His Girl Friday (1940)
Grade: 88
"His Girl Friday" is a comedy that satirizes the newspaper business. It is based on the noted Broadway play "The Front Page", but with a plot twist in that one of the two leads is a woman and is the ex-wife of the other.
It stars Rosalind Russell as a headstrong woman who plans to marry a milquetoast insurance salesman (Ralph Bellamy). She attempts to quit her job as a reporter working for conniving editor and ex-husband Cary Grant. Although she is fully aware of his schemes, she gets suckered into covering one last story; the pending execution of a mild-mannered man who becomes unstable when carrying a handgun.
One of the running gags of the film is that clueless Bellamy keeps ending up in jail, an innocent victim of Grant's machinations. Bellamy plays the wide-eyed dupe perfectly. When Grant makes a ridiculous speech about his devotion to his ex-wife, Bellamy believes it all and can only say "Gee!" in amazement.
"His Girl Friday" makes heavy use of overlapping dialogue. One scene has Grant, Russell and Bellamy all talking at once. This technique works as it makes the film more dynamic.
Newspapermen are depicted in the film as prone to cynical moralizing, embellishing the truth for dramatic impact, and willing to commit crimes in order to win a "scoop". This image may be more accurate today, more than a half century later, than it was when the film was made.
Director Howard Hawks and Cary Grant must have gotten along well, since they made four other films together. All but one of these films was a comedy. Cary Grant was a great comic actor, usually playing a character who doesn't quite realize that he is making a fool of himself. "His Girl Friday" is different in that Bellamy plays the stooge. Of course, Grant had success in dramatic roles as well.
kollers@shell.mpsi.net http://members.tripod.com/~Brian_Koller/movies.html
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