His Girl Friday (1940)

What the trade papers reported

The Canadian Moving Picture Digest’s notice of 27 Jan 1940 called The Front Page an “epic hit” and reported that Hildy had changed sexes in the rewrite, emerging as “a blushing sob-sister.” Its reviewer wrote that the new script put more weight on comedy and romance than the earlier version did. The notice matched the casting against the 1931 film: Grant in the part Adolphe Menjou had played, Russell in Pat O’Brien’s part, and Helen Mack in the role Mae Clarke had taken as the murderer’s girlfriend. It described Bellamy’s Albany insurance agent as an added character, made necessary by Hildy’s new sex.

The same reviewer wrote that “Grant and Miss Russell make a good team,” but said his own choice for Hildy would have been Jean Arthur, already under contract at Columbia. Later accounts of the casting record that Arthur refused the part and was suspended by the studio. The Digest’s “Trans-Canada Showings” column of 24 Feb 1940 listed the film at the Imperial in Toronto and the Capitol in Vancouver. By 13 Apr 1940 the paper’s report on the RKO Radio line-up was presenting Grant as “star of the hit comedy film,” while announcing him for My Favorite Wife with Irene Dunne and slating him for three RKO pictures.

The reviews

Harry Cohn rushed the release, according to later accounts, with a sneak preview in December, a press screening on 3 Jan 1940 and a premiere at Radio City Music Hall on 11 Jan 1940. Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times said he had grown a little tired of The Front Page, then conceded that it remained “the maddest newspaper comedy of our times.” The Variety reviewer, who misprinted the screenwriter’s name as Charles Leder, wrote that Columbia “need not regret it” and predicted the film would “grab healthy grosses.”

Harrison’s Reports expected that viewers who knew the first version would still be held in “tense suspense.” Film Daily promised “first-rate entertainment” for any type of audience. John Mosher of The New Yorker, after years of what he called “feeble, wispy, sad imitations” of the play, found this one “fresh and undated and bright.”

Later accounts: the casting

The later record of the casting is told mostly from Russell’s side. Hawks first wanted Carole Lombard, whose cost as a freelancer Columbia could not meet. Russell’s biographical record names Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Margaret Sullavan and Ginger Rogers as having refused, and the film’s production history adds Margaret Tallichet and Lana Turner. Dunne is said to have thought the part too small. Russell called herself “Everyone’s fifteenth choice,” and she learned of the refusals from a New York Times article, read on a train to New York by one account.

Before meeting Hawks she went swimming and walked into his office with wet hair, drawing what is described as a “triple take.” When she raised the casting with him, he dismissed the matter and sent her to wardrobe. Russell had complained in a 1936 interview about being typed as a lady, and The Women (1939) had established her reputation as a comedienne. Grant, by contrast, was chosen almost at once, although Cohn first meant him to play the reporter opposite Walter Winchell as the editor.

Later accounts: the script and the shoot

Hawks pitched the remake to Cohn while producing Only Angels Have Wings, and the change of Hildy’s sex is credited to an audition at which his secretary read the reporter’s lines. Hawks thought the play had the “finest modern dialogue,” yet more than half of it was replaced. Charles Lederer wrote the script with uncredited help from Hecht, and Morrie Ryskind revised the dialogue over the summer of 1939. Ryskind’s own account of the ending is that he described a newsroom wedding to a few Columbia writers, then found it filmed on another set days later. He afterward thanked the unnamed writer, because he preferred the replacement and its line, “I wonder if Bruce can put us up.”

The shoot ran from 27 September to 21 November 1939 under the working title The Bigger They Are, finishing seven days late. Hawks told Peter Bogdanovich that he had noticed how people talk over one another, and that the beginnings and ends of sentences “were there for overlapping.” The 1928 play script, however, already specifies and cues overlapping speech. Multi-track recording was not yet available, so the sound mixer switched overhead microphones on and off, as many as 35 times in a scene. Hawks is reported to have set out to beat the record for fast screen dialogue, then held by The Front Page, and to have shown the two films to newsmen side by side. Later counts put the film’s average at 240 words a minute, against about 140 for American speech.

Russell wrote in her autobiography, Life Is a Banquet, that she thought Grant had the better lines, so she paid her own writer to “punch up” her dialogue and slipped the results in as ad-libs. Only Grant caught on, she wrote, and he greeted her each morning with “What have you got today?” The restaurant scene, partly supplied by that writer, took four days instead of the planned two. Bellamy said that Grant ad-libbed the line comparing Bellamy’s character to Ralph Bellamy in the movies, and that Hawks kept it over Cohn’s order to cut it. Grant’s character also names Archie Leach, Grant’s birth name, as the last man who crossed him. “Get back in there, you mock turtle!” looks like another inside joke on Grant’s 1933 Alice in Wonderland role, but the line is also in the 1931 film of The Front Page.

The shoot also had an offscreen result. Frederick Brisson was staying in Grant’s guest house during filming, and Grant spent weeks asking Russell on the set, “Have you met Freddie Brisson?” Russell and Brisson married on 25 Oct 1941, with Grant as best man.

Later verdicts and afterlife

Pauline Kael wrote that “Russell is at her comedy peak here” and that Grant “raises mugging to a joyful art.” Leslie Halliwell, giving four of four stars, called it “possibly the fastest comedy ever filmed.” David Bordwell read the ending as a “closure effect” rather than a true closure, since Burns has not changed. Grant received no Oscar nomination for the part, an absence described in later accounts as a “sin of omission.”

Lux Radio Theatre broadcast a version on 30 Sep 1940 with Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray and Jack Carson, and Grant and Russell repeated their parts on The Screen Guild Theater on 30 Mar 1941. The Library of Congress chose the film for its National Film Registry in 1993, and the American Film Institute ranked it 19th on its 2000 list of American comedies. Switching Channels (1988) loosely reworked it with Burt Reynolds, Kathleen Turner and Christopher Reeve. John Guare’s stage version, drawn from both the film and the play, ran at London’s National Theatre from May to November 2003, with Zoë Wanamaker as Hildy and Alex Jennings as Burns.