Fun Fact: Other than the beginning and end, His Girl Friday has no musical score due to the rapid pace of the film.

Walter: He looks like that fellow in the movies – Ralph Bellamy!

Walter: You’ve got an old fashioned idea divorce is something that lasts forever, ’til death do us part.’ Why divorce doesn’t mean anything nowadays, Hildy, just a few words mumbled over you by a judge.

Sheriff Hartwell:: Aiding an escaped criminal and a little charge of kidnapping.
The Mayor:: Well, looks like about ten years a piece for you two birds.
Walter: Does it?
Hildy: If you think you’ve got The Morning Post licked it’s time for you to get out of town.
The Mayor:: Whistling in the dark. Well that isn’t going to help you this time. You’re through.
Walter: Listen the last man that said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat.

Hildy: Walter, you’re wonderful, in a loathsome sort of way.

Hildy: Now, get this, you double-crossing chimpanzee: There ain’t gonna be an interview, and there ain’t gonna be a story. And that certified check of yours is leaving here with me in twenty minutes. I wouldn’t cover the burning of Rome for you if they were just lighting it up. If I ever lay my two eyes on you again, I’m gonna walk right up to you and hammer on that monkey skull of yours ’til it rings like a Chinese gong!

Walter: What do you think I am, a crook?
Hildy: Yes.

Walter: There’s been a lamp burning in the window for ya, honey… here.
Hildy: Oh, I jumped out that window a long time ago.

Walter: Look, Hildy, I only acted like any husband that didn’t want to see his home broken up.
Hildy: What home?
Walter: “What home”? Don’t you remember the home I promised you?

Walter: What were you when you came here five years ago – a little college girl from a school of journalism. I took a doll-faced hick…
Hildy: Well, you wouldn’t take me if I hadn’t been doll-faced.
Walter: Well, why should I? I thought it would be a novelty to have a face around here a man could look at without shuddering.

Walter: You’ve got the brain of a pancake. This isn’t just a story you’re covering – it’s a revolution. This is the greatest yarn in journalism since Livingstone discovered Stanley.
Hildy: It’s the other way around.
Walter: Oh, well, don’t get technical at a time like this.

• 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 dialogue. 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 finished their lines before the next lines began.
• Right after Williams is found at 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 Merriam-Webster’s definition, the term was first used in 1940 (the film’s release).
• Howard Hawks originally wanted Carole Lombard to play Hildy Johnson, but because she had just left a studio contract and gone freelance, she proved 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 fiancé 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 original stage production did, 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, directed by 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 fiancé.