About His Girl Friday (1940)
The story behind the film
His Girl Friday is Howard Hawks' screwball comedy remake of the hit 1928 Broadway play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, which had already been filmed once, in 1931. The play was about two male newspapermen. Hawks' big idea was to make star reporter Hildy Johnson a woman — and the ex-wife of her editor, Walter Burns. That single change turns a cynical newspaper comedy into a fast, funny battle of wits between two people who are clearly still in love.
Charles Lederer wrote the screenplay for Columbia Pictures, and filming ran from September to November 1939. Hawks encouraged his cast to improvise and to talk over each other, and the result is famous for the speed of its dialogue: lines overlap, characters interrupt, and jokes fly past before you've finished laughing at the last one.
Cast & crew
- Directed by Howard Hawks; screenplay by Charles Lederer
- Cary Grant as Walter Burns, the scheming editor
- Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson, his ex-wife and best reporter
- Ralph Bellamy as Bruce Baldwin, Hildy's mild-mannered new fiancé
- Gene Lockhart as Sheriff Hartwell
- John Qualen as Earl Williams, the condemned man at the centre of the story
Why it's worth watching
Hildy has come back to the newsroom to tell Walter she's quitting journalism to marry a nice insurance man and move to Albany. Walter has one day to stop her, and he uses every trick he can think of — dragging her into one last story about a man about to be executed. Grant and Russell are perfectly matched: she's just as quick and tough as he is, and the film treats her as the best reporter in the building.
It's often ranked among the funniest American films ever made. The American Film Institute placed it 19th on its list of the 100 greatest American comedies, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1993. Underneath the jokes, it's also a sharp satire of corrupt city politics and sensational journalism.
Fun facts
- Grant slips in several in-jokes. At one point Walter describes the dreadful fate of the last person who crossed him: "Archie Leach" — Cary Grant's real name.
- Another gag has Walter describe Hildy's fiancé by saying he looks like "that fellow in the movies, you know ... Ralph Bellamy!" — the actor who is playing him. Bellamy later said Grant ad-libbed it.
- Studies of the film have estimated the average pace of its dialogue at around 240 words per minute, far faster than normal conversation.
Public-domain status
His Girl Friday's copyright was not renewed, so the film entered the US public domain. The underlying play, The Front Page (1928), entered the public domain in 2024. The film is listed among US public-domain films; see "Rights & source" below.