His Girl Friday (1940)

"Anchored by stellar performances from Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday is possibly the definitive screwball romantic comedy."

-Critics Consensus from Rotten Tomatoes.

His Girl Friday is a 1940s screwball comedy based on the play, The Front Page and is also a remake of the film The Front Page from 1931. Despite no Academy Award nominations, His Girl Friday was a major critical and box office success and still holds a 98% critic's score on Rotten Tomatoes. It also broke records for being the "fastest" film at the time, and boy do the characters talk fast.

To get it out of the way, I did not like this film. If I had a feeling before that I wasn't crazy about screwball comedies as well as Cary Grant, I sure as hell know it now. Grant is the same old "above everyone else" asshole as always, though luckily director Howard Hawkes learned from Bringing Up Baby and had some straight characters to balance out the insanity occurring on screen. Not to take anything away from the leads, Grant and Russell do a fine job, especially learning that supposedly much of the dialogue and even some of the best lines were ad-libbed. The dialogue is VERY quick and the story moves fast with many unexpected dramatic turns in a so called screwball comedy. I also have mixed to positive feelings about how leading lady, Roz, had a failed growth arc where she attempted to develop personally but ended up choosing the same doomed to fail situation as before.

From here it gets nasty. First, Hawkes' overlapping dialogue is praised for adding realism to Hollywood conversations, and while it is true people in real life do talk over eachother, I have never met anyone who talks as ridiculously fast as the people in this film. For me, the dialogue is insufferable and it completely took me out of many of the scenes. Modern day filmmaker Noah Baumbach does overlapping dialogue a million times better than this. Granted, Hawkes couldn't learn from Baumbach. Though his depiction of caring honest people as unintelligent and gullible, and the enormously selfish, manipulative Grant as the intelligent, hero is pretty horrendous to me. Sure this is a story and maybe Grant isn't supposed to be a good guy, but then who am I supposed to root for? Who do I care about? Because it sure as hell isn't Grant's character. So what about Roz? Well Roz is in a similar position where she practically babies her soon to be husband and treats him as a child, while still entertaining the obvious advances of Grant who is trying to win her back. I also found her apathy towards possibly saving a man on death row to be pretty detestable. She only began to care about the guy when 1) he pointed a gun at her and 2) she saw this would lead to a massive story.

Maybe it's a characteristic of screwball comedies to not empathize with the characters, but if I already don't find them particularly funny, why watch them? Overall, I appreciate the failed arc that Roz goes through over the course of the film and, while it ended in classical Hollywood marriage, at least this time you could see these unlikeable characters speeding off of a cliff together.