filmsite.com - His Girl Friday (1940)

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"His Girl Friday (1940) is Howard Hawks' speedy and hysterically funny, modern-style screwball comedy, and one of the best examples of its kind in film history. Although it has an 92-minute running time, the breath-taking, fast-paced film has more than enough dialogue for a 3-hour movie. The film marked the beginning of a number of screwball comedies in the 1940s that emphasized the conflict for women in deciding between love/marriage and professional careers.

The original film version of His Girl Friday was director Lewis Milestone's big hitThe Front Page (1931), produced by Howard Hughes and released by United Artists. [Milestone had won the Best Picture and Best Director Academy Awards for the previous year's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).] This second screen version's screenplay, again by Charles Lederer, brilliantly transformed Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's newspaper classic - the George S. Kaufman-directed 1928 Broadway smash-hit play The Front Page, with a major script change.

One of the main male characters in the earlier film, Hildebrand 'Hildy' Johnson (played by Pat O'Brien), became female - renamed Hildegard Johnson (played by Rosalind Russell), to star opposite the major actor, Cary Grant. [Grant was the leading man from Hawks' two previous films: the male-dominated action film Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938), and had appeared in other romantic comedies at the time (i.e., The Awful Truth (1937), The Philadelphia Story (1940), and My Favorite Wife (1940)).] Other changes in the script involved removing topical references to the 1920s, and jokes about Prohibition.

The gender swap brought an entirely new angle to the film, making it more than a satirical view and social commentary on the operation of a newsroom under the management of a hard-boiled, smart-alec managing editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant in this version, Adolphe Menjou in the earlier film), and providing an additional feminine-romance angle.

This madcap, giddy film - originally titled The Bigger They Are, is best remembered for its overlapping dialogue and simultaneous conversations, rapid-fire delivery, breakneck speed, word gags, sexual innuendo, plot twists, "in" jokes, mugging, jousting, sarcastic insults, frantic pace and farcical script. With its plot about a ruthless editor, a marriage renewed by divorce and the threat of re-marriage, a politically corrupt city, and a questionable judicial system, the romantic comedy is both a love story and a sophisticated battle of the sexes (and duel of wits).

This screwball masterpiece lacked even a single Academy Award nomination. Cary Grant's un-nominated performance as the suave, calculating and exploitative managing editor, who attempts to lure and maneuver his ex-wife (and star reporter) back with the opportunity to write a breaking, front page news-story, is a tour de force of comedy - combining cartoonish faces, silent-film pantomime, slapstick, witty word-play, and irony into one remarkable characterization. Likewise, Rosalind Russell's role as the ace news-reporter to her ex-husband and ex-managing editor, who is wooed back from marrying a staid, dull, but devoted insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), is her greatest comedic portrayal, following her similar role in The Women (1939).

Film posters exclaimed how she holds up as Grant's equal:

"SHE LEARNED ABOUT MEN FROM HIM."

[Note: Ironically, Grant's other film in this same year, The Philadelphia Story (1940), had a similar plot about him trying to win back his ex-wife (Katharine Hepburn) from her very soon-to-be-wed fiancee.]

Director Billy Wilder attempted a remake with a third film version: The Front Page (1974) with Jack Lemmon (as Hildy Johnson) and Walter Matthau (as Walter Burns). It was again remade (with the same gender twist, but newspapers were updated to a TV news environment) asSwitching Channels (1988) by director Ted Kotcheff, with Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner in the lead roles, and a frosted-haired Christopher Reeve as the third individual in the love triangle, a New York millionaire.""