March 5: His Girl Friday (1940 – Howard Hawks)

★★★★★

This Howard Hawks’ version of "The Front Page" is just fun.  Unlike Lewis Milestone’s 1931 talkfest, Hawks brings this play to the screen as a full-fledged screwball comedy that works as cinema.

In addition to the repartee that informs the dialog, there’s always something worth looking at in the frame in His Girl Friday.  In Hawks’ version, the camera is more fluid than in Milestone’s, which helps engage us with what we’re seeing and hearing.  The contrast in the opening sequences of the films points to that difference right away.  While both films open with a newsroom tracking shot, Hawks lets newsroom items loom suddenly into the frame and pass out, just as he has the newsroom personnel bustle in and out of the frame.  By contrast, Milestone’s pan is rather monotone.  One particular Hawks update on the opening is the way the camera tracks to the elevator, engages Hildy, then tracks back across the newsroom again as she walks to see Walter, greeting people as she goes.  Hawks tells us in this opening scene that it’s same story, but done in a more active, cinematic way.

There are other camera and action flourishes in Friday, too.  At one point, the camera pans around to a series of phones as they start ringing, replicating how the eye might move as one phone after another sounds.  And rather than simply learning that Hildy has discovered that Sheriff Hartwell's gun was used in the escape, which is what happens in Front Page, Hawks shows us Hildy chase down and tackle the sheriff.  The ironic humor in a woman of this era performing a running tackle adds to the audience engagement that camera and action are already creating in Friday.

To the dialog-heavy script, Hawks also adds action within scenes so there’s usually something interesting to look at while we're listening.  Early in the film, for example, as Hildy, Walter and Bruce go into a bar for lunch, the conversation among the three is continually supplemented with other input.  Hildy, for example, exchanges greetings with the waiter during their conversation, and as they walk to the table, the silhouette of a wood column momentarily splits up the three, attracting our eye.  With the dialog never pausing, Walter maneuvers Bruce to sit at the far end of the table away from Hildy, and when they’re sitting and still talking, Hildy is removing her coat, another action that keeps the film from becoming visually stale.  In a similarly animated scene after Walter’s physical, the editor is putting on his shirt and tying his tie while the dialog between him and Bruce unspools.  As the conversation continues, Walter puts his hand on Bruce’s shoulder, and Duffy pokes his head into the office to give a visual comment on the dialog he’s overhearing.  A long, two-person conversation like this could fall flat, but Hawks animates it with action and with having ancillary characters break up any monotony.

The cinematic wit here also adds to our experience of Friday, especially the way Hawks winks at Milestone’s version.  Hawks is clearly one-upping Milestone with his take on the earlier film’s opening tracking shot, and his embellishment of Hildy’s revelation about Sheriff Hartwell shows a similar wit.  And changing Hildy’s gender here, with the subsequent fun of having Bruce as the character with the mother, opens the door for lots of humor that Milestone could hardly access.  The intertextuality between these two productions is another fun element of Hawks' Friday.

Although Hawks’ version of "The Front Page" is more cinematic than Milestone’s, Friday keeps the social critique of the original play.  Government is corrupt, and officials are mostly interested in keeping their jobs even if it means scare-mongering or outright bribery.  Experts are cluelessly self-important; the press is uncaring and unreliable.  And the people who bear the brunt of this pervasive self-serving attitude are the poor, like Earl and Molly.  In His Girl Friday, Hawks imbues the strong play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur with the director’s command of the cinematic, and the result is a thoroughly engaging, deep social critique.