His Girl Friday

His Girl Friday
January 18, 1940
Columbia
Comedy
VHS
B+

The '40s portion of my movie collection starts with a bang: this funny, fast-paced, smart, still controversial film.  Is the movie feminist or anti-feminist?  Is it racist or anti-racist?  And where does it stand on the death penalty?  It's tempting to say that it's not meant to be a message movie, that its ethics are no purer, its concerns no higher, than those of Walter Burns (Cary Grant), the charming but unscrupulous newspaper publisher who thinks a story about a rooster is "human interest," while "the European war" can be moved off the front page.  (And, yes, this is based on the play The Front Page.)  I think it is a very entertaining movie with a dark side that it hints at without fully exploring.  The reporters, even Hildy (played by Rosalind Russell), think a big story is more important than people.  The movie mocks them but also celebrates them.

Grant and Russell are wonderful together, with Ralph Bellamy as the never-a-real-challenge third side of the triangle, who gets taken advantage of because, well, he looks like Ralph Bellamy.  There are other third-wall-breaking jokes, like Grant's remark about "Archie Leach" and his calling someone a "mock turtle" (his role in the very odd 1933 version of Alice in Wonderland).  Grant and Russell ad-libbed a lot, and director Hawks encouraged them.  But other performers have their moments, mostly funny, although sometimes sad, as with Helen Mack as Mollie Malloy.  I would say, don't watch this expecting a perfect comedy-- it was #19 on the AFI list of 100 best comedies-- but give it a chance, and watch it more than once to really appreciate it.

Frank Orth, who plays Duffy, was the diner chef in At the Circus.  Frank Jenks was in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man.  Warden Pat Cooley would go on to The Bank Dick, Frank McClure to Citizen Kane.  Regis Toomey, who's Sanders, kept working into the 1980s, among other things playing a priest in Change of Habit (1969).