#36: his girl friday (howard hawks, 1940)

(This is the 15th of 50 pieces that originally appeared in a Facebook group devoted to three of us choosing our 50 favorite movies. I’ll present them un-edited except for typos or egregious errors. I’ll also add a post-script to each.)

Howard Hawks is one of my favorite directors. You don’t have to know anything about directors to enjoy his movies, but they reward you even more when you do learn about directors.

His Girl Friday, a newspaper comedy, features witty, rapid-fire dialogue, crammed so tightly into the film that it grows with multiple viewings (our enjoyment of many comedies lessens once we know the jokes, but with His Girl Friday, you’ll still be getting jokes for the first time on a sixth viewing). Hawks’ innovation here was to use overlapping dialogue, which will sound fairly ordinary to anyone who has seen a few Robert Altman films, but which was highly unusual (and technically difficult) for 1940. The overlapping meant that Hawks could create scenes where the audience had no chance to breathe, because there were no empty spaces on the screen. The visuals were uncluttered, but the sound was dense.

His Girl Friday also has Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson. The movie is based on a play, The Front Page, where Hildy is a man. Changing the gender of Johnson adds a sexual charge to the film, and Russell takes that ball and runs with it. But, more importantly for my tastes, the gender switch allows Hawks to give us one of his classic “Hawksian Women.” (How classic? “Hawksian Women” has its own page on Wikipedia.) She talks a lot and is good at it (a requirement to get along in His Girl Friday), and she knows what she wants and how to get it. She is as strong as the men in Hawks’ films. It’s interesting that someone as politically conservative as Hawks managed to create such an archetypical woman, one that seems modern even today, 40 years after his last movie. It is important to note that the Hawks Woman is strong and successful on male terms; she isn’t so much a paragon of feminism as she is “as good as any man.” But her presence in His Girl Friday is crucial, because without it, Cary Grant’s Walter Burns has no one to play off of. Grant and Russell are equals in their repartee, which makes their dialogue even more delightful.

 

Comments focused on what Hawks films were favorites of the commenters. The Big Sleep and Red River were mentioned more than once.