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Post date: Apr 1, 2017 5:51:29 PM
His Girl Friday is a romantic comedy starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. It is in the same mold as other Grant pictures like The Awful Truth which also starred Ralph Bellamy as the other man.
It was based a play called The Front Page. His Girl Friday changes the ace report from male to female. This change make the whole story work better. Even Billy Wilder's Front Page with Lemmon and Matthau didn't have the dynamics of this movie. Maybe it me but Cary Grant making fun of Ralph Bellamy is funnier than Matthau making fun of Lemmon's fiancee. Furthermore, His Girl Friday follows the great screwball convention where the women and are as funny and tough as the men while The Front Page does not.
The movie is notable for various reasons. The fast dialog was written and performed so the characters speech overlapped each other. Watching it for the first time, one feels like you are missing a third of the jokes.
The copyright for the movie expired in the 1940s. This allowed it to be widely available turning it into one of the well known comedies of its time.
In one scene Cary Grant's character is talking about the fate of people who crossed him and describes the fate of Archie Leach. Archibald Leach was Grant's birth name.
The film was directed by Howard Hawks who was a very versatile director. He often successfully went from comedies like His Girl Friday to detective crime drama like the Big Sleep and back. This is no small feat. The great Alfred Hitchcock ventured into screwball comedy once and produced one of the most worst screwball comedies of all time!
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