’t go back. The film’s speed is addictive. It’ll make every other film you see feel just a trifle too slow.

Hildi Johnson, played by Rosalind Russell, is a reporter at a newspaper, Morning Post, in a nameless city, and she’s just divorced her husband and boss, roguish editor Walter Burns, played by Cary Grant. She returns to the office from her post-divorce trip to Bermuda and tells Burns she’s quitting, going to marry a docile insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin, played by Ralph Bellamy, and become a suburban housewife. Burns marshals all his questionable skills (lies, entrapment and even kidnapping) in a con man’s crusade to win Hildi back as both his ace reporter and his wife. He convinces her to cover one last story: the imminent and politically-charged execution of murderer Earl Williams, played by John Qualen.

You’ve never heard people speak like Johnson, Burns and the other journalists in His Girl Friday. They fire off information as quick as breaking news. The words from their mouths go ZOOM into your ears with the relentlessly energetic rat-a-tat-tat you hear from the typewriters filling Burns’ newsroom or even the tommy guns who’s metallic, lightning speed chorus was practically the whole soundtrack to Hawks’ 1932 gangster film Scarface. Hawks sought to break the record for fastest dialogue when he made this film. To do that, he innovated and rigged multiple overhead mics up on set over the actors and the mics were switched on and off as the actors dropped in and out of speaking to catch each character’s dialogue without needing to move the mic. Time and time again, characters talk in quick succession after another and no sooner has one finished insulting the other that their interlocutor quickly cracks their tongue to get their own back. Hildi’s hardly finished saying that, unlike Burns, her fiancé treats her “like a woman” before Burns spits back: “And how did I treat you, like a water buffalo?” Characters also routinely talk over the top of each other and their verbal artillery collide in mid-air. The climax sees Johnson, Burns and Baldwin alternatively trying to talk and/or shout at each other and on several different phones and it sounds like a tap-dancing train wreck. It’s chaotic. It’s energetic. It’s loud. It’s one Hell of a ride.

“I am fond of you,” Johnson tells Burns. “I often wish you weren’t such a stinker.” You’ll agree with her 100%. By the time the end credits roll, Burns has lied to Johnson, her fiancé, her mother-in-law-to-be, the mayor, the sheriff, and even the governor, aided an escaped felon, arranged a kidnapping, and framed an innocent man thrice. Yet you can’t help but feel that if Walter Burns were to invite you out for lunch that you’d say yes enthusiastically. For all his faults, and there’s plenty, Burns is a magic combination of entertaining magician, daring gangster and loveably unabashed and resourceful con man. You wouldn’t be surprised if, when a mugger pulled a knife on him, he could pull a sword out of his throat. Grant is at his most handsomely daring in His Girl Friday. He always had a gentlemanly yet roguish blend of swagger and suave, you can see it in his other films like North By Northwest, An Affair To Remember, and Suspicion, but here Grant goes full throttle. As Walter Burns, he makes himself in all his other roles look like an old man.

Russell does a good job at keeping up with him but without becoming just a female-version of Walter Burns. She’s just as energetic but just one gear down and she leans into her role slightly softer than Grant. While Grant may race to grab all the opportunities for one-liners, Russell is the one who usually gets the last word by waiting patiently for the right moment. He races ahead to throw a pie in your face while she sneaks up to clobber you on the skull.

Grant and Russell are such a combustible duo that the rest of the cast struggle to avoid being reduced to shadows. The other journalists are slower versions of Grant and Russell while the rattle-snake mayor, played by Clarence Kolb, the porky sheriff, played by Gene Lockhart, Baldwin and his mother, played by Alma Kruger, are the comic reliefs and straight men who are lashed by Grant and Russell’s formidable wits and tongues. John Qualen is both adorable and pitiful as Earl Williams but fades away into the background. Even though his execution is part of what sets the whole plot off, no one’s too concerned about him and he’s not a very dominating presence. “Can I go back to jail now, I’m awful tired?” he asks his jailers in a miserably exhausted and somewhat whiny voice and while sporting eyes that look far too bored for a man on death’s row.

It’s not about Williams in the end. It’s about Johnson and Burns and how outrageous they can be while never losing your love. Russell will speak for you when she tells Grant: you’re wonderful in a loathsome sort of way.