His Girl Friday [PG]

Fast-talking and wise-cracking star journalist Hildy Johnson comes back to ‘The Post’ to tell her hard-hitting editor and ex-husband that she’s getting married and quitting the paper. Dumbfounded by the news the ex-husband, Walter, goes into conniving overdrive; staging various schemes to disrupt the engagement and hopefully keep Hildy at the paper and under his wing. As Walter calculates, Hildy doesn’t belong in the role of a housewife and when a juicy murder story hits the city, his theory is proven. Unable to leave the job in the middle of such a hot story, Hildy is right back doing what she does best with poor sweet fiancé, Bruce taking a few of the knocks. 

Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic! Set at a time when newspaper journalism constituted even murder to get the hot story, His Girl Friday is a lightning-paced romantic screwball comedy that is damn near exploding with wit, all kinds of innuendos, and brilliant journalism discourse and slurs. A fantastically lethal battle of the sexes in the vein of those done by Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy such as Adam’s Rib, this movie is absolutely BRILLIANT, keeping you on your toes and your head spinning from the first exchanged of machine-gun dialogue! It’s delicious! 

Fast-talking and wise-cracking star journalist Hildy Johnson comes back to ‘The Post’ to tell her hard-hitting editor and ex-husband that she’s getting married and quitting the paper. Dumbfounded by the news the ex-husband, Walter, goes into conniving overdrive; staging various schemes to disrupt the engagement and hopefully keep Hildy at the paper and under his wing. As Walter calculates, Hildy doesn’t belong in the role of a housewife and when a juicy murder story hits the city, his theory is proven. Unable to leave the job in the middle of such a hot story, Hildy is right back doing what she does best with poor sweet fiancé, Bruce taking a few of the knocks. 

An adaptation of their play, The Front Page, writers Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur do a fantastic job rewriting the story for the screen; steering the story on the basis that the protagonist, Hildy Johnson, wants to be seen as a real woman. Suddenly, the movie has real class and becomes a very rollicking battle of the sexes with the characters of Hildy and Walter pipping and outsmarting each other in various comical stages. It’s a fantastically hilarious look at the role of the sexes in a specifically dog-eat-dog world where the hot articles are the fresh meat. The banter that goes back and forth between these two is electrifying, absolutely hissing and fizzing with sarcasm, cynicism, and aggressive determination and it’s the most hypnotic thing to watch, particularly when it all begins to snowball and the conversations that take place become overwhelmingly incomprehensible. 

Amidst the human debris on the battlefield of the sexes that this film depicts, there are strong comments on the hot political fears of the day; namely the threat of communism. At certain plot points, the dialogue becomes thick with red ink and jargon, really hammering home the idea that movies are a method or voice that can be used to convey various messages to the masses. 

Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell star as the two competing romantic leads, going head to head in a battle of wits and game. Their story becomes quite comically cat-and-mouse and each party delivers a fantastic performance with Rosalind being quick-witted and eloquent and Cary being hard-hitting, loud, and sometimes scary. The chemistry between the two is electrifying and, although they play completely different characters, their relationship does have an element of that between Grant and Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. It’s so juicy and wonderful! 

Starring Ralph Bellamy, Gene Lockhart, Porter Hall, Ernest Truex, Cliff Edwards, Clarence Kolb, Roscoe Karns, Frank Jenks, Regis Toomey, Abner Biberman, Frank Orth, Helen Mack, and John Qualen, His Girl Friday is a brilliant screwball movie filled with drama, murder, the press, conflicts, romance, machine-gun dialogue, and comedy. I absolutely adored it, it’s a film that really stands the tests of time and comes out on top!