The Meticulous Chaos Of Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday.
What a week in which to reappraise Howard Hawks’ finest screwball comedy! At the dawn of Trump’s America, with confused declarations of “FAKE NEWS!!!” pouring out of small people across the land, the role of the press is being questioned like never before, rendering Hawks’ tribute to the reporter in a timely light. His Girl Friday is a celebration of the murky trade of the newspaperman in all its glory. Treachery is commonplace, with the search for a scoop the domain of the hardiest and craftiest. It’s apt then that the newspaperman at the heart of Hawks’ movie isn’t a “man” at all, rather a woman, and in Hildy Johnson we have a figure to rival Phineas Mitchell or Chuck Tatum in the pantheon of on-screen ‘papermen.
Given how iconic a piece of cinema His Girl Friday is it’s easy to forget that Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson was intitally envisioned a man, and was indeed played by one (Pat O’Brien) in The Front Page, Lewis Milestone’s first adaptation of the source play that informed both pictures. It was Hawks who made the decision to rework the role, and it’s difficult to imagine just how the film could have played had he not encouraged the shift.
Rosalind Russell’s performance is so strong that for much of the film’s running time even the mighty Cary Grant is reduced to something of a bit player, his Walter Burns away from the screen for a relatively extraordinary amount of time given the Hollywood star’s pedigree. Of course, Grant’s star-billing is maintained, and it would be foolish to argue that he’s not an integral part of the film’s appeal.
Away from the actors the film’s third star is the energetic script, courtesy of icon of the screwball-era Charles Lederer. It’s cutting, runs at a breakneck pace and is very, very funny. Great characterisation rules too; we spend a few minutes in the press room without any of the main protagonists, with Hawks and co. granting the viewer the opportunity to get to know the space and the creatures who inhabit it. The press room might be the most interesting place in the movie, with much of the second half of the picture confined to a space full of men who “ain’t human, they’re newspapermen”. Hildy’s gender-shift naturally allows for more of a social insight in to a world ordinarily dominated by the male of the species. The screwball comedy lends itself so well to caustic studies of how genders interweave with one another, with the meticulous chaos of the subgenre making for the ideal metaphor for connected life itself.
It’s interesting to note that when it came once again to remaking The Front Page, this time in 1974 and courtesy of Billy Wilder, the decision was made to reverse things back into being an all-male affair. While His Girl Friday is undoubtedly a canonical classic, mention is rarely made of the Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau version, with the director himself even dismissing it later in life.
