Movies from the Heart—His Girl Friday

There’s a special genre of the romantic film called the “screwball” comedy. I’ve talked about a couple of classic screwball comedies before—Holiday and Bringing Up Baby—they were both funny. I mean SERIOUSLY funny. But hey, they’re comedies, they’re supposed to be funny, right? Sure, but they both had absolutely outrageous moments of humor when you’d erupt into side-splitting laughter. But the humor in His Girl Friday [1940] by Charles Lederer, is way more slapstick.

Take look at the trailer for the film.

Not all coming attractions show the true nature of a film—they’re often full of sales pitches for the actors or the director [never for the writer, of course!] and hope to lure audiences into the theatre by saying, “Hey, you liked this actor's or director’s last film—wait til you see this one!” But take a good look at this trailer—can you keep up with the pace? And the pace of the trailer is very indicative of the pace of the film. I remember when I first saw the film I felt like it was too much, TOO fast—it took me awhile to get used to the pace. But, eventually, on the second viewing, I got it.

Because think about the story here. It’s about a fast-paced newsroom in the late 30s/early 40s. And hey, if you were actually a fly on the wall in a real newsroom back then, would you have heard people talking like this? Probably not. But that’s the thing about slapstick—it’s over the top, it’s not Reality 101.

Another example of slapstick—albeit that comes from television—was the late-80s show Moonlighting created by Glen Gordon Caron. This was the story of two unlikely people who are thrown together and can’t stand each other… until they can very much stand each other. I remember Caron saying in an interview that the scripts for the show—and normally, a 60-minute show would have a 60 or so page script—were much longer, often close to 100 pages. Why? Because the dialogue was sooooo fast-paced that it took the actors way less time on screen to say the lines!

And that’s so true of His Girl Friday. It tells the story of the head of a newspaper, Walt, and his reporter ex-wife, Hildy, as she prepares to leave the biz and marry rich guy Bruce. Walt dangles a story in front of Hildy that’s just too good to pass up, thus drawing her back into the newsroom where he thinks he’ll have a chance to keep her there. Obviously, he still has feelings for her.

This film is a great example of quick, snappy dialogue, sure, but most of all it’s an example of taking characters from where they think they want to go to where they need to go to be true to themselves. It’s tricky to pull off, but if it’s your forte, give it a try!

Next week, another newsroom film set in the modern day—Broadcast News.

Copyright © Diane Lake

01Dec24

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