His Girl Friday
If you are a fan of classic "golden age" Hollywood, names like Cary Grant, Gene Lockhart, Rosalind Russell, Howard Hawks, and Ralph Bellamy will ring an instant bell. You will also be familiar with "screwball" comedies. And if this is the case for you, His Girl Friday is a movie that you need to see. Based on a hit play titled The Front Page, which had been adapted into a movie once with the same name as the play, His Girl Friday came out in 1940. It was directed by Hawks, and was about newspaper reporters. The film is careful to mention with an opening screen card that it portrays reporters of a vague earlier time, and is not indicative of the behavior of newsies of the time. It doesn't quite mention what earlier era the movie is supposed to be set in.

Hildy bribes her way in to the jail to interview the murderer, Earl Williams. Williams was in a bad place at the time of the murder, and says it was an accident. Hildy comes up with a bit of a stretch to try to mitigate the killing, saying that Williams was unduly influenced by hearing about the economic theory of production for use. While Hildy is getting her scoop, Burns is trying to make sure that Bruce doesn't get to leave town with her. Burns sets him up for stealing a watch and gets him arrested. His schemes for keeping the couple in town and unmarried escalate until they involve kidnapping Bruce's mother.
Meanwhile, the corrupt local politicians have decided to ignore a reprieve from the governor and move forward with the execution of Williams. Williams makes his way to the press room, where Hildy hides him in a desk. A woman who at first denies being Williams' girlfriend bizarrely decides to jump out of the press room window to distract the cops and reporters away from the press room where Williams is hiding. The movie zooms along at a very fast pace until it comes crashing into the end with all (or at least most of) the plot points getting tied up, even if not all of the resolutions make a lot of sense. The man delivering the reprieve at first appears to accept a bribe from the mayor to "fail" to deliver the rep
rieve until after the execution, then changes his mind and delivers it in front of the press, with no explanation given for his change of heart, for instance. The conclusions work well enough in the context of the movie, and I for one was not bothered that some of the things that happen would not make much sense in real life.

The movie moves very fast, as I mentioned before. The director wanted the dialog to be delivered very quickly, and had people talk over each other to make it both faster and more realistic. This is an approach to film dialog that would not be used much until very recently, so in this way the movie is ahead of it's time. Also probably due to the speed of the delivery, the comedy felt very much to me like the Groucho portion of a Marx Brothers movie. There were also several "inside" jokes, like Grant's Burns character describing Bruce as looking like "that actor Ralph Bellamy". Bruce was of course played by Ralph Bellamy. Burns also mentions a man that crossed him once, Archie Leach. This is Cary Grant's given name.

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