How His Girl Fri­day rede­fined the screw­ball comedy

The open­ing title card of Howard Hawks’ clas­sic Hol­ly­wood com­e­dy His Girl Fri­day con­tains a sim­ple but apt warn­ing in hind­sight of view­ing. At the end of its intro­duc­tion, the card sim­ply asks the view­er ​“Ready?” From there, we are fired through one chaot­ic day in the dark but hilar­i­ous life of a news­pa­per, as if lit­er­al­ly shot out of a canon. But Hawks’ film rep­re­sents a rad­i­cal shift in Hol­ly­wood com­e­dy, not just in the sheer speed of the dia­logue, but in how dark a nar­ra­tive it was will­ing to use for laughs.

His Girl Fri­day fol­lows one hec­tic day at The Morn­ing Post. Hildy John­son (Ros­alind Rus­sell) has left the news­pa­per and has come to say good­bye to her edi­tor and recent­ly divorced ex-hus­band, Wal­ter Burns (Cary Grant), who owes her mon­ey. Hildy is about to leave for a new, small-town life with her fiancé Bruce (Ralph Bel­lamy). Agree­ing to go to lunch with Wal­ter before catch­ing their train, the edi­tor con­cocts a world of intrigue in order to pre­vent them from leav­ing, hop­ing he’ll get Hildy back as both his wife and star reporter. With the tur­moil from a recent crim­i­nal case and pend­ing pub­lic exe­cu­tion lin­ger­ing over the city, per­haps the biggest sto­ry of the year may just make the choice for Hildy to stay or go a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult than she anticipated.

Much is made of Hawks’ inno­va­tions in His Girl Fri­day. The direc­tor fore­shad­ows them to some degree two years ear­li­er in Bring­ing Up Baby, where the lay­er­ing of chaos and the height­en­ing of the fran­tic nature of the dia­logue earnest­ly births screw­ball com­e­dy. But Hawks’ tack is dif­fer­ent here because there’s more at stake, part­ly thanks to fel­low scriptwriter Charles Led­er­er and the film’s stage play source mate­r­i­al. Though sep­a­rat­ed by only two years, the world is a dark­er place than in Bring­ing Up Baby, and Hawks must find a way to explore his com­e­dy in a sce­nario that is believ­able in an era tear­ing itself apart.

For con­text, the sce­nario of His Girl Fri­day, which remains one of Hollywood’s fun­ni­est come­dies, is also one of its most charged. Putting aside for one moment the break up of a rela­tion­ship con­coct­ed by an ex, essen­tial­ly the dra­ma fig­ures around the clock tick­ing down to a pub­lic hang­ing. Add to this the fact that the man is being exe­cut­ed for the manslaugh­ter of a black police offi­cer in a scheme deployed by the state gov­er­nor to ensure that community’s votes in the com­ing elec­tion, and what is left is a film that, on paper at least, seems mirac­u­lous to end up fun­ny. But Hawks knows that laugh­ter can be a pow­er­ful way to manœu­vre through such grim, com­plex realities.

Much has been made of the mas­sive shift in Hawks’ approach to dia­logue in the film, aid­ed equal­ly by his lead­ing per­form­ers. Clear­ly tak­ing influ­ence from Orson Welles’ Mer­cury The­atre, dia­logue is no longer the typ­i­cal call-and-response of clas­si­cal Hol­ly­wood scripts but instead an over­lap­ping, con­stant lay­er­ing of char­ac­ters fir­ing lines simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. It con­tains more than two-and-a-half times the amount of words per minute for a Hol­ly­wood film of its era (around 240; way above the aver­age of 90). Add to this the already fast wise-crack­ing nature of the peri­od, and it’s clear that Hawks set him­self and his stars a challenge.

This one sin­gle shift changed the whole of His Girl Fri­day, espe­cial­ly its pro­duc­tion. It came in sev­er­al days over its allot­ted sched­ule due to the amount of time and plan­ning it required to get the dia­logue right. More than the usu­al amount of micro­phones were need­ed to catch every character’s utter­ing, and usu­al­ly sim­ple scenes of con­ver­sa­tions, whether in cafes or offices, took days to shoot due to the posi­tion­ing of every­thing around the rhythm of the dia­logue. Even Ros­alind Rus­sell, unhap­py with the qual­i­ty of her orig­i­nal lines and build­ing on Hawks’ instruc­tion to impro­vise, brought in an adver­tis­ing copy­writer to give her sharp­er material.

Some­times the laugh­ter and tragedy in His Girl Fri­day are in such close prox­im­i­ty that it’s dif­fi­cult to know how the com­e­dy still works. After one char­ac­ter, in her utter dis­may at the injus­tice befalling her friend, jumps to her death from an open win­dow over­look­ing the pub­lic gal­lows, Hawks fires some of his strongest comedic moments at us. If only because of the shifts being so quick and the dia­logue scat­ter­ing like machine gun rounds does this approach work; the fre­net­ic rhythm of life smooth­ing over the cracks in the darkness.

Yet, in tak­ing (and win­ning) the gam­ble with such a mor­bid orig­i­nal stage play, Hawks and his cast pro­duced what is still arguably one of Hollywood’s finest and most rad­i­cal come­dies, as well as one of its fastest.