His Girl Friday

Contributed by S. Saylor

"You can get married 365 days of the year, but when do you have a murderer in your desk?!" Walter Burns (Cary Grant) says to Hildegard "Hildy" Johnson (Rosalind Russell) as they scamper around the office entangled in the various phone cords which function as extensions of their own schemes. His Girl Friday is a remake of the 1931 film, The Front Page, in which a newspaper man tries to get his partner back into the business. But in His Girl Friday, that partner is a woman: the swaggering Rosalind Russell. Both Grant and Russell ad-libbed and wrote much of their own dialogue because they weren't satisfied with what the script offered. Thankfully, Hawks encouraged this.

As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Walter and Hildy share the same passion—for getting the story. Walter is still very much in love with Hildy, but she apparently has other plans—to quit the business and remarry. Walter does all he can to get Hildy back, including having her fiancé repeatedly pick-pocketed and thrown in jail. There is nothing like the crackling energy of Cary Grant to liven up a romantic scene. He is a truly generous actor, and for this we should all be very grateful. Whether he is screaming that the reason he is wearing Susan Vance's (played by Katherine Hepburn) nightgown is that he suddenly "went gay," as in Bringing up Baby, or chasing Hildy around the office in His Girl Friday, the name of the game is sexual tension, and nobody is more alert and feisty than Grant.

Russell's ability to be simultaneously hard and vulnerable is refreshing. She matches Walter's schemes at every turn. And I like a woman who's not afraid to be ugly sometimes. It means she's got spirit, that she's a human being rather than a mere manicured version of femininity. After driving Walter away for the greater part of the film, this stalwart fighter breaks down when she thinks he will actually let her go. In this, she reveals her machismo. "Why are you crying?" he asks. "Because I thought you didn't love me anymore," she sobs. Rather than this being pitiful, or stereotypically "feminine" (i.e. in the end all a woman really wants is a man), it is moving because the viewer knows what a, well, "man" Hildy is. That is, she's the toughest person in the film.

There is a sub-genre of romantic comedies that I propose we call "schemantic comedies," wherein the hard-headed protagonist(s) fight against what they are destined for (and really want) and scheme to get what they think they want (but aren't destined for). Alternately, they scheme for what they really want and are destined for—in any case, they make a mess of the whole damn thing in the process. It is utterly Shakespearean. Think of Much Ado About Nothing, or any of Shakespeare's comedies for that matter. But instead of the women literally masquerading as men to get what they want, as in Shakespeare, in the schemantic comedies of classic cinema the women don the status of men to achieve their aims, as in The Lady Eve, or Bringing up Baby. Same idea, different costume. And guess what? It works. Because it creates tension by raising the low-status character (the woman) to the high-status character (the man), thereby leveling the playing field, and creating two equally-matched opponents who can really duke it out mano-a-mano.

Anyone who's ever studied acting, writing or directing knows that conflict is key to a good story. No conflict = no story. The scheming creates tension and conflict, but it also facilitates another purpose, which is to create the sense that the two characters are true counterparts; they're a special fit—at least in regard to their scheming abilities. At the end of the day, the more emotional dodge-ball, scheming, attacks and counter-attacks, the more we want Walter and Hildy to get it on! There is one particularly scintillating moment toward the end of the film when they are arguing, yelling at each other, and he suddenly grabs her wrist
and . . . ! Everything stops and we just watch, and wait in suspense. She is still arguing a mile a minute when she suddenly realizes that he's got her by the wrist. Her speech falters only a little, and she tries to slowly twist out of his grip while still arguing. It is a very real moment. One of the hottest moments in film—because the actors match each other, the characters match each other, and this sizzles with tension.