Perhaps I am as old as people tease me for being?  For the record, I am forty-three, going on forty-four, though if you ask some of my friends and family, I am at least seventy-five.  What does this have to do with today’s film, His Girl Friday(1940)?  The release year is the first clue.  The more I age, the more I appreciate classic cinema.  The joke would be that this makes me elderly because people tend to like the movies of their own generation.  As I watch what is released nowadays, the feeling grows that we lost something as a society in the 1960s.  It is a thought I began to form while I was completing my Ph.D., and it has been confirmed many times since those years.  Sure, that decade saw the genesis of a lot of important changes that needed to happen, such as advancements in how our society approached civil rights.  I am getting off track here, so I will leave it at those ten years being crucial to the development of our culture and society.  Put differently, you would not see a motion picture like this one in today’s age, even if it does have some themes that were ahead of its time.

I do not know what day it is, but His Girl Friday is Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), and she is with insurance salesman Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy).  This is a surprise to the busy newspaper room they are visiting.  This is because she had once been married to The Morning Post’s editor-in-chief, Walter Burns (Cary Grant).  She had not only been his wife, but one of his reporters.  While he is glad of the visit, he believes it is to resume her post.  She has other plans, telling him how much she is looking forward to getting away from the grind and hustle of the news cycle before finally getting around to telling him that she is engaged to Bruce.  During the first part of her speech, Walter had been coming up with numerous arguments for why she should remain, mostly appealing to her natural abilities as a reporter.  This last bit of news flummoxes him, particularly when she declares that she and Bruce are leaving that afternoon for Albany to be wed the next day.  Walter has to think fast because he is still in love with her, and to stall for time, offers to take them both to lunch.  While at the restaurant, Walter makes a call to the press room to tell them that Hildy will be covering the big story of the day: the eminent hanging of Earl Williams (John Qualen), a man their publication believes to be innocent.  Though Hildy sees through Walter’s cunning to get her to stick around for the story, her latent ability to see the angles for the piece begin to come out.  It takes Walter agreeing to a $10,000 life insurance policy sold by Bruce to convince her to stick around a little longer for the sake of the scoop.  While she heads off to the courthouse where the information is coming in about the Williams case, Bruce and Walter go to Walter’s office for the editor to sign the policy.  Walter makes out the check for the transaction and sends Bruce on his way, but tasks Louie (Abner Bieberman), a sort of assistant to Walter who is not above breaking the law, to trick Bruce into being arrested.  The idea is to keep Hildy in town, ostensibly to write the article, but also to convince her to be with Walter.  Not long after arriving at the courthouse, she is able to bribe her way into the cell in which Earl is being kept to get some quotes.  He swears by his innocence, saying that he had been temporarily insane when he shot and killed the police officer, the offense that landed him in this predicament.  Hildy has what she needs for the write-up, but is kept from finishing it when she learns that Bruce is in jail.  She knows right away who is behind this plot.  Before she can leave in disgust, gun shots pierce the night, and the windows of the press room.  Earl has escaped.  Once more it is back into reporter mode.  Outside the building, she tracks down Dr. Eggelhoffer (Edwin Maxwell), the state psychiatrist who had been in the room when Earl broke out.  She pays him the last of her and Bruce’s money to be the first person to hear what had happened.  The mental health professional (and I realize this is an anachronism) had handed Earl a gun to recreate the crime for which he is accused.  Instead, he used it to force his way out of incarceration.  She returns to start writing a new story, beating the other reporters into the room, who all believe that Earl is holed up in another part of town.  While she is there, Earl comes in through the window.  Now, she has the man of the hour in the room with her, and she manages to get the gun from him.  Understanding the scoop she has for the paper, she eventually forces him to hide in a roll top desk and informs Walter of the development.  He comes down to the courthouse, and together they begin plotting how they are going to get Earl out of the building, thus allowing them to show the world that The Morning Post has captured the most wanted man in New York City.  It is at this moment the Bruce arrives, along with his mother (Alma Kruger), suggesting that they leave.  By this point, Hildy is embroiled in the story.  Besides, Walter orders Louie to carry Mrs. Baldwin out of the building and to be put into a cab, with her son in fretting tow.  Next enters the rest of the reports, then Sherriff Hartwell (Gene Lockhart), and then the mayor (Clarence Kolb), and soon Hildy and Walter can no longer hide Earl.  The fugitive is dragged away by the police, more relieved that the ordeal is over, and the two newspapermen are put into handcuffs.  What saves them is a reprieve for Earl given by the governor.  Hoping to save face, the mayor unchains Hildy and Walter and leaves.  Walter says that Hildy needs to get to Bruce, but she seems hesitant to do so.  When she learns that he is back in jail, this time for finding hundreds of dollars of counterfeit money on him, she decides to stay for good.  She knows that it had been another set-up by Walter, but she is touched by the effort.

His Girl Friday is as funny as all the rest of Grant’s films.  It is also an interesting one to look at in light of what I discussed in the introduction in terms of its representativeness of cultural changes.  Some of these developments are things that the Catholic Church has been doing for centuries, and some the Church would probably not tolerate.  This works spiritually and temporally.  Much of what is to be said on this subject relates to Hildy.  While I would not call her an “independent woman” in the modern sense of the term, she is undeniably on par with the men with whom she works.  At least to my eye, they do not treat her differently than they would any other reporter.  The popular perception of women at this time is that they all wanted to be housewives.  Interestingly, the film refers to this as being an “actual human being,” as if doing something else with one’s life than motherhood for females was inhuman.  If this were true, then count nuns among those who are apparently not real people by the standards of the day.  Yet, like Hildy (who, interestingly, is referred to as Hildegard at one point, like St. Hildegard von Bingen), nuns are perfectly happy to perform the duties to which God has called them.  Sure, female religious fulfil the role of spiritual mothers, in a personal and Church-wide level.  At the same time, it is a countercultural mode of living that had some within the nascent feminist movement of the 1960s giving at least grudging respect to a group of people they would not otherwise countenance.

While I have mainly discussed how forward looking is His Girl Friday, what puts it firmly in a different era is its innocence.  Unfortunately, that way of looking at the proceedings swings both ways as there is some off-color language used in it that would not be tolerated today.  What I appreciated most was the comedy, and it is funny throughout.  I encourage viewing this one, and get ready for more like it.