girl Friday

Of all the classics of the Golden Age of Hollywood, the most overrated is His Girl Friday (1940) — and I say this as a great lover of Howard Hawks’s movies. This is his big clunker. It’s frenetic, regularly unfunny, and completely lacking in the vivid and memorable supporting-actor parts that are so important in the true classics. (And in other Hawks films.)

The only way you could possibly rescue the movie is by seeing it as a very different kind of story than its self-presentation would indicate. So here goes.

To understand what’s really going on in it, you have to compare its opening and closing scenes. In the opening scene Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson is striding happily and confidently into the offices of a newspaper. In the final scene she is stumbling tearfully and confusedly and (above all) obediently out of a press room in the wake of the domineering Walter Burns. She is a woman destroyed.

And she has been destroyed by a monster. Not one moment in the movie gives us any reason to believe that Walter loves Hildy. We only know that he values her journalistic skills and abilities as a writer. Indeed, it seems obvious that while Walter ends by announcing that they will remarry — note: he is not asking her to re-marry him — he only does this to keep her under his thumb: marriage is the best means for him to control her and deploy her talents in ways that serve his ambition. Throughout the movie he shows no signs of caring about anything except his power to make or break political careers. Hildy is the primary instrument through which he can wield this power; that is why she must be wholly within his control and obedient to his dictates. He is a kind of vampire who feeds on her blood, without killing her. He needs her to be alive but weak.

That is to say: the only way you can redeem His Girl Friday – telling title! – as a movie is to see it as a tragedy, as Hildy’s tragedy. Given the social situation of women at this time and in this place, she has to choose between being a wife and mother in Albany or a journalist in New York – but the second option, while it gives her scope for her intellectual gifts, means being subservient to a man’s control far more completely than marriage to the boring Bruce would entail.

His Girl Friday is thus less like Bringing Up Baby or The Lady Eve than it is like Hedda Gabler. It’s impossible to forsee any future for Hildy other than working herself to the nub to make Walter happy with her. She won’t have any children because she and Walter don’t have sex — indeed, they have probably never had sex: Walter is a man whose sexual instincts are thoroughly and completely re-channeled into his libido dominandi. Do they look romantically intimate at any moment in the movie? They do not. If there’s any chemistry between the two of them, it’s not sexual, it’s power-based.

And if Burns is like anyone else in classic Hollywood cinema, it’s the Charles Boyer character in Gaslight, except that he doesn’t want Hildy’s money, he wants her energy and ability. And when that’s gone he will cast her aside.

Walter Burns is the nastiest character that Cary Grant ever played, not excluding the murderous husband in Suspicion (and of course he’s murderous there, don’t be silly). And there are few movies, if any, in that era that strike me as being as darkly depressing. The snappy tone of the film cleverly disguises the real arc of its story. Walter Burns is a vampire and Hildy Johnson his victim. She’s like Earl Williams, the convicted but possibly innocent murderer she interviews: both of them are trapped. The difference is that Earl knows it.