His Girl Friday (1940) on Netflix
Approved19401h 32mComedyDramaRomance
Hildy Johnson has quit the newspaper trade to marry insurance man Bruce Baldwin in Albany. Her ex-husband, editor Walter Burns, dangles one last scoop to keep her in the newsroom.
- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb7.8/1068,644 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes99%
Trailer
Plot summary
Hildy Johnson was the star reporter at The Morning Post in New York City before four months away that ended in a Reno divorce from her husband, Walter Burns, the paper's editor. She walks into his office to say she is quitting and to announce that she will marry Bruce Baldwin, an insurance agent, tomorrow in Albany, where the couple will live with his mother for the first year. Walter admits he was a bad husband but does not want to lose her, either as a reporter or a wife. He doubts Bruce is worthy of her and does whatever he can to delay their trip, including putting Bruce in a bad light. He talks up one more story: the coming execution of Earl Williams.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about His Girl Friday (1940)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film was meant to be a straight remake of The Front Page with two male leads. During auditions Howard Hawks's secretary read the reporter Hildy Johnson's lines, he liked how they sounded from a woman, and the script was rewritten to make Hildy the ex-wife of Cary Grant's editor.
- Hawks wanted Carole Lombard for Hildy but Columbia could not afford her as a freelancer. Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Margaret Sullavan, Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner and Irene Dunne all turned the part down, Dunne because she thought it too small, and Jean Arthur was suspended by the studio for refusing it.
- Rosalind Russell learned from a New York Times piece that Harry Cohn was "stuck" with her after chasing other actresses. To show how little she cared she went for a swim and turned up to her first meeting with Hawks with wet hair, making him do a triple take.
- Multi-track recording did not yet exist, so to get the famous overlapping dialogue Hawks had the set's sound mixer switch the overhead microphones on and off during a scene, as many as 35 times.
- Hawks set out to take the record for the fastest dialogue on screen, then held by The Front Page, and arranged a screening of the two films side by side for newsmen to prove his was faster.
- Rosalind Russell thought her lines were weaker than Cary Grant's, so she hired a writer of her own to punch up her dialogue and slipped his work in under cover of Hawks's encouragement to ad-lib. Only Grant worked it out, greeting her each morning with "What have you got today?"
- When Grant's character says of Ralph Bellamy's that "he looks like that fellow in the movies, you know ... Ralph Bellamy!", it was Grant's own ad-lib. Studio head Harry Cohn thought it too cheeky and ordered it cut; Hawks insisted it stay.
SPOILER
Morrie Ryskind wrote an ending in which Walter and Hildy start fighting the moment they say "I do" in the newsroom, mentioned it to a few Columbia writers one evening, and days later heard it had been shot on another set by someone else. He thanked the anonymous writer, preferring the replacement ending he was forced to invent.
