In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
Continuing on one of my favorite themes, film adaptations of stage plays, brings me to one of the great success stories of that genre. The Front Page, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, was a Broadway hit in 1928 and has been revived four times on Broadway since then. It has also served as the basis for at least nine movie, television, and radio adaptations. Two of those adaptations were particularly successful: Lewis Milestone’s 1931 film The Front Page, which garnered three Oscar nominations and is preserved in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, and Howard Hawks’ 1940 film His Girl Friday, which was ignored by the Academy but holds a 99% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 94% score on Metacritic and has also been preserved in the National Film Registry.
Hecht, MacArthur, and screenwriter Charles Lederer had all worked in the newspaper biz, which may explain why the newsroom where most of the action takes place has such a lived-in feel. Lederer made one big change in his source material—changing the gender of star reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) from male to female—which allowed him to a layer of romantic competitiveness to the newsroom goings-on that forms the heart of the source material. It was a smart move: I suspect more people remember the sparky repartee between Hildy and her boss and former husband Walter Burns (Cary Grant) than do the plot about the pending execution of Earl Williams (John Qualen) and the re-election campaign of the mayor (Walter Kolb).
The action proceeds fast and furious in His Girl Friday, and the characters talk even faster, as if modern life demanded speed of which previous generations were blissfully ignorant. The characters aren’t deep and their relationships are quickly sketched in. For instance, it’s significant that in an early scene, with Hildy, Walter, and Bruce sharing a lunchtime saloon table, Hildy and Walter are smoking and drinking while Bruce is not, as if to differentiate the adults at the table from the child they are humoring. Water spends much of the film playing tricks on Bruce, all calculated to keep him from leaving for Albany with Hildy, while she gets distracted from the whole nonsense by the draw of a good story. When convicted murderer Williams escapes custody and turns up in the newsroom, her reporter’s instincts kick in and the whole Albany plan starts to look less than viable. And, spoiler alert, let us remember that this is a screwball comedy of the type often described as a “comedy of remarriage.”
Much ink has been spilled on the question of whether Russell’s Hildy Johnson is a feminist icon or not. There’s plenty of arguments against, beginning with the fact that His Girl Friday is a product of its time and contemporary headlines described Hildy as “a beautiful girl” and a “wild woman.” The very title makes reference to both racist and sexist tropes, recalling on the one hand, the native “assistant” to the European main character in Robinson Crusoe, and on the other the common translation of Gen. 2:18 describing Eve as a “help meet” to Adam. Well, business is business and nobody knew that better than the Hollywood moguls.
Still, a movie can be more than one thing at once, and I think The Front Page found a way to smuggle some feminism into the story without endangering its commercial prospects. The newsroom is a very masculine environment, apart from a few “girls” doing clerical duties and one female source (Helen Mack) treated quite dismissively, yet Hildy seems to own the place, and the otherwise cynical and hard-bitten reporters respect her as one of their own. Accepting one woman as exceptional is easier than recognizing that all of us are human beings, so you could cheer for Hildy and still expect that most women would spend their days putting their best energies into supporting the career of their husband and the lives of their children.
My interpretation of Hildy’s character is that, like many women today, she had by necessity mastered the art of being one of the boys but also wanted to enjoy being a beautiful woman (which Rosalind Russell certainly was, and that stunner of a suit by Robert Kalloch certainly didn’t hurt the cause) and to have a family. She knew her chosen husband is not her equal, but few men would be, so she settled for what was reasonably available to her. The fact that men in her world don’t have to choose between a career and a family, but women in those days were expected to, is present but not highlighted, allowing people to enjoy His Girl Friday without pondering that it might offer more than just an entertaining night at the movies. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 849
Technical details: 92 min.; B&W; screen ratio 1.33:1; English.
Edition reviewed: DVD (2 discs).
Extras: 4K restoration of Lewis Milestone’s 1931 film The Front Page; featurette based on interviews with Howard Hawks and illustrated with clips and stills; visual analysis by film scholar David Bordwell; documentary short “On Assignment: His Girl Friday” featuring interviews with Molly Haskell and David Thompson; doc short on Howard Hawks’ career; featurette about the play The Front Page and its cinematic adaptations; featurette about Rosalind Russell; 1940 Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of His Girl Friday; 1937 and 1946 radio adaptations of The Front Page; featurette on restoring The Front Page; featurette on screenwriter Ben Hecht; two trailers; two CD booklets with essays by Farran Smith Nehme and Michael Sragow.
Fun Fact: Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht, and Herman Mankiewicz are sometimes credited with inventing the screwball comedy, of which His Girl Friday is a prime example. In his 1954 memoir Hecht credited Mankiewicz with recruiting him to Hollywood through a 1925 telegram including the immortal words “Millions are to be grabbed out here and the only competition is idiots.” This telegram is often cited as marking the point when California overtook New York as the center of the movie industry in the United States; whether that’s true or not, you have to admire Mankiewicz’s way of getting right to the point.
Parting Thought: One of the most notable aspects of The Front Page is how rapidly characters speak: by one measure an average of 240 words per minute, versus 90 words per minute for normal movie dialogue. It was also the first film to have characters deliberately overlap their dialogue, a technique much beloved of Robert Altman. How much of a role do these innovations play in making The Front Page seem much more modern than many films of the same era?
