I watched His Girl Friday

I watched His Girl Friday the other day. This movie came out the same year as such greats as The Philadelphia Story (also with Cary Grant), Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and of course Hitchcock’s Rebecca. It was a phenomenal year for movies. I think that His Girl Friday may be best understood by also keeping in mind another movie from that year: Disney’s Fantasia. They are both out of place when their contemporary peers are considered.

His Girl Friday feels like what every blogger wishes their blog was like. The post-modern, self-referential nature of parts of the dialogue (The Walter Burns character tells a woman “He looks like that guy in the movies, Ralph Bellamy” referring to Ralph Bellamy who actually co-stars in the movie as Bruce Baldwin), the fast delivery (and snappy it is, at times hitting 240 words a minute) and witty humor. Then to top it all off the main characters are living a fascinating mile-a-minute life. The film eschews a score for all but the beginning and ending of the film. Emotions are allowed to play out as honestly as possible, the opposite of the emotional manipulation most scores of the time were guilty of. Also consider the fact that the female lead, Hildy Johnson, is a career woman who doesn’t need to get married and live a nice, neat suburban life. She predates the executive women films of the 80s by almost 50 years.

I can only imagine how complicated it was to direct and edit this film. One character will pick up immediately when one pauses for a breath. The timing is remarkable. Some scenes use a single camera and cut between people with their dialogue overlapping the cuts, such pitch perfect editing was not an accident. Technicalities aside the movie was particularly enjoyable for me because you have a pleasant narrative underscored with a mastery of the craft on the part of the director, cinematographer, actors and editor that adds surprising depth to a “screwball comedy.”

For some reason I generally have lower expectations for studio films, I guess that’s because modern studio films routinely disappoint. I need to work on seriously adjusting that. If you jump back a year you find the same level of excellence in films like Wuthering Heights, and to a lesser degree Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, and The Wizard of Oz. Back then you even had composers like Aaron Copland scoring films. Clearly at one point they knew how to deliver.