His Girl Friday: A Distinctively Bitter Screwball Comedy

"[Howard] Hawks has stamped his distinctively bitter view of life on adventure, gangster and private-eye melodramas, Westerns, musicals, and screwball comedies."

— Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

After watching Howard Hawks's classic screwball comedy His Girl Friday (1940) with a friend recently, I asked him what he thought of it. He admitted that it was a very funny movie but then confessed that in the end he didn't really like it very much. When I asked him why not, he replied, "Because there weren't any nice people in it." His comment made me realize that the cynical view of human nature pervading Hawks's movies, even his comedies, is something I have come to take for granted. Even in a Hawks comedy it no longer strikes me as incongruous because it is what I expect of any Hawks film.

In His Girl Friday, based on the play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, Cary Grant plays Walter Johnson, the editor of a New York newspaper. Rosalind Russell plays Hildy Johnson, his ex-wife and star reporter. The play was filmed once before by Lewis Milestone in 1931 under its original title, with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien playing Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson, and has since been remade several times and in many other guises. Hawks's major innovation was to update the source material to the then-fashionable screwball genre by making Hildy a female character and also Walter's ex-wife.

In the very first scene Hildy walks briskly through the crowded, bustling city room and into Walter's office to announce not only her resignation from the newspaper but her engagement to Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), a strait-laced insurance agent from Albany. In typical Hawks fashion, this walk to Walter's office—with its swift pace, lengthy tracking shots as the camera follows Hildy's progress through the city room, abundant visual detail, and non-stop banter between Hildy and the other reporters—sets the tone for the whole movie. The entire sequence is one of continuous movement and sarcastic, rapid-fire dialogue.

As soon as Hildy announces her intention to resign and remarry, Walter immediately begins a campaign to thwart her in both of these intentions. His strategy is to convince her through flattery and chicanery that she is the only person who can possibly cover the story of convicted murderer Earl Williams, scheduled to be executed the next morning unless a last-minute reprieve from the governor comes through. What follows is in many ways an archetypal screwball comedy. Baldwin is a likeable but vapid dunce, and Hildy is clearly making a mistake in her plans to leave behind the excitement of her career and unstable life with Walter for the comfortable, unchallenging boredom of a conventional marriage, "with a house and children," to Baldwin. What really distinguishes His Girl Friday from other screwball comedies of the time, though, is precisely what disturbed my friend about the movie: the cynicism in which Hawks steeps the characters and their behavior.

Hawks's bitter view of humanity—his deep conviction that all human action is essentially motivated by self-interest—is projected onto nearly every character in His Girl Friday. In no character is this more apparent than in Cary Grant's Walter Johnson. His dirty tricks campaign to sabotage Hildy's engagement is relentless. So single-minded is he in pursuing his goal that his actions are wholly unrestrained by what would normally be considered human feeling.

The hapless Bruce Baldwin is the repeated victim of Walter's machinations. Walter intentionally humiliates Baldwin the first time he meets him by marching up to an elderly and unattractive man and pretending to mistake him for Baldwin. The mild-mannered Baldwin meekly sits in the background, unable to get a word in edgewise because of Walter's non-stop effusion in introducing himself to the man he has pretended to mistake for Hildy's fiancé. When Hildy, who seems not at all surprised by Walter's self-centered sense of humor, arrives and sorts out the situation, Walter responds with mock apology, and the credulous Baldwin innocently assumes there has been a true case of mistaken identity, never for a moment suspecting Walter's manipulative ruse. Walter continues to torment Baldwin at every turn (even causing him unjustly to land in jail), and Baldwin continues to believe that the string of merciless humiliations is unintentional. That Hawks manages to obscure the innate unkindness of Walter's repeated victimization of Baldwin by making it seem very, very funny is a testament to Hawks's skill at wresting humor from the most unpromising premise—that even cruelty can be played for laughs.

Even the initially sympathetic Hildy eventually shows her true nature when, as Walter intended, she is hooked by the irresistible lure of the story she has committed herself to write. (She has agreed to do this for purely mercenary reasons, to earn $5,000 so that she and Baldwin can buy a house and not be forced to live with his mother.) She is simply too thoroughly a professional reporter to overcome her natural instinct to pursue to the end, and if necessary embellish, a potential story. In the press room at the prison, she easily holds her own with the other reporters—all male, all aggressively pursuing the same story. But it is when she is finally allowed to conduct an interview with the condemned killer that Hawks fully reveals his cynic's conception of her exploitative personality.

The condemned killer, like Bruce Baldwin another soft-spoken naïf, has no clear conception of why he actually shot his victim; the murder seems to have been more the result of an accident than an intentional act. Yet Hildy, in her "interview" with the laconic killer, cleverly manages to create a story where there is none. This she does by putting words in the befuddled and suggestible man's mouth until she has created a scenario that not only appears to explain his actions but also in large measure exculpates him by making him seem to have been temporarily insane at the time.

The minor characters in the movie also get their share of Hawks's bile. The reporters in the press room are portrayed as vultures. They are, after all, essentially participating in an all-night death watch with the remote possibility that a last-minute reprieve from the governor will arrive before Williams hangs. Either way, they will get their story, and that is all these ultra-competitive scoundrels care about. When Williams's lady friend of one night, another pathetic and lonely individual, arrives and then dramatically throws herself from the window, the reporters all race to the window and stare into the courtyard below, waiting for the ambulance to arrive. "She's dead," one calmly says. "No she ain't. She's movin'," another impassively adds. Then they all race back to the telephones to call in the story.

But Hawks reserves his most vitriolic judgments for the elected officials in the movie, the sheriff and the city mayor, two characters of such unredeemed ambition, greed, and corruption that they make the politicians, lawyers, and bankers in the typical Frank Capra movie seem almost innocuous in comparison. When a messenger from the governor does indeed arrive with a reprieve, the mayor, desperately needing to be perceived as a law-and-order crime fighter before facing an election the next week, bribes the messenger and persuades him to take the retrieve back and pretend he arrived too late to prevent the hanging. The sheriff, his crony, abets him in this scheme.

In the end, after many more complications, Williams is saved from execution and declared to have been temporarily insane at the time of the shooting, and the corrupt sheriff and mayor are exposed. Baldwin returns to Albany without Hildy, and Hildy returns to both Walter and the newspaper. Despite, and in some measure because of, the fallibility of human nature, order has been restored and justice has prevailed—at least for a little while, for in Hawks's world human nature may be constant, but everything else is in perpetual motion.

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Trivia notes: It is widely known that although Cary Grant, who had worked with Hawks before, was cast early as Walter Johnson, virtually every major comic actress in Hollywood turned down the role of Hildy (including, according to notstarring.com, Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard, and Ginger Rogers) before the part was offered to Rosalind Russell. I have also read that after viewing the first dailies, Hawks and his stars all realized that something wasn't working. At a loss to identify what was wrong, Hawks suggested that the actors speed up the dialogue, firing it off at about half again the speed they had been using. After seeing the results, all agreed that the problem was fixed.

An Unsuitable Attachment: The Classic American Screwball Comedy

In the late 1930's and early 1940's, comedy in American movies was dominated by what came to be called screwball comedy. In Britain, the genre was known as crazy comedy, which British writer Leslie Halliwell defines as "seemingly adult people behaving in what society at the time thought was a completely irresponsible way" (Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion). My own conception of American screwball comedy is more specific than this.

For me screwball comedy has a classic trajectory. A character is forced to choose between two opposing alternatives. On the one hand is safety, conformity, and predictability; on the other is risk, idiosyncrasy, and unpredictability. Most often this choice is presented in romantic terms: a man or woman must choose between two possible love interests, each of whom represents one of these alternative ways of seeing the world and behaving. Typically, the main character initially chooses the safer, more conventional alternative. The movie, then, details how this person comes to change his or her mind and instead opts for the more adventurous alternative. This is invariably the resolution of the conflict, for Americans prize individuality (on the notional level at any rate) above all other character traits.

This basic situation is in truth not all that innovative. It is essentially an Americanized updating of the classic romantic dilemma created by Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice, whose heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, must choose between the sanctimonious, asexual Mr. Collins and the rich, handsome, and intelligent Mr. Darcy. What transforms this traditional romantic dilemma into screwball comedy is the addition of the element of conformity versus nonconformity to the choices confronting the main character.

The first American screwball comedy is generally, and I believe rightly, considered to be Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934). So completely did this new kind of movie captivate audiences and the industry that the movie received all four major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor, Actress, and Director), the first time this had ever happened and an accomplishment not to be repeated for more than forty years, by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). In Capra's movie, heiress Claudette Colbert runs away from her overprotective father to marry a fortune-hunter she has become infatuated with. Pursued by the kind of fast-talking, get-the-story-at-any-cost newspaper reporter (Clark Gable) who populated city rooms in the movies of the 1930's, the initially hostile Colbert is finally and reluctantly won over by Gable's working-class, no-nonsense, down-to-earth masculinity and bravado. He, in turn, comes to see her as more than just a spoiled, self-centered heiress out of touch with the realities of the world. In the end, she finally sees the unsuitability of her fortune-hunter and exchanges him for another man whom she at first found just as unsuitable, but finally comes to realize is actually just the right choice for her.

Capra is sometimes considered the King of Screwball Comedy, but except for You Can't Take It With You (and that movie is based on a popular play), he never really repeated anything approximating this formula again. Instead, he veered into making comedies with a social conscience and a more sentimental undertone, movies like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Meet John Doe. His attempt at black comedy, Arsenic and Old Lace (also based on a popular play), is a movie I find labored, overly frenetic, and at times almost tedious. (How many times can one watch Uncle Teddy race up the stairs yelling "Charge!" before the charm wears off?)

His last great work, It's a Wonderful Life, admittedly both a popular and artistic masterpiece, is a very melancholic movie that isn't really a comedy at all. A few Christmases ago, I watched a severely truncated version of this film on a Spanish-language TV channel. Running less than an hour in its entirety, it consisted mostly of the mid-section of the unedited film, the parts describing George Bailey's vision of what life would be like if he had indeed never been born and his horrified reactions when everyone he encounters really does treat him as though he had never existed. Everything before this was reduced to a couple of scenes, as was everything after. The effect was unnervingly like watching an especially macabre episode of The Twilight Zone.

A good example of the typical screwball comedy is the second version of Holiday (1938), directed by George Cukor. Here, when Cary Grant comes to meet the family of his rich, conventional, and dull fiancée, he unexpectedly encounters her alcoholic brother (Lew Ayres) and her rebellious sister (Katharine Hepburn). Both are suffering from an obvious case of inadequate parental affection and consciously chosen arrested development. (Much of the movie takes place in their childhood nursery, a place of refuge for these sibling misfits). By the end of the movie, they (especially Hepburn) have persuaded Grant to reject their sister and a life of comfortable but unexciting wealth as a drone in the family corporation. He opts instead to see the world and exchanges his original fiancée for the adventurous and unconventional Hepburn. One unsuitable mate is swapped for another who at first seemed unsuitable herself but turns out to be exactly right for Grant's newfound values and his newly acquired craving for excitement and unpredictability in life.

By about 1940, the screwball approach to comedy had become so ubiquitous, and had produced so many mediocre movies, that it was in real danger of running its course. The choice confronting the main characters in romantic comedies was becoming less and less one between freedom and conformity and was instead beginning to revert to the conventional romantic choice based on temperament and sexual attraction. (Of course, sex had always been an implicit element of the classic screwball comedy: Cary Grant is sexy, exciting, and slightly dangerous; Ralph Bellamy most definitely isn't.)

Filmmakers looking for ways to prolong the life of the genre, however, came up with inventive variations of the basic situation. In My Favorite Wife (1940) Cary Grant's first wife (Irene Dunne), missing at sea for several years and just declared legally dead, turns up right after his wedding to his second wife. This situation provokes many farcical complications, including an unanticipated attack of jealousy on the part of Grant when he meets the hunky athlete (Randolph Scott) Dunne was stranded on the island with, before Grant finally acknowledges that he is still in love with her. The deus ex machina of his second marriage being ruled invalid in court saves the day, and the couple (it was always apparent to the audience that temperamentally, Dunne is more suited to Grant than his second wife) are at last reunited.

In The Lady Eve (1941) the intrepid Preston Sturges gave Barbara Stanwyck a most unusual dual role. In this film she plays both potential love interests for nerdy herpetologist Henry Fonda—gold-digging conwoman Jean Harrington, who is rejected by the rich Fonda, and the fictitious British aristocrat Lady Eve, whom she creates and impersonates to ensnare him for revenge. Sturges took even more audacious liberties with the genre in his 1942 masterpiece The Palm Beach Story. Here Claudette Colbert leaves inventor Joel McCrea not only for personal reasons—his disbelieving jealousy when she accepts money from the "Wienie King" with no strings so that he can build his bizarre invention, an airport suspended over a city on a net—but for practical reasons as well: she wants to marry a millionaire to finance the invention. She becomes engaged to an effete, hare-brained millionaire (Rudy Vallee) while his sex-crazed sister (a hilarious Mary Astor) pursues McCrea when he follows Colbert to Florida. In an outrageously surreal denouement, everybody gets their cake and eats it too when it turns out that McCrea and Colbert are both identical twins (thus explaining the enigmatic prologue to the movie, which apparently shows Colbert pushing herself into a closet and locking the door before rushing off to marry McCrea). McCrea and Colbert re-marry while Vallee and Astor marry the twins, in a triple wedding.

By the early 1940's the worsening situation in Europe, the entry of the U.S. into WW II, and the end of the Depression (class distinctions and the conflict between the rich and the poor had from the beginning often been important issues in the genre) made the screwball approach to comedy seem frivolous and irrelevant. But for nearly ten years, beginning with It Happened One Night, screwball dominated the comedic output of the Hollywood studios with absolute authority.

My favorite screwball comedies (in alphabetical order):
The Awful Truth, Leo McCarey (1937)
Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks (1938)
His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks (1940)
It Happened One Night, Frank Capra (1934)
Midnight, Mitchell Leisen (1939)
My Man Godfrey, Gregory LaCava (1936)
The Palm Beach Story, Preston Sturges (1942)
The Philadelphia Story, George Cukor (1940)
Twentieth Century, Howard Hawks (1934)

My second-favorites:
Bachelor Mother, Garson Kanin (1939)
Holiday, George Cukor (1938)
The Lady Eve, Preston Sturges (1941)
The More the Merrier, George Stevens (1943)
My Favorite Wife, Garson Kanin (1940)
Theodora Goes Wild, Richard Boleslawski (1936)
You Can't Take It With You, Frank Capra (1938)

American-style screwball comedy never seemed to catch on in Britain, but one outstanding British example ranks with the best of the American films:
I Know Where I'm Going, Michael Powell (1945)

Young and Innocent: A Neglected Early Hitchcock Masterwork

Two of Alfred Hitchcock's films made in Britain in the 1930's are universally recognized as masterpieces, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). For the latter movie Hitchcock received the Best Director award from the New York Film Critics Circle. During this period Hitchcock directed two other pictures that are also highly regarded, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Sabotage (1936), as well as several other lesser movies. But in 1937 he directed a film that to my mind is very nearly the equal of his two masterpieces of the period and which has never received the acclaim it deserves: Young and Innocent (originally released in the U.S. as The Girl Was Young).

In the movie, writer Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney) is falsely accused of murder. Tisdall saw the real killer but does not know who he is; he knows only that the man has a pronounced squint in one eye. During a court hearing in the small English town where he has been jailed, Tisdall manages to escape and hide in a car. The car happens to belong to Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam, the kidnapped daughter in The Man Who Knew Too Much), the daughter of the local constable. Erica then proceeds to help the fugitive escape and hide out, at first unwillingly, and later willingly as her romantic attraction to him grows. The rest of the movie consists of the basic plot that Hitchcock had already used at least once before, in The Thirty-Nine Steps, and would continue to use several more times until it reached its apogee in North by Northwest. The innocent man must learn the truth and find the real culprit before the authorities, who are all the while pursuing him, capture him. If this happens, he will almost certainly be falsely convicted and jailed, for to everyone but the viewer all the evidence appears to indicate his guilt.

This basic plot was in truth merely an elaboration of the classic cinematic device that had been used to create suspense since the earliest silents and was based on the cross-cutting between parallel plots perfected by D. W. Griffith. There the cross-cutting was typically between the heroine in peril and the rescuer(s) racing to reach her. Will the villain succeed in achieving his evil intentions before the hero arrives? The device was used in everything from The Perils of Pauline style of melodrama—where the heroine is tied to the railroad tracks while the hero races a speeding train to save her—to more ambitious works like The Birth of a Nation. In this brilliant but egregiously racist landmark film, Lillian Gish risks suffering the "fate worse than death" (to the sexually repressed Victorian mentality of Griffith, rape) before the Klan, attired in their full regalia and mounted on racing horses, reach her.

As well as its basic plot, Young and Innocent contains many other elements that are staples of the Hitchcock movie. The director has a brief cameo as a reporter outside the court building. His macabre sense of humor is in full evidence during the dinner scene with Erica's family, where while dining, her teenaged brothers discuss in graphic detail a grisly murder. The film also contains two of those elaborate set pieces that are always the high points of any of Hitchcock's movies.

The one that serves as the movie's finale is well known and rightly so. It is set in a night club where Tisdall and Erica have finally tracked the murderer. The police are closing in on the pair, who still have no idea exactly who the killer is. As the police arrive, a dance band in blackface begins to play, and the camera slowly moves in a lengthy crane shot towards the band and keeps on moving to an extremely tight close-up of the eyes of the drummer at the very rear of the band. Suddenly one of the drummer's eyes, surrounded by its outrageous blackface make-up, begins to twitch involuntarily, Erica sees it, and the hero is saved.

The other memorable set piece served as the template for a device that Hitchcock used again and again. In Young and Innocent the sequence takes place in an abandoned mine. Tisdall and Erica, accompanied by one of those ubiquitous tramps of 1930's British fiction, are in her car racing away from pursuers and drive into the derelict mine to elude them. Suddenly the ground begins to give way beneath the car, which rapidly begins sinking into a collapsing mineshaft. Tisdall and the tramp manage to escape, but Erica is trapped in the car. By this time the car is below floor level and all that can be seen of Erica is her outstretched arm reaching for help. In another tight close-up, Tisdall's hand is seen reaching for Erica's and finally taking it and pulling her to safety an instant before the mineshaft collapses completely and the car plunges to the bottom of it. Hitchcock was to repeat this device—based on fear of heights and of falling—or a variation of it again and again in later films. He used it in Sabotage, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, and (again reaching its apogee) in the conclusion of North by Northwest.

If you like Hitchcock and you've never seen Young and Innocent, by all means make a point of catching it. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Glamour's Adriana Lima