HIS GIRL FRIDAY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 47, 17 May 1940, Page 20

HIS GIRL FRIDAY

(Columbia) Toughest and snappiest of all newspaper plays is Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s "The Front Page." In 1931, Lewis Milestone made it into a film which gave great joy to all newspapermen, but aroused much less enthusiasm in the general public, who~did not

appreciate or understand its brittle wit and its atmosphere of the Chicago yellow press. In re-making the play now for Columbia under the title of "His Girl Friday," Director Howard Hawks has employed a bright device which, while perhaps lessening the enjoyment of newspapermen (who seldom pay for their seats anyway), is likely to make the film much. more acceptable to those who only read the newspapers. Hawks’s big idea is nothing less than to change the sex of the leading character — from Hildy Johnson, the tough ace reporter of the Chicago "Herald Examiner," +o Hildegarde Johnson, the no less efficient but much less tough, feminine newshound of the same mythical paper. With this metamorphosis, the rest of the story fits in much more neatly than might at first seem possible. In the original play, Hildy the he-man was blustered, bullied and double-crossed right and left by a man-aging-editor who would stop at nothing to prevent his best reporter from leaving the rough and exciting road of Chicago journaJism for the primrose path of matrimony and a respectable New York daily. Every time Hildy was about to make an exit with his fiancée, a big story would break and his newssense would get the better of him. The biggest story of all was when a miserable little murderer escaped from the deathhouse and in so doing gave Hildy a line on the juiciest political scandal of the century. What could any conscientious newshound do but stay to write it up? Now it is Hildegarde, the girl reporter (Rosalind Russell) who finds the escapee and the big story hiding in a desk in the press-room at the prison; and it is she who stalls off an ardent but oafish fiancé (Ralph Bellamy), while being egged on both to get the story and drop the fiancé by an unscrupulous managingeditor. In his defence, it must be said that the managing-editor (Cary Grant) was once her husband, and he wants her back-but he wants the story more, ‘"His Girl Friday" is more of a farce than its "Front Page" predecessor, with both Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant sustaining the comedy at top pitch. The dialogue has lost some of its saltier patches, but the pace is still terrific, and those who are quick enough to catch the wise-cracks will find plenty worth laughing at.