His Girl Friday

The subtractive test finds very little to cut. Every scheme Walter runs serves one end, getting Hildy back to the paper: the lunch, the insurance policy, the counterfeit money that lands Bruce in jail, the stolen wallet, Bruce’s mother carried off by Louie. The repeated arrests of Bruce look like padding and are the engine; each return of the dull fiancé measures how far Hildy has gone back into the story. The escape, the desk, the reprieve and Pettibone’s arrival are the play’s mechanism, which Lederer’s script tightens rather than extends, and the film runs without a slack scene. What gives: Bruce’s gags are one gag at three speeds, the press room’s card game is partly texture, and the farce’s later turns are required in kind rather than in particular.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Two disclosures, one inherited and one made. The inherited one is the play’s: a city where a hanging is timed to an election, the mayor and sheriff suppress a reprieve, the press invents what it cannot find, and a frightened clerk is to die for a phrase from a radical meeting, “production for use”. The made one is the film’s: changing Hildy to a woman discloses that the choice between work and a respectable marriage was a woman’s choice, and that the job is what she is good at and loves. Mollie Malloy’s scene, the reporters’ laughter turned on a woman who then jumps, shows the cost of the trade more sharply than the plot. What holds it: the satire is the play’s, and the film closes the question it opens by making the job and Walter the same answer.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The register is velocity, and velocity can transport. The long press-room passages where Hildy writes her story while the room explodes around her, and the climax with the desk, the sheriff, the mayor and Pettibone all in the room at once, rise to an exhilaration few comedies reach. Dread arrives once and is real: Mollie at the window and the jump, played fast and left behind faster. The film does not reach beauty and does not want to; Walker’s images serve the pace and are never held for their own sake. Elevation by tempo recurs across the whole second half, which earns frequency. Height is limited by the form, which rarely pauses long enough for terror or grandeur to register as such: the summits are of momentum rather than of vision.

Score: 7.0 / 10

The myth is built, and it is the remarriage. A couple divorced at the start is brought back together not by a new love but by the recognition of what the first one was, and the third party, the decent man from Albany, is the ordinary life the pair cannot live in. The structure bears the load: every scheme is a courtship, and the ending is a second wedding without a ceremony. Walter is trickster, tempter and liar, half devil; Bruce the innocent with an umbrella and a mother; Hildy the one who chooses. Beside it stands the scapegoat, Earl Williams, a little man made to die for the city’s fear, hidden in a desk like a body in a coffin. What holds it: the scapegoat is the play’s and stays a device, and the remarriage is played at a speed that keeps it particular more than it lets it deepen.

Score: 7.5 / 10

The inheritance is The Front Page, a proven stage hit already filmed by Lewis Milestone in 1931, and Hawks’s own screwball comedies, Twentieth Century (1934) and Bringing Up Baby (1938). The turn is one decision with large consequences: Hildy becomes a woman and Walter’s former wife, so that a newspaper melodrama of male comradeship becomes a comedy of remarriage and of a woman’s vocation, with the original plot kept whole beneath it. The second turn is in the sound: lines spoken over each other at a density the American sound film had not attempted, with in-jokes that treat the film as film, Grant speaking his own birth name and Bruce likened to Ralph Bellamy. What holds it below the bar is the stake: the speed was already Hawks’s, and the property was a sure thing.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows. What it knows is that for these two people talking is living and working at once, and that the trade crushes whatever is slower than it: Bruce, Mollie, Earl Williams. The form is speed and overlap, and the knowledge is in them. The audience cannot follow every line, as Bruce cannot, and the speed itself sorts the characters into those who belong in the room and those it runs over. Slow the film to a stage tempo and it becomes The Front Page with a change of sex; play it in a wider world and the single room, where a hanging and a remarriage share a rolltop desk, disperses. What holds it below the top: the camera records the room more than it shapes the knowledge, and the instrument is almost wholly the sound.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Evidence over eighty-six years. Stanley Cavell made it one of the seven comedies of remarriage in Pursuits of Happiness (1981), and the film has carried that reading since. The questions stay open: whether the ending is a liberation, Hildy taking back the work she loves, or a capture, the woman following the man who has cheated her into it, carrying her own bag down the stairs; and whether its laughter at Mollie and at Williams is the film’s own cruelty or its exposure of the press room’s. It yields on return as few comedies do, because lines missed in the overlap are found on a second and a third viewing. What holds it: much of the return is of pleasure and detail rather than new meaning, and the criticism turns on a small set of questions about the ending and about gender.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The field is the cinema of the 1940s, with the American screwball comedy of the late 1930s behind it. The intrinsic force: the fullest statement in the classical sound film of overlapping, accelerated dialogue, and of the working woman as the equal in speed and competence of the man she spars with. It perfected a manner Hawks had begun more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the overlapping-dialogue line that runs to Robert Altman’s sound in the 1970s and to the rapid talk of later American screen comedy and television; the film’s standing as the model of the fast-talking newsroom and of the professional heroine; and the later versions of the property, Billy Wilder’s The Front Page (1974) and Switching Channels (1988), measured against it rather than against the play. The reach is real and lies mainly in comic dialogue and in the image of a heroine; others moved the decade more.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty-six years. The form is whole: one version, surviving complete. Presence is continuous and unusually wide, and for an odd reason: the copyright lapsed, so for decades the film played on television and circulated on cheap video in every market, and it has also been in repertory and teaching throughout; it is on the National Film Registry. Against this, the fabric: for much of its life the film was seen through worn, duped public-domain prints with poor sound, a real charge for a film whose instrument is its soundtrack, made good by later restorations. The surface, newspapers, a hanging and a radical scare of the late 1930s, is period, but the film is about the press room’s appetite, which has not aged. The fabric holds it a tenth below the widest survival of its age.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in the sound and the playing. Hawks’s direction of an ensemble at speed, lines stepping on lines while the important words still land, is a command few films of any period equal. Rosalind Russell holds her own against Cary Grant and often takes the scene; Grant’s Walter is quick, charming and appalling; Ralph Bellamy plays the dull man precisely enough to be funny without being contemptible. The press-room chorus is cast and timed as one instrument, and Lederer’s script keeps the play’s mechanism and rewrites its voice. The charges: Joseph Walker’s photography is serviceable and the staging largely theatrical, one room shot from conventional set-ups; there is almost no visual invention; Mollie’s leap is staged perfunctorily.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the opening banter in Walter’s office and Mollie Malloy’s leap from the press-room window. One law governs both: the job comes first, and everything slower than it is run over. Walter’s schemes against Bruce, the reporters’ cruelty to Mollie and the mayor’s scheme against Earl Williams obey the same rule of speed and appetite, and the film’s comedy is the same thing as its satire. The range is wide for a comedy, from courtship to an execution and a suicide attempt. Two seams hold the figure. The film runs on past Mollie’s leap with barely a beat, and whether that is the law applied or a tonal gap left open is a fair question; and the reprieve, arriving by a comic messenger, resolves the hanging by farce rather than by the film’s own logic of power.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The orders held in one structure: the press as a trade and an industry; the state, in a mayor, a sheriff, a governor’s reprieve and the gallows; the law and capital punishment; politics, in an election and a red scare; marriage and the family, in a divorce, a remarriage and Bruce’s mother; class and respectability, in the insurance man from Albany; and the woman’s work set against the woman’s place. The farce integrates them: the hanging, the election and the remarriage are one night’s plot. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: consciousness is all surface, at speed, with no interior; the sacred is absent and the natural world does not appear; Williams and Mollie are held as victims rather than as lives; and the city is one room. A comedy of 92 minutes holds much for its form, and the figure records the form’s ceiling.

Score: 6.9 / 10