His Girl Friday (1940)

Based on the play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

It is estimated that the normal rate of verbal dialogue in most films is around 90 words per minute. In His Girl Friday (1940), the delivery has been clocked at 240 words a minute.

While shooting, Rosalind Russell didn’t think she had as many good lines as Cary Grant had, so she hired an advertisement writer through her brother-in-law and had him write more clever lines for the dialog. Since Howard Hawks allowed for spontaneity and ad-libbing, he and many of the cast and crew didn’t notice it, but Grant knew she was up to something, leading him to greet her every morning: “What have you got today?”

One of the first films (preceded by Stage Door (1987)) to have characters talk over the lines of other characters for a more realistic sound. Before this, movie characters completed their lines before the following lines were started.

Right after Williams is found in the desk, the Mayor tells Walter that he’s “Whistling in the dark. Well, that isn’t going to help you this time. You’re through.” Walter says, “Listen, the last man that said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat.” Archie Leach was Cary Grant’s birth name.

According to Ralph Bellamy, Cary Grant ad-libbed the line, “There’s a guy in a taxi down at the court building who looks just like that movie star. What’s his name? Ralph Bellamy!”

Ginger Rogers wrote that she was offered the role of Hildy Johnson. She read the script, but this was before Cary Grant was cast, and she turned it down. After learning that Grant was cast, she regretted it.

In addition to casting Hildy as a female reporter and editor, the City Room of the Morning Post had a half dozen other women sitting at reporter’s desks. As a 1940 film, this was an extraordinary number for what was then an overwhelmingly male profession.

A “girl Friday” is an assistant who carries out a variety of chores. The name alludes to “Friday”, Robinson Crusoe’s native male dogsbody in Daniel Defoe’s novel. According to the Merriam-Webster’s definition, the term was first used in 1940 (the film’s release).

Howard Hawks originally wanted Carole Lombard to play the part of Hildy Johnson but as she had just left a studio contract and gone freelance, she proved to be too expensive.

The film plays a prominent role in the Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics (1994) segment “The Theatre” in which a woman named Melissa Sanders (Amy Irving) attends a screening of His Girl Friday (1940) at a cinema and sees scenes from her life on the screen.

Charles Lederer wrote three drafts of the screenplay. Major changes from the first draft to the shooting script included making Hildy less submissive and transforming her fiance from a bully into a comic patsy. The earlier drafts also opened with a divorce court scene indicating Walter and Hildy had been married and divorced three times. All three drafts ended differently. In the first, Burns fakes an accident, which prompts Hildy to declare her love. The second ends as the stage original had, with Burns letting Hildy leave, then having her arrested. Only the shooting script ends with his letting her go with his blessing, which convinces her to stay. Not filmed, however, was that version’s wedding scene.

Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, Margaret Sullavan, and Claudette Colbert were all considered for the role of Hildy.

Director Billy Wilder remade the film as The Front Page (1974) with Jack Lemmon (as Hildy) and Walter Matthau (as Walter).

Another remake was attempted in 1988 with Switching Channels by director Ted Kotcheff. The movie starred Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner in the lead roles, working in a tv newsroom instead of a newspaper. Christopher Reeve also starred as Turner’s fiance.