His Girl Friday
DVD review from The Movie Snob
His Girl Friday (B-). Cary Grant plays Walter Burns, a charming but unscrupulous New York newspaper editor. Rosalind Russell is Hildy Johnson, his ex-wife and former star reporter. She shows up at his office with her new fiancé, a bland insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy). Walter deploys every trick in his book to try to win Hildy back as both wife and reporter, getting her to cover the imminent execution of a convicted murderer who may have been insane. Widely considered one of the funniest comedies ever made, this 1940 release just didn’t do it for me. The dialogue is delivered with machine-gun-fire speed, but I didn’t think it was all that witty. The most remarkable thing about the picture to me was its amazingly cynical view of both journalists and politicians. In that sense, it certainly feels ahead of its time.
1 Comments:
I was eight years old when "His Girl Friday" showed up, so by the time I got around to seeing it on TV years later, it was already "a classic" (but of what?), in spite of which I reacted badly to its rat-tat-tat dialogue that left zero chance to appreciate the wit it may or may not have had. If all comedy depends on timing, as several smart guys and two smart women claim, who could know if it was funny? Besides, by then I knew both Cary Grant and Roz Russell could talk a lot slower (more slowly to you grammarians out there), so only the fact I was probably aching for the good old, bad old '30s kept me watching to the end, and very reluctantly, too.
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