Review: His Girl Friday (Hawks, Howard; 1940)

In Howard Hawks’s great film His Girl Friday (1940), Cary Grant plays the devil. No, he doesn’t really play the devil, but he comes close enough. Grant plays Walter Burns, a big time newspaper editor with no scruples when it comes to getting a story. A whatever-the-means slicker, he’s as charming as a snake and so nonchalantly smooth you’d mistake him for an honest respectable man. Walter isn’t exactly a bad guy, which is I suppose what anyone would say about him (how could they not?). And although he’s never up to any good, you just can’t help but root for him and whatever master plan he is hatching up to puppet those around him. It almost seems as if you weren’t paying attention, he’d sell you and you’d still be glad to count up his winnings. Thus, the devil, I imagine, would have a harmless name such as Walter to go along with the face of Cary Grant.

Walter’s ‘girl Friday’, aka his slave, is his star reporter and ex-wife, Hildy (played brilliantly with a lively soulful elegance by Rosalind Russell), who has gone AWOL after divorcing him. Hildy, the paradigm of the independent modern career woman, returns to the office after her sabbatical with quite a surprise, a tame groom-to-be named Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), marriage the very next day, and a new unopened life of wifehood tucked away someplace in Albany. Walter decides that he must save her from herself, and also keep her all to himself, by preventing her from leaving on the evening train to a place too far from anything interesting. Of course, Walter gets what he wants as he tries to seduce the ambitious Hildy with the biggest story in town – that of an ‘innocent’ cop-killer set to hang the very next day. Through a series of stratagems, he sets off a succession of events that delay Hildy and Baldwin from leaving town. The consequence is that Hildy must choose between a life of domestication with Baldwin or a career with Walter. With an irresistible face like Cary Grant’s, is there even a question of what happens?

His Girl Friday is a great comedy and one of the most exhilarating American films I have seen in a long while. Adapted by Charles Lederer from the Broadway play The Front Page, the film is a snappy smart battle-of-the-sexes screwball comedy that puts to shame most you’ll ever see.

Right from the start it propels us head first into the bustle of a newspaper office that sets the tone of the frantic energy that gets everything going along with the laughs. Aside from unleashing two considerable performances by Grant and Russell along with their high-octane verbal bouts exciting to watch on their own, His Girl Friday does not shy from stinging social satire. By working in women’s issues concerning the dilemma of career versus family life cleverly paralleled with the incest between crooked local politics and popular media, the film leaves us smarting in between the laughs. Hawks turns the brand of American equality, and its so-called democracy, on its head in vibrant fashion. Women and the plebian public, the usual subjects of equal rights talk, are fleeced as suckers by the politico-media complex staffed exclusively by a bunch of good old boys. It’s never exactly a battle of the sexes or for equality. Yes, there is a bit of a fight, but in the end, it’s just like one of those films with suffocating romantic endings where the heroine resigns herself to a final submissive kiss.

Now, Rosalind Russell‘s Hildy isn’t that sort of heroine. A formidable woman as well as reporter almost every bit of a match for Grant’s Walter, it’s tragic that she’s just not quite. In the case of the woman, it’s never really about the will or the ability to fight. The professional girl’s quest for equality, which at its core is a fantasy to be accepted as a man, is a slave’s task of attempting to achieve the impossible. And this is superbly played out in Hawks’s film. Through the objective of parity motivated by sheer ambition, Hildy wills her own degradation to become Walter’s Friday and he never even pays attention to the fact that she is or ever was a woman. Sure, he knows what a ‘woman’ is, along with all the tricks of tenderness necessary to win them over. But Walter never lights a cigarette for her, he never even bothers to offer her one, never opens a door, or offers a hand in hauling heavy baggage. So, Hildy achieves her fantasy, perhaps he takes her as a chap. But the result isn’t some feminist utopia of mutual self-respect. Walter doesn’t think of her, for that matter, as a man either. She becomes merely an extension of his will, never his equal, like just about everyone else in the film.

Although the film is a comedy, the underlying feminist themes in His Girl Friday are essentially tragic. The subjugation of Hildy as Walter’s ‘girl Friday’ is formed with Walter as Hildy’s Pygmalion, though his is a tough love if he loved her at all. In the film, Walter brags to Hildy that he took her in as a “doll-faced hick.” The result of a ruthless pawn of a reporter was his achievement, and he says it as if he was reclaiming his authority over her. This subscription to an almost biblical imagery of the woman as created from the man leaves the fatalistic impression that the she is imperfect in relation to man and can never exceed him. Hildy as Walter’s creation means that she is forever flawed to the possibility of meeting her instincts as a woman with those instincts that strive for equal footing. The secret catch is her inherent drive, the desire to become on a par that Walter, who knows all about this, can forever use to entice her with; all he needs to do is dangle the objects of her ambition and watch her squirm. This is what makes Hildy Walter’s slave.

Even though Hildy is Walter’s slave, we sincerely feel that they deserve each other; Walter and Hildy are a natural born pair and any waltz needs two. And I am not saying this because Walter irrepressibly likable and we thus cheer on his nefarious attempts to control Hildy, but because it couldn’t be any other way; Hildy is always going to be running after Walter as his errand boy. The sharp bite of the film rests on conveying this resignation to the uncomfortable facts of how things are. When we question ourselves whether Hildy could be happy raising kids in Albany or whether she can have a fulfilling life with Walter, our inquisition unveils the biggest question of all: why does there have to be a compromise? If our resignation indicates that we live in no perfect world, then we have to be content to accept the choices that people make even if we find them to be tragic. His Girl Friday offers us any answers. I don’t think there are any at all, but the film does engage us with the problems, which don't tire us even seventy years on.

It’s hard to believe that there was originally no female Hildy role for The Front Page, which makes me wonder whether there was an adaptation at all. It is claimed that Hawks decided on a female lead because he liked a woman reading the lines of the Hildy role. But frankly, if Hildy was no girl, then there could not have been His Girl Friday. The entire construction of the film rests on the idea of women in the modern workplace, which is obvious from the very first tracking shots in the newspaper office that tune us into women handling office duties. The genius of the script and the film is to bring out this feature prominently and to handle it so playfully. The dynamics of man and woman, Cary Grant versus Rosalind Russell is so authentically lively and engaging, so comical because of how they mismatch and ramrod into each other. They argue and talk over one another back and forth with the staccato of witty dialogue forming the sparse musical score that couldn’t possibly deserve any better.

Yet despite all this intermingling of voices and noises, which call to mind the naturalism of Altman, Hawks's style is rarely oppressive. He sets the stage, usually a room, and lets the action roll. By letting Grant and Russell play it out, it almost doesn't matter if we can't follow them every way of the heavily condensed and convoluted plot of the to-be-hanged murderer. All that we want to see are the two of them chained together. We smile because we know that they are enjoying it, we laugh because there couldn't be anything more pleasing to watch than them locked in their non-fatal duels. And before we know it we are pushed out at the other end. Great films are always too short.

Some additional observations on His Girl Friday.

What other people have written on His Girl Friday:

David Bordwell fleshes out the film history context of the film in depth and style that few could do better.

Jim Emerson touches on the film's opening shots and how it sets the tone for the rest of the movie (citing That Little Round-Headed Boy, which is unfortunately no longer publicly available on the internet).