On Sunday, March 22, 2015 at 8:49:30 AM UTC-10, davidc...@gmail.com wrote:

Just about every venerated American institution takes it on the kisser
in His Girl Friday (1940). Nothing is sacred—politics, marriage, motherhood, sentiment, patriotism, and the values of the Fourth Estate
all get deveined and dunked in butter like shrimp. The prodigious
Howard Hawks directs for breathless laughs; he and his actors (Cary
Grant, Rosalind Russell, Clarence Kolb, Porter Hall, Ernest Truex,
Roscoe Karns, Frank Jenks, and Regis Toomey) generate a mind-blowing
tempo in the dialogue. This fast-talking high point of screen
newspaper comedies raises the American movie vernacular to a Benzedrine-fueled art. His Girl Friday is the Menckenesque city of
salty reporters, toadying careerists, gangsters, politicos, and simpletons—a modern commedia dell'arte with its character types. It
shares with the Renaissance tradition an emphasis on character acting
and an exuberance that reminds one of improvisatory theater. The
reporters work for various dailies and travel in packs, which is weird considering they're all out to scoop the others. These guys have no
patience for pretense or tender emotions, and they cut through the
bull. Grant and Russell—a controlling editor and his
independent-minded reporter—parry and thrust, and their erotic verbal
jabs are a classic American mating. They were the screwball genre's
best pairing since Fredric March and Carole Lombard in Nothing Sacred (1937), another skewering newspaper comedy (accented by Walter
Connolly's conniption fits). His Girl Friday is both knockabout farce
and sharp, modern satire, and speeds along from start to finish on a
track of one-liners, squib, and broadside. Thanks to the overlapping dialogue (a technique used before in movies), jokes whiz by you so
fast that if you stall on any one to replay it mentally, you're liable
to miss the next two or three.

In the 1930s, Hollywood comedies were at their toughest and most
satirical. They were designed to get Depression-era America out of its
funk, and these tart, springy romances, newspaper farces, and
review-style musicals were huge successes. An intermingling group of
1920s newspaper columnists, critics, and playwrights on the East Coast
gave American talkies much of their whiplash energy and smarts. In one
of the great migration stories in the history of popular art, many of
these wags wound up in Hollywood—sunshine and easy money. Their screenplays and stories are filled with smart, sardonic
dialogue—crude, quintessentially American poetry. Ben Hecht and
Charles MacArthur wrote The Front Page (the 1928 Broadway hit from
which His Girl Friday was adapted) and Hecht wrote Nothing Sacred,
Charles Lederer wrote the screenplay for the first movie adaptation of
The Front Page in 1931 as well as the screenplay for His Girl Friday,
Jules Furthman wrote the pre-Code Jean Harlow newspaper comedy
Bombshell (1933) and two or three enormously entertaining Howard Hawks classics (1939's Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not in 1944,
and The Big Sleep in 1946), Herman Mankiewicz co-wrote Citizen Kane
(1941) and adapted the George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber play Dinner
at Eight for the screen in 1933, Nunnally Johnson wrote the riotous
comedy Roxie Hart (1942) starring Ginger Rogers and Adolphe Menjou
(who played the editor in The Front Page in 1931), Robert Benchley
returned to Hollywood during the worst of the Depression to write
features and star in several popular shorts, and Donald Ogden Stewart
wrote The Philadelphia Story (1940).

By the middle of the 1940s, the era of carefree screwball stories
about newsmen, wisecracking society dames, and daffy heiresses was
largely played out, and His Girl Friday was thus not only the greatest
but also one of the last of its kind. American audiences turned their attention to events in Europe, and found there wasn't much left to
laugh at. Movies got propagandistic and returned to serious, "noble" homefront themes, as in Mrs. Miniver (1942), Since You Went Away
(1944), and The White Cliffs of Dover (1944). The war sapped comedic energies and soured the public on its old urge to satirize its sacred
cows.

Isn't it amazing that that movie wasn't nominated for any Oscar?:

https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/1941

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