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His Girl Friday is a 1940 American screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell and featuring Ralph Bellamy and Gene Lockhart. It was released by Columbia Pictures.
Girl Friday may refer to: Girl Friday (idiom), a feminine variation of the phrase "Man Friday". Girl Friday (TV programme), a 1994 BBC television reality show. Girl Friday, a 2009 TV pilot for Channel 4's Comedy Showcase. His Girl Friday, a 1940 motion picture.
- It’S Based on A Play.
- Howard Hughes Produced The First Film Adaptation.
- Hawks Decided to Make Hildy A Woman After A Dinner Party Reading.
- Hawks Wanted to Make A "Fast" Film …
- … So He Wrote Overlapping Dialogue.
- The Screenplay Was 191 Pages Long.
- It’S Full of Inside Jokes.
- Rosalind Russell Hired A Writer to Help Her Ad Lib.
- Ralph Bellamy and Cary Grant Played Similar Roles Inthe Awful Truth.
- Cary Grant Donated His Salary to The War Relief Fund.
Director Howard Hawks adaptedHis Girl Friday from the hit Broadway play The Front Page. First produced in 1928, The Front Page—written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur—was an instant hit on Broadway, with The New York Times proclaiming it “loud, rapid, coarse, and unfailing entertainment” (though they also noted, with some distaste, that its char...
His Girl Friday may be the most famous film adaptation of The Front Page, but it was eccentric aviation magnate Howard Hughes who first brought it to the big screen, in 1931. At the time, Hughes was working as a film producer in Hollywood and had recently directed and produced the costly and controversial Hell’s Angels (1930), a WWI film about comb...
In the original play, Hildy and Walter were both male reporters, but Hawks had a sudden stroke of inspiration while discussing the play at a dinner party. In an interview, he recalled:
Hawks didn’t just want His Girl Friday to be a fast-paced film, he wanted it to be the fastest film. “Everybody said that the original Front Page was the fastest picture that was ever made,” Hawks recalledin an interview. “I said, ‘I’d like to show them that the first picture was not as fast.’”
In order to speed up the pace of His Girl Friday, Hawks employed two primary strategies: He wrote overlapping dialogue, then had his actors speak faster than they did in real life. The idea was to write dialogue the way people really speak, so that characters cut off the beginnings and ends of each other’s sentences. In the film, Hildy and Walter a...
All that overlapping dialogue had a major impact on the length of the screenplay. In most screenplays, one page of dialogue translates to approximately one minute of film. But with all of the overlapping and simultaneous dialogue in His Girl Friday, the film ended up at a fast-paced 92 minutes instead of the lengthy 191 minutes the screenplay seeme...
Though he worked off of a script, Hawks encouraged his actors to improvise throughout the film. Twice, Cary Grant managed to sneak Hollywood inside jokes into his dialogue. In one scene, Walter makes a passing reference to a man named Archie Leach, saying, “Listen, the last man that said that to me was Archie Leach, just a week before he cut his th...
While ad libbing came naturally to Grant, who got his start in the more improvisational world of vaudeville, Russell sometimes struggled to come up with jokes on the spot. Not to be outdone by her co-star, Russell paid a writerfrom her brother’s advertising firm $200 a week to write jokes for her. Though she tried to keep her joke writer a secret, ...
Just three years before His Girl Friday, Grant and Bellamy appeared in the Leo McCarey-directed screwball comedy The Awful Truth, playing nearly identical roles. In His Girl Friday, Grant plays debonair ex-husband Walter, fighting to steal his ex-wife away from her goofy new fiancé, Bruce (Bellamy); similarly, inThe Awful Truth, Grant plays debonai...
Grant didn’t make a penny off of His Girl Friday. Instead, according to biographer Graham McCann, he donated his salary from bothHis Girl Friday andThe Philadelphia Story, which were both released in 1940, as well as part of his salary from 1944's Arsenic and Old Lace,to the War Relief Fund.
Jan 12, 2017 · His Girl Friday remains one of his best films – and one of Hollywood’s best – for how it managed to combine comedy and drama, to make a movie about work and love, about professionalism, a ...
- Contributor
Jun 15, 2019 · At 240 words a minute, Howard Hawks’ comedic romp 'Hist Girl Friday' more than earns its place as the quintessential screwball comedy.
When newspaper editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) learns that his ex-wife and top reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) is quitting to marry Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), he pulls out all of the stops to get her to stay.
Sep 30, 2022 · Girl Friday: Directed by Joel Lamangan. With Angeli Khang, Jela Cuenca, Jay Manalo, Stephanie Raz. A wife resorts to sexual explorations with her husband in order to save their marriage but when her plan backfires she devises an evil scheme.
