Once upon a time, the newspaper wars were fierce! Wait, what's a 'newspaper'? And why are we reviewing a comedy from 85 years ago?
His Girl Friday (1940)
The film is now available from the Criterion Collection in a new 3-disc 4K+Blu-ray edition, as well as separate, 2-disc Blu-ray and DVD editions.
Primarily, Screen Anarchy covers independent and international genre films from around the world. Yet we recognize that filmmakers of today, as talented as they may be, draw inspiration from came before.
By breaking down films of the past, we can better appreciate how and why they inspired newer filmmakers, e.g. Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, which is rife with his inspirations from the past. So while some modern viewers may dismiss films from the past century as old and out of touch with reality -- and eek! In black and white, too!! -- we believe our readers especially enjoy reading and watching films that have proven to be hugely influential over the years.
Case in point: Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday.
Released in 1940, the film was the second screen adaptation of the hugely influential stage play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, The Front Page. (The first version, released in 1931, has been lovingly restored and is included on Blu-ray on a separate disc, included with this 3-disc edition.) Charles Lederer, a protege of Ben Hecht, receives sole credit for the screenplay -- he also contributed to the first adaptation -- even though both Hecht and Hawks contributed to the script, and the actors were encouraged to improvise on set.
The original play, first staged in 1928, was noted for being a 'fast' production, and Hawks says (in one of the featurettes included) that he was conscious of the need for speed. (His adaptation runs 92 minutes, while Lewis Milestone's version runs 101 minutes.) The Front Page (1931) features many actors who talk very fast, so how did Hawks speed things up?
As early as 1934's Twentieth Century, scripted by Hecht and MacArthur, Hawks had been developing his idea of "overlapping dialogue," so that two or more people could be talking at the same time, yet the essential dialogue could still be understood. (Director Robert Altman renewed this idea in his films, beginning in the 1970s, and it became a trademark of his work.) His Girl Friday features overlapping dialogue on speed, as it were, the remarkable actors talking so fast that the speed of their delivery becomes a thing of marvel.
The original play and the first screen adaptation revolved around reporter Hildy Johnson and editor Walter Burns, two men engaged in a feature-length battling tango as they work at a daily newspaper in Chicago. (Both Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur had worked as reporters for years before becoming playwrights and screenwriters, so they drew upon lightly-fictionalized versions of their own experiences to give their story its sensational flavor.) Howard Hawks saw his version, coming just nine years after the first film version, could be made different by making Hildy Johnson a woman -- a gender swap that was not uncommon in remake-mad Hollywood of the 1930s -- and Charles Lederer hit upon the notion that Hildy and Walter had been married and then divorced.
That notion lights a whole new fire under the story, which otherwise follows the narrative arc of the stage play and the first adaptation, with a number of lines carried over directly. In His Girl Friday, former reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) stops by the office of her former editor and ex-husband Walter Burns (Cary Grant) simply as a courtesy, to let him know that she is on her way to Albany, New York, intending to marry her fiancee, mild-mannered insurance salesman Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), the next day.
Meanwhile, a possibly innocent man awaits execution by hanging, a sentence that may have been politically motivated by the Mayor and his obedient Sheriff, and which has earned the public scorn of Walter Burns' newspaper. If only star reporter Hildy Johnson could be persuaded to stay long enough to write an article to sway public sympathy further?
Having watched the film multiple times -- first at a Los Angeles repertory screening, then on videocassette, then on Turner Classic Movies, and now on Criterion's sterling new 4K -- I laugh every time. The dialogue remains crisp and witty, and its commentary on the relationship between the media and politics and "the real world" is as relevant as ever. Grant and Russell, as well as the many supporting players, make their lines their own, so that their characters come vividly to life.
Hawks' direction is sterling. It never calls attention to itself; instead, the quality is manifested in Hawks' shot selection, camera placement, and camera movement. Sure, there are 'arty' moments in how he frames certain sequences -- though nothing as self-consciously distinctive as in Lewis Milestone's version -- but mostly it's shot to keep the focus on the story that he is telling, so that I became completely wrapped up in the movie once again.
Criterion's new 4K digital restoration means that the film grain is noticeable but never distracting, while the black tones are absolute, meaning no light escapes from them. It looks notably cleaner than any home video version that I've seen before -- and some of the public domain editions that proliferated on videocassette in the 1980s looked truly awful -- and the mono sound happily booms.
Criterion has included special features from past editions produced by themselves and other distributors, so the video quality on those features sometimes suffer. Taken together, however, I thoroughly enjoyed watching all of them, which ate up my afternoon yesterday. I sampled one of the radio adaptations, which are curiosities, to be sure, but I'm glad they're included for completeness' sake.
The 4K version of His Girl Friday gets its own disk, while both His Girl Friday and The Front Page are on separate Blu-rays. The Front Page Blu-ray included two excellent, 24-minute features on restoring the film and a lovely documentary on writer Ben Hecht, which I loved. The His Girl Friday Blu-ray includes the special features listed below.
Special Features (per official verbiage)
-- New 4K digital restoration of His Girl Friday, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
-- One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film, The Front Page, and the special features
-- 4K digital restoration of The Front Page, made from a recently discovered print of director Lewis Milestone's preferred version, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
-- Interview with film scholar David Bordwell
-- Archival interviews with His Girl Friday director Howard Hawks
-- Featurettes from 1999 and 2006 about Hawks and actor Rosalind Russell
-- Radio adaptation of His Girl Friday from 1940
-- Program about the restoration of The Front Page
-- Program about playwright and screenwriter Ben Hecht
-- Radio adaptations of the play The Front Page from 1937 and 1946
-- Trailers
-- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
-- PLUS: Essays on His Girl Friday and The Front Page by film critics Farran Smith Nehme and Michael Sragow
Cover by Randy Glass
Note that both printed critical essays are excellent. What's truly awesome about this printed extra is that is a fold-out, yet it appears to be on news print, meant to look like an edition of The Morning Post, complete with headlines, photographs, a cartoon, and a poem (?!), taken directly from the movie, with the two essays featured.
Summing up: Pure pleasure for now people, His Girl Friday is eternally funny and worth endless rewatches. Buy it!