HIS GIRL FRIDAY/THE FRONT PAGE: A DOUBLE BILL OF SCREWBALL COMEDIES BASED ON THE 1928 PLAY BY BEN HECHT AND CHARLES MCARTHUR AND REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS.
HIS GIRL FRIDAY. (1940) DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY HOWARD HAWKS. SCREENPLAY BY CHARLES LEDERER.
STARRING CARY GRANT, ROSALIND RUSSELL, RALPH BELLAMY, GENE LOCKHART, JOHN QUALEN AND ALMA KRUGER.
THE FRONT PAGE. (1931) DIRECTED BY LEWIS MILESTONE. PRODUCED BY LEWIS MILESTONE AND HOWARD HUGHES.
STARRING PAT O'BRIEN, ADOLPHE MENJOU, MARY BRIAN, MAY CLARKE, EDWARD EVERETT HORTON, GEORGE E. STONE AND CLARENCE WILLIAMS.
'THE MADDEST NEWSPAPER COMEDY OF OUR TIMES...'
'PERHAPS THE FUNNIEST, CERTAINLY THE FASTEST, TALKIE COMEDY EVER MADE... QUITE SIMPLY A MASTERPIECE...'
I had the tremendous pleasure of watching these two great classic screwball comedies back-to-back recently over the mince pies and the mulled wine. As luck would have it, they're both being released together in Blu-Ray form by THE CRITERION COLLECTION on January 16th, 2017.
THE FRONT PAGE, on which HIS GIRL FRIDAY is based, is actually included as an extra feature to HIS GIRL FRIDAY. There's something tremendously satisfying about getting a free whole extra film in your special features. It appeals greatly to the Ebenezer Scrooge in me, haha.
Amazingly, both films still look fresh and full of life despite being a whopping eighty-six and seventy-six years old respectively this year. The plot of each, and they're both newsroom comedies, by the way, is straightforward enough. Except that in HIS GIRL FRIDAY the lead reporter Hildy Johnson, a man, has changed sex and become a dame, a broad, see?
The action is set in 'Thirties and 'Forties America respectively, where everyone, guys and dolls alike, wears hats all the time and not just for special occasions. Both movies, especially HIS GIRL FRIDAY, are famous for the razor-sharp, lightning-fast comic dialogue which, unless you're Speedy Gonzalez and exceptionally quick off the mark, you almost certainly will not be able to follow fully first time around. I myself had to watch 'em a couple of times before I was confident of having picked up on every word correctly, haha.
The action in both films mostly centres around the press room of the newspaper, THE MORNING POST. The room is drab, dreary and wholly functional and probably smells of sweat and the hamburgers the press men order in as eats. It's a place of doing business, newspaper business, and therefore it doesn't need to be attractive or ornamental in any way.
The mostly male reporters sit around the big table, the centrepiece of the room, bitching and making calls to other staff in the building on those tall old-timey telephones, saying things like: 'Get me So-and-So, fast!' to whoever's on the receiving end. Those old phones are great, aren't they? Can't you just see yourself in an old film noir thriller tapping at them repeatedly and saying: 'Operator? Operator?' in the high-pitched voice of the soon-to-be-murdered...?
They don't particularly come across as a nice bunch of people, these reporters. Certainly we know they're unscrupulous, and would sell their own mothers for a good story and their own by-line. They're also dreadfully sexist against women, especially in THE FRONT PAGE, and if you look closely enough, you'll see that they're more than a little bit racist too. Nice guys, huh?
In HIS GIRL FRIDAY, the always debonair and handsome Cary Grant plays Walter Burns, the savvy, quick-talking and quick-thinking editor of THE MORNING POST. He gets the shock of his
topsy-turvy life one day when his ex-wife and former star reporter, Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), strolls into his office, which as usual is a hive of activity, and breezily informs him that she's getting married again.
That's right, Hildy is planning to ditch the cut-throat world of newspaper journalism permanently in favour of marriage to sweet, undoubtedly worthy but sadly quite dull insurance salesman, Bruce Baldwin. Bruce, played by Ralph Bellamy, hopes to make an honest woman out of Hildy and sweep her off to darkest Albany, New York, to iron his shirts and cook his morning waffles, or whatever it was that they ate for breakfast in New York in the very early 'Forties.
Walter Burns is determined to sabotage the marriage of his ex-wife to a man he considers bland and, frankly, a big joke, although Bruce is a lovely chap who would make any woman a perfectly adequate husband if she was the kind of woman who would choose stability and security over excitement. We also get the impression that Walter misses Hildy and doesn't want any other man to have her, though whether he still loves her or he's just being a dog in the manger we're not entirely sure at this point.
Walter tries to convince Hildy to stay on at the paper. He uses the upcoming execution of convicted killer Earl Williams as bait, knowing that that's a big news story by anyone's standards and Hildy, being a seasoned reporter, will want to cover it.
Hildy's not as easily convinced as all that, though. She says that she craves peace and quiet and charming domesticity and that she really does want to leave the newspaper business behind her for good. But then this Earl fellow, a convicted criminal and Death Row inmate from the conveniently-located next-door prison, escapes from custody on the very eve of his execution and Hildy finds herself faced with the unmissable opportunity to write the news story of a lifetime...
There's terrific chemistry between Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell as they machine-gun-fire dialogue back and forth at each other at a speed you wouldn't see at Wimbledon. (Bah-dum, tish...) Yes folks, if you like your dialogue quickfire, snappy and razor-sharp then you'll love this film.
And if you get a kick out of hearing hard-bitten, hard-boiled newsmen from the 'Forties chew the fat with each other, then you'll definitely love this film. And if you want to know if Hildy marries good old dependable Bruce after all or gets back with unpredictable, rascally Walter Burns whose unscrupulous attempts to have Bruce removed from the picture make for hilarious viewing, then you'll just have to watch this brilliant screwball comedy for yourself. But hurry up about it, will ya? We gotta newspaper to print and a deadline to meet!
THE FRONT PAGE runs more or less along the same lines, except that Hildy Johnson, the MORNING POST's star reporter, is played by a handsome strapping Irish lad called Pat O'Brien, who looks a bit like a cross between Tyrone Power and George Clooney.
He has a love-hate relationship with Walter Burns, the boss of THE MORNING POST who taught him everything he knows about being a newspaper reporter. Hildy heaps abuse on Walter when he's determined on leaving the newspaper to marry the doe-eyed 'Twenties doll that is his fiancée, but when convicted criminal Earl Williams breaks out of jail in the most spectacularly easy jailbreak since I don't know when, you can see how close the pair are as they seamlessly and automatically move into 'work-mode' right alongside each other chasing that front-page story.
The doomed relationship between sad little Earl Williams and poor despised streetwalker Molly Malloy (she's gotta have a bit of Irish in her somewhere with a name like that!) is heartbreaking to witness in both films, though probably more so in THE FRONT PAGE.
In this same film also, you can see that the lovely Peggy is on a serious hiding to nothing by trying to force Hildy to give up the newspaper business. If writing news stories is in his blood, then she'd be very foolish to attempt to make him forgo that thrill permanently. How long would it be before he's itching to see his name and picture on page one of the newspaper? Well, it's not our place to worry about the possible marital difficulties of two fictional characters from a film made in the 'Thirties, but I still say it's our business and I still say it won't last. You see if I'm right.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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