In Public Domain: His Girl Friday

More and more films are falling out of copyright and into the public domain. I'm going to watch them all on the internet, and then I am going to tell you about them.

His Girl Friday has never been my favorite of the five or six masterpiece comedies Cary Grant made from about 1937 to around 1942 - it doesn't have the class-clash dynamics of Bringing up Baby, or the just-barely-repressed post-Code chemical sexiness of The Awful Truth - but still, it's one of those sex-and-pizza things, where even when it's not quite as good as it could be, it's still pretty damn great. 


In adapting 1931's The Front Page, Howard Hawks turned "Hildy" Johnson (originally played by Pat O'Brien), an ace reporter about ten minutes away from packing it all in for a cushy ad job and a suburban marriage, into a female foil for Grant's Walter Burns. The new Hildegarde (played by an unusually sufferable Rosalind Russell) is, like so many of Grant's romantic interests in this era, Walter's ex-wife. She left him and the newspaper racket a few months back, and has only now returned to announce her engagement to a safe, friendly, and bland as all hell insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin.

Baldwin (played by Ralph Bellamy, as Grant's milquetoast opponents so often are) is basically a human-shaped bowl of potato soup - neither offensive nor lovable, or even particularly memorable, Walter barely has to lift a finger to get him out of the way. The real struggle is coaxing Hildy, who is convinced that she wants only "to be a woman, not a newsgetting machine", that Walter can offer her some kind of utopian hybrid of both. A big story just happens to be breaking, Walter cons Hildy into putting the wedding off a few hours so she can report on it. The game is thus on.

His Girl Friday was a failure on its initial release, and it doesn't really fit into any kind of generic mold of the era. It's not a simple romantic screwball comedy;  it bogs itself down with excessive plot, and for much of the film Grant and Russell are kept away from one another. This is a huge problem, I think, because there's absolutely no urgency to the breaking-story narrative, and without Grant to bounce off of, a little Rosalind Russell, frankly, goes a long way.

But the quadruple-entendre-laden newsroom dialogue between Grant and Russell is incredible. Their sugarcoated insults and backhanded come-ons, escalting eight times a second, add up to what is pretty much the hottest coversational sparring I've ever seen. His Girl Friday isn't the first film to employ the rapid-fire argument-as-equal opportunity seduction, and it isn't even the first film to place such linguistic eroticism in a workplace context (I might argue that Trouble in Paradise pioneered both). But it certainly raises the game. Watch a couple of episodes of Moonlighting and it starts to look like Hawks' flop invented a genre in its own right: Bicker Porn.

Grant, pillar of the studio system and arguably its most sucessful star-shaped creation, chronically and ironically serves in many of his this-era films as a catalyst towards insurrection. Whether he's coaxing Marlene Dietrich to layabout his penthouse whilst her sick husband is in Europe, or inspiring Katherine Hepburn to drop out of polite society and cruise the world with him and his band of drunken academics, choosing to be with Cary Grant is tantamount to relinquishing one's claim to a normal life. The eveyday drudgery of marriage and career start to resemble defiant acts of rebellion when Cary Grant is involved. No wonder no one can seem to stay divorced from him for very long.

The version of the film available online is imperfect; when I tried to watch it, the audio slipped out of sync quite a few times. I suggest you let it play on your desktop whilst working on other things - you'll miss one or two visual jokes, but otherwise it doubles quite convincingly as a radio play. Although don't be surprised if your own co-workers seem a little slow in comparison.