His Girl Friday is a 1940 screwball comedy, a remake of the 1931 film The Front Page, itself an adaptation by Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur of their play of the same name. The “twist” to His Girl Friday is that the one of the lead roles was converted from a man to a woman.
The film stars Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell and features Ralph Bellamy. It was directed by Howard Hawks and is noted for the rapid-fire pace of its dialogue. The film was #19 on American Film Institute’s “100 Years, 100 Laughs”, and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Today the film is in the public domain, which hasn’t prevented Columbia from issuing official video releases of the film.
Plot: Walter Burns, editor of a major Chicago newspaper, is about to lose his ace reporter and former wife, Hildy Johnson, to insurance salesman Bruce Baldwin, but not without a fight! The crafty editor uses every trick in his fedora to get Hildy to write one last big story, about murderer Earl Williams and the inept Sheriff Hartwell. The comedy snowballs as William’s friend, Molly Malloy, the crooked Mayor, and Bruce’s mother all get tied up in Walter’s web.
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