His Girl Friday is a screwball spin on a play, called The Front Page, about a newspaper editor and his star reporter who do everything in their power to get the exclusive scoop on a man who has escaped prison to avoid the gallows. His Girl Friday twists it up slightly by making the reporter a woman, and making the two leads a divorced couple where the reporter is now about to marry someone else. It adds extra stakes for the characters and a whole other layer to the chaos that ensues throughout the film. Cary Grant stars as the editor, Walter Burns, and Rosalind Russell is his star reporter, Hildy Johnson. Ralph Bellamy rounds out the leading cast in another role where he’s the new beau of Cary Grant’s ex (The Awful Truth is the first). The movie is hilarious, sharp-witted and quick. The director, Howard Hawks, encouraged his actors to improvise and be spontaneous in their performances, and he also wanted them to step on each other’s lines in an attempt to be the record holder for fastest film dialogue – a record I believe the film still holds to this day. The dialogue clocks in at 240 words per minute. For comparison, most other movies at the time ran at 90 words per minute, and we talk casually to each other, we average 140 words per minute.

Walter learns that his ex-wife, Hildy, is about to marry an insurance salesman, Bruce. He convinces Hildy to cover one last story: the execution of a bookkeeper named Earl, who is convicted of killing a police officer. She interviews Earl in prison and he claims he shot the officer by accident. Meanwhile, Walter does whatever he can to keep Hildy from leaving and accuses Bruce of stealing a watch, which lands him temporarily in jail. Hildy bails Bruce out of jail and quits Walter’s paper right away, but just then, Earl escapes from prison and she becomes glued to the story. Walter frames Bruce again, and gets him sent back to jail, but instead of bailing him out right away, Hildy prioritizes the story. Earl sneaks into a deserted press room to hide, but Hildy finds him and he is forced to hold her off at gunpoint. At the sound of the other reporters returning to the room, Hildy hides Earl in a rolltop desk. Hildy and Walter are forced to keep police, the other reporters, and Bruce’s mother away so they can get their scoop to varying degrees of success. In the end, Earl is revealed and Hildy and Walter are arrested for assisting his escape. However, the governor issues a reprieve on the execution and Hildy and Walter are released. Hildy realizes that Walter still loves her and, after bailing Bruce out of jail again, Hildy and Walter plan to remarry.

His Girl Friday has practically no soundtrack until the end of the film, though you wouldn’t notice for how fast-paced everything about the movie is. It also is an early example of breaking the fourth wall, which is when characters in a production speak or nod directly to their audience. Cary Grant adlibs some of his lines and at one point claims that Bruce, played by Ralph Bellamy, looks like Ralph Bellamy. He later uses the name Archie Leach (Cary Grant’s legal name) when talking about an off-screen character. His Girl Friday has been remade multiple times and has been referenced by several filmmakers as one of their favorite movies. It’s crept into pop culture in many ways. Particularly, Russell’s Hildy is the inspiration for Lois Lane in the Superman series. It’s a classic that begs to be watched and rewatched and rewatched, if only to actually understand the dialogue.

Bonus Review: Arsenic and Old Lace

Frank Capra was mostly known for his idealistic humanist films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It’s A Wonderful Life, but two years before that last one was released, Capra released Arsenic and Old Lace. Because of the serious nature of these films, Arsenic and Old Lace almost seems like an outlier, but Capra was mostly known for his screwball comedies before the late 30s. His career consisted of classics like Platinum Blonde, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and It Happened One Night before he turned into the king of the patriotically critical. What does make Arsenic and Old Lace stand out somewhat is the horror underlining of the story. Even though it’s a comedy, it is still darker than the majority of Capra’s output.

This screwball comedy takes place on Halloween night, and Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) has just been married. He runs home to tell his aunties only to discover that his sweet, old aunties have a dead body in the window seat. In fact, they have been killing sad old men for awhile, trying to help them out of their lonely, depressing lives. From there, the film spirals out of control as Mortimer fends off his brothers, Teddy (who believes he’s the president with the same name) and Jonathan (who looks just like Boris Karloff and is an actual killer), asylum doctors, the police, and his new bride. It’s such a mad-cap night that, by then end of it, even Mortimer walks away a little insane.

Cary Grant plays in screwballs so well, because he plays out-of-his-element so incredibly well. Bringing Up Baby is another example of some of Grant’s best work as a paleontologist who gets caught up with a scatterbrained Katherine Hepburn and her pet leopard, but even that pails compared to Arsenic and Old Lace. It’s a perfect Halloween comedy although it really doesn’t have any references to the holiday outside of the fact that movie takes place during it. And of course, even Arsenic and Old Lace can’t compare to the uproarious action of His Girl Friday and those reporters that will literally do anything for the sake of their story.