His Girl Friday (1940)
A newspaper editor learns his star reporter and ex-wife is quitting to remarry, so he stalls the wedding with one last assignment: a jailbreak, a crooked mayor and a scoop too good to walk away from. Hawks overlaps every line of dialogue until the film moves faster than anyone in it can think.
The fastest comedy of the studio era: roughly 240 words a minute, most of them spoken over someone else’s.
Background
His Girl Friday is a rewrite of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s stage play The Front Page, with the reporter Hildy Johnson changed from a man to a woman who is the editor’s ex-wife. That one change turns a newsroom comedy into a romantic battle. Howard Hawks directed, and Charles Lederer wrote the screenplay. The 1931 version of The Front Page is also on the site, so you can compare the two.
What to watch for
Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell play Walter Burns and Hildy, and they trade lines so quickly that they often speak over each other. Hawks encouraged the overlap, and the actors were allowed to ad-lib. Look for the moment when Grant refers to the “last person who said that to me”: the name he gives is Archie Leach, his own real name. Ralph Bellamy is the patient fiancé who never stands a chance. The Library of Congress selected the film for the National Film Registry in 1993.
