"'His Girl Friday' represents one of the major paradoxes of American narrative cinema — Hollywood's ability to incorporate images of social change into films that ultimately deny and frustrate the possibility of such change." - Tom Powers
Before Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" and Mackendrick's "Sweet Smell of Success" there was "His Girl Friday", Howard Hawks' motor-mouthed screwball comedy and light-hearted satire of both journalism and Chicago politics.
The film is based on a 1928 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, but it was Hawks who came up with the idea of making the lead a woman. "Write em as a guy and cast em as a broad," was Hawks' motto, a technique which resulted in a filmography filled with strong, masculine, bawdy women. This time around our heroine is Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), a star reporter who has recently divorced Walter Burns (Cary Grant), editor at the Morning Post.
Like most screwballs, "His Girl Friday" finds Walter and Hildy engaged in a battle of wits. They can't stand each another, but Walter nevertheless spends the entire film scheming to repair his relationship with Hildy. When the film's couple aren't cracking wise, Hawks engages in an altogether different affair, excoriating conniving journalists, newspaper editors and the political/media machinery of Chicago.
At the heart of this criss-crossing satire is a character called Earl Williams, scheduled to be publicly executed for the shooting (and killing) of a black police officer. Every subset of the city, the film goes on to show, wants Williams executed for different reasons, the Mayor chasing African American votes, and the news desks itching for good ink. Their detachment is chilling; death reduced to filling column spaces. No better is Hildy's desire to twist Williams' story into a weapon to be used against the Mayor's local policies. Make Williams a scapegoat and damn the Mayor, she thinks.
By the film's end, Williams has became a pawn in an ugly chess game in which everyone is wrong. Meanwhile, the news desks, politicians and police are all busy over-pyschoanalysing Williams. Each group hires "experts" to offer "expert opinions" on Williams' motivations. These "experts" are geared not toward finding the truth, but creating rationalizations, and therefore ammunition, for already held opinions, plans or policies.
Hawks' films have always been amoral, dark and cynical, but "His Girl Friday" is particularly bleak. It's a film filled with sharks, leaches and back-stabbers, though a century of cynical films about newspaper men have rendered its satire impotent (even the cutting edge "The Wire", in its final season, can't get away from these clichés). Likewise, modern viewers may find Hawks' once novel screwball antics somewhat dulled by a diet of TV sitcoms. Aesthetically the film is typical of Hawks, packed with rapid-fire banter, overlapping dialogue, virtually no dead air and snappy, fluid camera work. Hawks captures the energy and buzz of newsrooms. His film spits like a machine gun.
Incidentally, upon release "Friday" was praised for "promoting" social change. Namely that of marriages being based on equality rather than exploitation, the notion that women might be economically independent, intelligent and self sufficient, and that new possibilities lay ahead in the roles of the sexes. In reality, however, the film boils down to rigid, old, gender roles. Men operate in a sphere of violence and corruption, a stance Hildy must herself adopt - her price of admission into their all-male world - in order to escape the world of female entrapment and domesticity. This domesticity, Hildy then decides, is not worth the effort leaving. In other words: play the game, be a ruthless man, or shut up and stay at home.
8/10 – Worth one viewing.
Before Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" and Mackendrick's "Sweet Smell of Success" there was "His Girl Friday", Howard Hawks' motor-mouthed screwball comedy and light-hearted satire of both journalism and Chicago politics.
The film is based on a 1928 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, but it was Hawks who came up with the idea of making the lead a woman. "Write em as a guy and cast em as a broad," was Hawks' motto, a technique which resulted in a filmography filled with strong, masculine, bawdy women. This time around our heroine is Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), a star reporter who has recently divorced Walter Burns (Cary Grant), editor at the Morning Post.
Like most screwballs, "His Girl Friday" finds Walter and Hildy engaged in a battle of wits. They can't stand each another, but Walter nevertheless spends the entire film scheming to repair his relationship with Hildy. When the film's couple aren't cracking wise, Hawks engages in an altogether different affair, excoriating conniving journalists, newspaper editors and the political/media machinery of Chicago.
At the heart of this criss-crossing satire is a character called Earl Williams, scheduled to be publicly executed for the shooting (and killing) of a black police officer. Every subset of the city, the film goes on to show, wants Williams executed for different reasons, the Mayor chasing African American votes, and the news desks itching for good ink. Their detachment is chilling; death reduced to filling column spaces. No better is Hildy's desire to twist Williams' story into a weapon to be used against the Mayor's local policies. Make Williams a scapegoat and damn the Mayor, she thinks.
By the film's end, Williams has became a pawn in an ugly chess game in which everyone is wrong. Meanwhile, the news desks, politicians and police are all busy over-pyschoanalysing Williams. Each group hires "experts" to offer "expert opinions" on Williams' motivations. These "experts" are geared not toward finding the truth, but creating rationalizations, and therefore ammunition, for already held opinions, plans or policies.
Hawks' films have always been amoral, dark and cynical, but "His Girl Friday" is particularly bleak. It's a film filled with sharks, leaches and back-stabbers, though a century of cynical films about newspaper men have rendered its satire impotent (even the cutting edge "The Wire", in its final season, can't get away from these clichés). Likewise, modern viewers may find Hawks' once novel screwball antics somewhat dulled by a diet of TV sitcoms. Aesthetically the film is typical of Hawks, packed with rapid-fire banter, overlapping dialogue, virtually no dead air and snappy, fluid camera work. Hawks captures the energy and buzz of newsrooms. His film spits like a machine gun.
Incidentally, upon release "Friday" was praised for "promoting" social change. Namely that of marriages being based on equality rather than exploitation, the notion that women might be economically independent, intelligent and self sufficient, and that new possibilities lay ahead in the roles of the sexes. In reality, however, the film boils down to rigid, old, gender roles. Men operate in a sphere of violence and corruption, a stance Hildy must herself adopt - her price of admission into their all-male world - in order to escape the world of female entrapment and domesticity. This domesticity, Hildy then decides, is not worth the effort leaving. In other words: play the game, be a ruthless man, or shut up and stay at home.
8/10 – Worth one viewing.