Review of His Girl Friday (1940) by Phillip M — 21 Oct 2008

This guy here loves His Girl Friday. The reason is because it is extraordinarily comfortable in its own skin: Howard Hawks and the characters are all operators. They can't sit still, all the time determined to gel the wheels of their countless devices and schemes into action. This has to be the most urbane film of the classic screwball comedies, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, both in their very top comic form, playing a tough, cynical editor and a star reporter with their ears forever to the ground and their fingers on the pulse of fashionable social drifts and developments. The ideal insiders, they gain access to whatever scene, privileged or specialized that occur to their whims: Russell forming chummy alliances, Grant ringleading, and ever living by their own arrays of convention. They have the souls and mouths of a Dashiell Hammett or an Allen Ginsberg from an older generation, so they have gravitated toward media-driven vocations, those steeped in the commercial exchange of ideas, which brings them into contact with an ever-revolving cast of characters. In scarce flashes of downtime, they still pine for activity, painting the town red with cliquey associations.

Hawks can step to one side and psychologically react to things from both slants at once. He grasps impressions and information, simultaneously conveying his own messages and agenda. Interaction is what it's all about for Hawks, a master of commerce, communication, and all such exchange.

Russell traverses a thin edge between inherent liability and an uncompromising need to claim her own agenda both professionally and in her personal life. She is very conscious of her womanly charm, utilizing them to her best benefit, playing coy or bright so as to win the affection of men and win position. No other woman around her generates more commotion. Russell does not play a laid-back or even very considerate character, her presence running entirely on nervous energy. She's able to gain the greatest triumphs on top of finding herself in the severest predicaments. She puts everything into keeping count of any ambition.

I'm stunned to find that Russell herself is not as iconic as this character of hers, if not cyclonic: She leaves every situation, and every person involved, tainted following her involvement. When it comes to her regretted past marriage to Grant, she had thrown herself into the situation the same way she does with all of them, out of an alternating need to indulge desire and impose dominance, letting herself be swept away by curiosity. Now however, much to the chagrin of Grant, she is touching down and planning to settle into an accepting marriage with Ralph Bellamy, as always playing a meek, bland cornball romantic, with whom she may safely swing between her two distinct personalities, helpless baby doll and ruthless boss.

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who wrote the original play, and more immediately the screenwriter Charles Lederer, are acutely cognizant of mental mechanics. They think, and they are masters of mind games, for the sake of our amusement as well as putting the wheels of the lightning-paced plot in motion and pulling out all the stops too, but the incidental appearance of a hilariously reactive and zealous fat man. His Girl Friday is undoubtedly one of the greatest comedies ever made.