His Girl Friday

 His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks 1939) is a screwball comedy with rapid-fire, overlapping patter, a soundtrack so dense with wit, sarcasm, and invective that the viewer can't hear half of what is going on.  The film pushes the outer limit with regard to rapid-fire overlapping dialogue to a point far beyond what Robert Altman did with his layered soundtracks in the 70's and 80's.  Altman arranged his soundscapes in depth -- you heard dialogue carrying plot points or developing dramatic themes in the foreground; other voices and sounds, however, were woven into a sonic tapestry behind the principal vectors of meaning in the script, improvised as it were as a background accompaniment.  (Altman was a fan of Kansas City jazz and he devises his soundtracks in improvised layers of sound.)  Except for a few snatches of music in His Girl Friday's last five minutes, there is no music and Hawks' picture gives the impression of several verbose theater pieces being performed at maximum volume simultaneously.  It all moves along with startling and ferocious velocity.  The film's comedy is darkened by abject misery glimpsed around the outskirts of the central romantic triangle:  the newspaperman Walter Burns (Cary Grant) scheming to romantically recapture his wife, Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), a hard-as-nails journalist herself (she calls herself a "newspaperman", who has misunderstood her own nature by becoming betrothed to a complacent, patient, and honorable life insurance salesman, a poor sap played by Ralph Bellamy.  (At one point, Cary Grant's newspaper publisher describes the decent but unadventurous fiancee as "looking somewhat like Ralph Bellamy.")  This triad is complicated by the insurance salesman's mother who intends to accompany the couple on their honeymoon -- she ends up kidnapped by a gangster and half-killed in a car crash, all of these mishaps contrived by Burns.  We can tell from the outset that the domestic appeal of the bland insurance man will be inadequate for Hildy: in the first shot, Hildy, short for Hildegard, enters the newsroom and, as her fiancee attempts to open a door for her, she bulls ahead, pushing the gate open herself.  This is not a "little woman" invested in having men open doors for her.  Hildy taunts her ex-husband Walter Burns who strenuously tries to lay hands on her -- the romantic sizzle between the two is palpable notwithstanding the fact that Hildy has resigned her position at the newspaper and has just returned from "six weeks in Reno", the residency requirement for her to acquire her quickie Nevada divorce.  Hildy boasts that she wants nothing more to do with Burns, but there is a big story pending, and the newspaperman knows he can win her back by involving her in the chase for the scoop.  Reluctantly, and against what she thinks is her better judgment, Hildy agrees to interview a murderer condemned to death and awaiting execution on Death Row.  This is a world in which the journalists invent stories and newspapers take adversary positions purely for the purpose of selling their product -- no one has anything remotely approaching integrity and the facts are pliable, twisted to support various sensationalist angles on the story.  Gathering the facts, tormenting witnesses, and spinning the story is apparently addictive fun and it's obvious that Hildy, who is supremely talented at this game, will be drawn back into the tawdry world of yellow journalism by Burns' machinations.  Simultaneous with Hildy's increasing obsession with the death row story, Burns arranges to have her fiancee repeatedly arrested for various petty crimes,  including theft, passing counterfeit currency, and soliciting a prostitute. (Burns has far-ranging contacts in the Underworld in Chicago where the story takes place and he exploits these connections to mercilessly humiliate and persecute Hildy's fiancee.)

The film is a leading exemplar of the so-called "comedy of remarriage", a genre that flourished in the era of World War Two.  (The philosopher and critic Stanley Cavell coined this phrase.) These comedies feature wise-cracking formerly married couples, both man and woman cynical, ring-wise, and sexually experienced.  The appeal of these sorts of romantic comedies is that they are artfully contrived to avoid the cloying sentimentality of the genre.  A lot is at stake in a romantic comedy involving a naive young man and virgin.  In the comedy of remarriage, things are more relaxed; the characters know how this will turn out since they've been down this path before and the players can afford to be sarcastic about romance and love.  These films aren't about "first love" and its illusions; to the contrary, these movies are about living with profound disillusion.  Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, of course, rekindle their romance but without a single kind or caring remark exchanged between them -- the film does everything in its power to avoid the typical discourse of romantic love and substitutes for sonnets and flowers a rapid-fire litany of insults.   

When I was younger, I didn't care for Howard  Hawks' films.  They are generally too cruel to make for comfortable viewing. Hawks' style is completely "invisible"; there are no showy shots and in The Front Page only a half-dozen or so close-ups.  Hawks' movies embody certain masculine pretenses about physical courage and stoicism, although, oddly enough, you could write feminist thesis on themes presented in a number of his films including The Front Page.  (I disliked the hypermasculinity of these movies while not understanding the feminist subtexts.) The film is quite violent with a prison escape and guards firing machine guns up at the journalists, hoping, it seems, to eliminate some of these pesky gadflies by friendly fire as it were --even in 1939, journalists in times of crisis were an endangered species.  But Hawks doesn't play any of the violence for thrills or adventure.  Everything is presented in an epic style -- that is, in a manner extremely indifferent to the human suffering (and, for that matter, sexual romance); it's one thing after another without any attempt to draw attention to violence or corruption or erotic attraction -- everything is presented from an Olympian perspective with complete nonchalance with respect to the merely human emotions involved.  An example from the film epitomizes His Girl Friday's casual indifference to suffering.  A hapless bookkeeper has run amok and killed a "colored policeman", thereby, creating a political problem for the Mayor (and his fat, inept and corrupt sheriff); these politicians are indebted to the city's Black voters for their offices and an election is pending.  Accordingly, the political boss and his lackey, the sheriff, have mounted a vicious and bloodthirsty campaign to have the feckless murderer hanged, even though its evident that the guy was half-crazed when he pulled the trigger and not guilty by reason of insanity.  Walter Burns' paper has embarked on a crusade against corruption in City Hall, not out of any principle, but to sell more newspapers.  Therefore, Burns' publication opposes the execution of the murderer since the journalists see this as judicial killing as self-aggrandizement on the part of the corrupt officials.  Walter sends Hildy to interview the killer and he is encouraged by her to blame his crime on a vaguely Leftist speech about "use for production" that the milquetoast bookkeeper heard in the park after he lost his job.  (This is an example of the journalists inventing the facts about which they intend to opine.).  Hildy finds out that the murderer, while on the lam, spent the night with a rather pathetic prostitute, Molly.  Molly seems to be in love with the condemned man and she makes the mistake of going to the press-room at the jail where a half-dozen hard-case journalists are playing cards and looking forward to the execution.  The journalists mock her mercilessly, vying with one another to make cruel remarks with no real intention other than to demonstrate to one another their tough-guy cynicism and sadism in the face of the impending hanging.  (It's apparent to the viewer that newspapermen have grown this tough bark on their hides to deal with their daily exposure to misery and horror.)  We see that this pose of cruel, even jovial, nonchalance is a disguise.  This is evident when Molly is driven out of the room by the vicious remarks of the journalists.  As soon as she is gone, the journalists are appalled by their own behavior -- striving to outdo each other's cynicism, they have acted like members of lynch mob.  For a minute, the men sit around in the room obviously ashamed and unable to speak to one another.  Any other director in Hollywood would have highlighted this moment, showing that the harshly cynical newspapermen have a heart after all (although it doesn't do Molly any good).  Hawks films the room in long shot, doesn't cut away, and uses no close-up inserts; we see the room full of now-silent, and crestfallen, thugs from a distance and, for some reason, the scene is all the more effective for the director's resolute refusal to dramatize the scene.  Later, Molly returns and, in the film's one gesture of dramatic sacrifice, flings herself out a third-story window to keep the cops from discovering that the assassin is now hiding in roll-top desk in the news room.  Hawks engineers one shot from the window of cops gathering around the woman concealed behind their shoulders and backs.  Someone says that Molly is dead; someone else claims she is still alive.  But this sequence isn't the point of the movie.  The movie's narrative is focused on the "comedy of remarriage," that is, the relationship between Hildy and Walter and, so, after four or five seconds, Hawks just moves on -- we never know if Molly lived or died; similarly, the assassin is saved by a reprieve but Hawks doesn't care about this aspect of the story.  The parts of the film about the murderer and his girlfriend are entirely incidental and, even, tangential to what the movie is about and Hawks regards that subplot as purely instrumental -- it's a plot invented by the newspapermen to sell papers and has no real substance in the greater scheme of things. 

The film presents an interesting portrait of America just before World War Two.  Walter and Hildy both say that the "war in Europe" is far less interesting to readers than the story of the murderer of the "colored cop."  The opposing paper has contrived a narrative in which the copkiller is said to be a "Red" and "employed by Stalin" (pronounced "Stahl-lean") -- but this is also imaginary; the murderer is wholly apolitical and acted without motive; Hildy had to invent a motive for the killing.  All news was fake news in 1939 and 1940.  The notion of the Press as being arbiters of the Truth is completely alien to His Girl Friday; rather the gentlemen of the Press (of whom Hildy counts herself a member) are not involved in journalism but in the entertainment industry.  (The Front Page is an adaptation of the jaunty theatrical play of the same name written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, first produced in 1928).