His Girl Friday has been on my watchlist for quite some time now and I had never watched the 1940’s classic from start to finish until last week. As a natural maker of lists, I have a complicated relationship with my movie watchlist. My longlist of yet to be seen films often feels like a neverending catalog of my ability for procrastination. I have roughly 400 movies in my Letterboxd watchlist and exactly 812 under “Unseen” in my movie hard drive (1,133 in “Seen” though). Assuming the overlap between those two numbers is less than 100 movies, this is essentially a to-do list with over 1,000 items and counting.
What this means is that I’m constantly disappointing friends and family who give me movie recs, since their one recommendation usually represents a much smaller weight on my conscience than film classics that have been waiting for over a decade. So last week I got covid and watched His Girl Friday (dir: Howard Hawks, 1940).
Back in film school, a teacher of mine once played a clip of His Girl Friday in class to talk about the transition from silent films to “talkies.” HGF was used as an example of how a lot of movies at the time wanted to impress audiences with the advent of synchronized dialogue by having their characters speak really fast and use lots of wordplay and innuendos that wouldn’t have worked in the previous era. Upon its release, Howard Hawks, the director, advertised the movie as having the fastest dialogue ever set to film. He organized publicity-stunt viewings in which his movie was projected right next to The Front Page (1931), the film which previously held the record, to show off exactly how fast the folks in his new movie were jabbering. Significantly, The Front Page was the original film adaptation of the 1928 screenplay of the same name, which HGF is also based on. It was quite a big deal at the time. To this day, His Girl Friday is still considered the movie with the fastest dialogue in history, with an average of 240 words per minute.
HGF tells the story of the events of a single day in which newspaper editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) attempts to prevent his ex-wife and ace reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) from quitting the newspaper business to marry her new beau by luring her with a hard-hitting front page story. Famously, Hawks’ film gender-swapped Hildy’s character, who is a man in the original play and first movie adaptation, and introduced the ex-lovers angle to the story. The movie exemplifies many of Howard Hawks’ trademark directing choices, including fast-paced and dialogue-driven scenes, highly capable professionals as lead characters, and outspoken female protagonists who are just as good as, if not better than, their male counterparts at verbal sparring. While this screwball comedy focuses on the unfolding events of the newspaper story in the second and third acts, it is the witty banter between the two leads that is the most memorable aspect of the film. As “newspaper men” who live on the beat of the city, Walter and Hildy speak twice as fast as the non-journalist characters, who struggle to keep up or get a word in.
It’s a great joy to watch a classic for the first time and delight in recognizing all the ways this movie has influenced film history, including personal favorites. Watching His Girl Friday certainly gives one the sense that fast-paced dialogue lovers Aaron Sorkin and Amy Sherman-Palladino possibly owe their entire careers to the style made famous by HGF. My favorite parallel though, is between HGF and one of my all-time favorite 90’s action movies: Twister (dir: Jan de Bont, 1996).
Both movies are about a divorced couple who once were the co-leaders of a band of professionals, suddenly forced to reestablish their work partnership for one last job due to a breaking story (or in Twister’s case, storm) that only the two of them working together can cover. Both movies begin when one of the two comes to meet the other at their old place of work, to symbolically get their blessing in moving on with their lives, away from their career and into a new marriage. And in both movies, the new fiancé(e) is carried along with them and the old crew on this urgent professional engagement, clearly out of their depth the entire time.
While His Girl Friday is much more cynical in its depiction of journalistic professionals (and of romance in general) than Twister is with its scrappy team of storm-chasing scientists, there’s something quite loveable about the idea of bickering divorcées being reunited by their shared love for their profession and the way it allows them to make a difference in the world. While most romance movies revolve around two people falling in love, suffering through one big disagreement and then deciding to be together forever, it’s refreshing to see a romance about seasoned partners, no longer starry-eyed, rediscovering their admiration for each other because of their shared skill. Another corny action movie I love about an estranged married couple rekindling their passion through their profession is the underappreciated Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie film, Mr. and Mrs. Smith (dir: Doug Liman, 2005).
In recent years, His Girl Friday was spoofed on a Saturday Night Live skit with Zooey Deschanel, which pokes fun at its fast-paced dialogue—the film still holds the record, after all. The movie was also the inspiration for Bojack Horseman’s scoop reporter Paige Sinclaire, introduced in the episode “A Quick One, While He’s Away” (Season 6, Episode 8). Sinclaire’s entire plotline is an homage to the 1940 movie. Because His Girl Friday’s copyrights were not renewed, it is currently in the public domain and the full movie is available online for free. I’ve thought about this film frequently since viewing it. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to trace the lines of influence directly from this movie to so many of my favorite pieces of media that came after and I highly recommend it for fans of black & white films, witty repartee, or stories about journalism. Vindication for my lists! One more down, 1,000+ to go.