His Girl Friday [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray] [2 Discs]

Director: Howard Hawks, Cary Grant Howard Hawks

Overview

The second screen version of the Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur play The Front Page, His Girl Friday changed hard-driving newspaper reporter Hildy Johnson from a man to a woman, transforming the story into a scintillating battle of the sexes. Rosalind Russell plays Hildy, about to foresake journalism for marriage to cloddish Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy). Cary Grant plays Walter Burns, Hildy's editor and ex-husband, who feigns happiness about her impending marriage as a ploy to win her back. The ace up Walter's sleeve is a late-breaking news story concerning the impending execution of anarchist Earl Williams (John Qualen), a blatant example of political chicanery that Hildy can't pass up. The story gets hotter when Williams escapes and is hidden from the cops by Hildy and Walter--right in the prison pressroom. His Girl Friday may well be the fastest comedy of the 1930s, with kaleidoscope action, instantaneous plot twists, and overlapping dialogue. And if you listen closely, you'll hear a couple of "in" jokes, one concerning Cary Grant's real name (Archie Leach), and another poking fun at Ralph Bellamy's patented "poor sap" screen image. Subsequent versions of The Front Page included Billy Wilder's 1974 adaptation, which restored Hildy Johnson's manhood in the form of Jack Lemmon, and 1988's Switching Channels, which cast Burt Reynolds in the Walter Burns role and Kathleen Turner as the Hildy Johnson counterpart.

Product Details

Release Date:	01/10/2017
UPC:	0715515189514
Original Release:	1940
Rating:	NR
Source:	Criterion Collection
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[B&W]
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Mono]
Language:	English
Time:	3:13:00
Sales rank:	3,928

Special Features

New high-definition digital restoration of His Girl Friday, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack; New 4k digital restoration of The Front Page, made from a recently discovered print of Director Lewis Milestone's preferred version, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack; New interview with film scholar David Bordwell about His Girl Friday; Archival Interviews with His Girl Friday Director Howard Hawks; Featurettes from 1999 and 2006 about Hawks, actor Rosalind Russell, and the making of His Girl Friday; Radio adaptation of His Girl Friday from 1940; New piece about the restoration of The Front Page; New piece about Playwright and Screenwriter Ben Hecht; Radio adaptations of the play The Front Page from 1937 and 1946; His Girl Friday trailers; Plus: A booklet featuring essays on His Girl Friday and The Front Page by film critics Farran Smith Nehme and Michael Sragow

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Cary Grant	Walter Burns
Rosalind Russell	Hildy Johnson
Gene Lockhart	Sheriff Hartwell
Helen Mack	Mollie Malloy
Ralph Bellamy	Bruce Baldwin
Porter Hall	Murphy
Ernest Truex	Roy Bensinger
Cliff Edwards	Endicott
Clarence Kolb	Mayor
Roscoe Karns	McCue
Frank Jenks	Wilson
Regis Toomey	Sanders
Abner Biberman	Diamond Louie
Frank Orth	Duffy
John Qualen	Earl Williams
Alma Kruger	Mrs. Baldwin
Billy Gilbert	Joe Pettibone
Pat West	Warden Cooley
Edwin Maxwell	Dr. Egelhoffer
Irving Bacon	Gus
Earl Dwire	Mr. Davis
Ralph Dunn	Guard
Pat Flaherty	Cop
Edmund Cobb	Cop
Wade Boteler	Jail Guard
Marion Martin	Evangeline
Jack Gardner	Actor
Harry C. Bradley	Insurance Doctor
Wheaton Chambers	Elevator Passenger
Ann Doran	Newspaper Office Worker
Sidney Cutner	Composer
Gordon Mills	Composer
Eddie Hart	Plainclothesman
Morris Stoloff	Composer
Sidney B. Cutner	Composer

Technical Credits

Charles Lederer

Charles MacArthur

Ben Hecht

Morrie Ryskind

Howard Hawks	Director,Producer
Charles Lederer	Screenwriter
Charles MacArthur	Playwright,Screenwriter
Ben Hecht	Playwright,Screenwriter
Morrie Ryskind	Screenwriter
Cary Grant	Director
Lodge Cunningham	Sound Effects

Editorial Reviews

One of the all-time-great comedies, His Girl Friday is a breakneck-paced joyride through the newspaper business, filled with some of the sharpest rapid-fire dialogue to ever grace the screen. Directed by Hollywood master Howard Hawks and adapted from the play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, His Girl Friday stars Cary Grant as a newspaper editor who will stop at nothing to lure his former star reporter (Rosalind Russell) -- who also happens to be his ex-wife -- back onto the newspaper and into his life. Hawks's typically clean, unobtrusive direction gives the actors plenty of room to work, and they make the most of it, reveling in the witty repartee and sprinting gleefully through scenes of nonstop, overlapping dialogue that may set a words-per-minute record. The jaded view of the press that marked the original play survives intact, but Hawks's addition of a romantic story line (the Russell character was a man in The Front Page) turns the material into a battle of the sexes -- a classic of the form. Grant, of course, delivers his lines with effortless impeccability; his sense of comic timing is nothing short of perfect. Russell matches him stride for stride and line for line, making for the kind of combustible screen chemistry that is the stuff of legend. The Columbia DVD includes a commentary track and four short documentaries.

Barnes & Noble - Gregory Baird

It's doubtful that one could find a movie as fast-paced as Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday, and next-to-impossible to find a film of the period more laced with sexual electricity. Decades after its release, the comedy-thriller adapted from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play The Front Page holds up as a masterpiece of pacing and performance, and even manages a few healthy swipes at some of officialdom's sacred cows. At the time, His Girl Friday was also a piece of groundbreaking cinema for the rules it broke: Hawks' version added an element of sexual tension that was about the only thing missing from the original play and the 1931 film version, in which main characters Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson are men engaged in a symbiotic/exploitative professional relationship. Hawks transmuted Hildy Johnson into the persona of Rosalind Russell, who was entering her prime as an archetype of the ambitious, energetic woman. Coupled with Cary Grant's cheerful nonchalance as the manipulative editor Walter Burns, the material -- which was fairly scintillating on its own terms -- took on a fierce sexual edge that made the resulting film a 92-minute exercise in eroticism masquerading as a comic thriller. Russell may never have had a better role than Hildy Johnson; she became a screen symbol for the intelligent, aggressive female reporter, decades before Candice Bergen's star turn as television's Murphy Brown. Amid all of the jockeying for superiority, and the sparring between Grant and Russell -- which, in many ways, anticipates the jousting between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in Hawks' own The Big Sleep, made four years later -- His Girl Friday found room to enhance some of the issues from the original play, including cynicism about government, the justice system and freedom of the press.

All Movie Guide - Bruce Eder