His Girl Friday is a 1940 movie made in America, starring Cary Grant, Rosalind Russel and Ralph Bellamy.
A former newspaper "man" named Hildy Johnson is engaged to Bruce Baldwin, but before she marries Bruce, she wants to drop in at her old newspaper to see her boss Walter Burns and tell him she's quitting the newspaper business for good. The catch? Walter is Hildy's ex-husband, and the pair had divorced 4 months earlier. Walter wants Hildy back both in love, and back in the newspaper business. Walter tries desperately to get Hildy back into the paper (delaying her and her fiance's train, giving them counterfeit money etc.) and eventually embroils her in her exciting story of a wrongly convicted man who makes a dramatic jail escape. Hildy and Bruce do not make it to the altar, Hildy instead stays behind to cover the jail story and accepts Walter's wedding proposal.
The film surprisingly doesn't show too many raucous newsrooms, instead a lot of the action takes place in the Press Room at the jail, a set scattered with so-called candlestick telephones.
The original writers worked on numerous newspapers in the 1920s, before writing a stage play that was later made to film and then remade (it was this remade version. (Ed: The original title was "The Front Page".)
A lot of Hildy and Walter's conversations (between EXES mind you) are pretty much textbook WHAT YOU SHOULDN'T SAY to your ex (guilt tripping, asking about current partners, bringing up old arguments, PET NAMING).
The direction was very dull and not action packed - you can really tell this film was based on a stage play, there was so much standing around in the same few sets and talking. The dialogue was where all the meat in the story was, with a little bit of smart wordplay and lots of fast confident talking. (Ed: This is producer/director Howard Hawks' distinctive style. See Thing From Another World 1951...)
Made good use of technology of the time in the storytelling - the use of telephones in the narrative.
Lilian's Rating - 3.5/5
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