(The following is my contribution to the Muriels Hall of Fame Class of 2015 essay collection commemorating the 17 films voted in this year by the staff of Muriels writers and voters. For daily updates and all-new writing on the inductees, please visit the the Muriels official Web site, Our Science is Too Tight.)
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God help the poor uninitiated soul who, in turning on Turner
Classic Movies and encountering Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940) for the first time, knows not enough about
this dizzying reshuffle of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page to at least take a few
deep breaths before jumping in. It’s hard to imagine a faster, more breathless
and whip-quick movie, from any genre, that all at once feels so fleet, dense
and confident, without betraying even the slightest whiff of desperation, as
this one.
Hawks kicks the movie off with one of the great introductory
scenes ever—reporter Hildy Johnson (embodied, the way God surely intended, by
Rosalind Russell) swooping through a big-city newsroom, the camera in hot
pursuit, acknowledging past colleagues of the reporting life with the breezy
assurance of someone who thinks she’s cast off a whole litany of childish and
corrupt things in favor of stability and a more conventional life. (One
1.5-second-long exchange has Hildy blithely asking a columnist friend, “How’s
‘Advice for the Lovelorn’?” The columnist’s response: “My cat just had
kittens.” Hildy: “It’s her own fault!”)
Of course, Hildy couldn’t be more wrong. She’s on her way
toward one final encounter (or so she thinks) with her ex-boss, the charming,
abrasive, brilliantly shifty and manipulative newspaper editor Walter Burns
(Cary Grant), who never met a story, or an employee, or a local politician he
couldn’t bend to suit the paper’s ends. In a fatefully brilliant move, Hawks
commissioned ex-newspaperman-turned-screenwriter Charles Lederer to rewrite Hildy,
the co-lead character of The Front Page,
as a woman after hearing his secretary run some of Johnson’s lines in
preparation for a proposed remake.
But it was Lederer’s inspiration to make
Hildy and Walter a recently divorced couple, upping Hecht and MacArthur’s
astringent newspaper satire with a jolt of screwball comedy energy, and
factoring in Hildy’s hayseed fiancé Bruce Baldwin—you know, looks like the
fella in the movies-- what’s his name? Oh, yeah, Ralph Bellamy—as one more toy
for Walter, and Lederer, to play with. The script was added to and subtracted
from by actors and writers alike throughout the shoot and ultimately fashioned
into the basis for what has arguably eclipsed Hecht and MacArthur’s original to
become the definitive version of The
Front Page, one of the biggest hits of the American stage.
None of it would work nearly as well as it does without the
inspiration and thorough commitment of the entire cast, from Bellamy and his
exasperated mother, played by Alma Kruger, to the stalwart character actors
Clarence Kolb and Gene Lockhart as, respectively, Chicago’s corrupt mayor and
sheriff, to the press room overflowing with cynicism and nasty wit provided by
the likes of Porter Hall, Ernest Truex, Cliff Edwards, Roscoe Karns and Regis
Toomey, to John Qualen as poor, rattled radical Earl Williams, around whose
impending execution for murder the entire movie churns and crackles.
Cary Grant’s comic timing and inspiration has never been
better, or more the beneficiary of a relentless pace, than it is here. What
other actor could possibly even approach Grant having dinner with Bellamy and
Russell, enduring her shin kicks under the table, and shooting microsecond-long
bursts of perturbed glances back at her, all while patronizing Bellamy as he
prattles on about the honor of his chosen profession—the insurance industry? Grant
set an impossible standard for every comic leading man as Burns 75 years ago,
and even in the modern cinema of information overload his work has yet to be
bested.
But the movie belongs to and rests on the padded shoulders
of Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson, who manages to stand out in Hawks and
Lederer’s conception as a career woman who plays cynical and callous and
single-minded as a way of keeping up with the boys, because she has to, of
course, but also because she feeds on the energy of a business teetering on its
own razor’s edge of morality and excess. (It’s clear she can outwrite them all
too.) Hildy isn’t considered a soulless shrew for being tough and smart (think
Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen), and
she gets points for style—one of the things I used to love about watching His Girl Friday growing up was the havoc
that outrageous zigzag pantsuit and hat she wears during the opening sequence
would wreak on my TV’s horizontal resolution. This is Russell’s movie; she
breathes life and precious fire into it.
And together with Grant and the
others, she realizes a seemingly impossible level of locomotion and grace with
the movie’s dialogue that becomes its own almost hallucinatory joke— the speed
itself can make you laugh hysterically. One can imagine Robert Altman, whose
own sense of a bustling, often claustrophobic community of individuals often
seemed a naturalistic, loose-limbed extension of Hawks, watching and listening
to the rapid-fire, often overlapping delivery of the actors in His Girl Friday, his own facility with
how dialogue and information could be delivered taking root.
One great hazard of writing about His Girl Friday is resisting the temptation to devolve into the
simple retelling of the movie’s countless dazzling setups and payoff lines
(I’ve indulged here just the once), but the jokes are too many and too layered
into the material to possibly be perceived in one sitting—no enthusiastic
critic could possibly spoil them all. If you see it in a theater (highly
recommended, if you can swing it), you’ll have to see it again to catch all you
missed because of the laughter of the audience. And each time I’ve seen it, in
whatever format, I’ve noticed and been surprised by something new. If you have
the sort of retention ability for comedy that I have, which is little to none,
then a movie as rich and rewarding as His
Girl Friday becomes its own self-sustaining, self-rejuvenating fountain--
American farce pitched with a complete lack of pretense that fulfills the
highest standard of the art of the screwball comedy, which can be revisited
again and again, playing as hilariously and as exhilaratingly the 15th
time as it did the first.
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My favorite American play and one that I'm amazed has never been turned into a musical (and, yes, I know the Brits did a musical version of The Front Page and adapted His Girl Friday).
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