Part of Swoon: A Love Series and Weekend Classics

One of the fastest, funniest and most quotable films ever made, HIS GIRL FRIDAY stars Rosalind Russell as reporter Hildy Johnson, a standout among cinema’s powerful women. Hildy is matched in force only by her conniving but charismatic editor and ex-husband, Walter Burns (played by the peerless Cary Grant) — who dangles the chance for her to scoop her fellow news writers with the story of an impending execution in order to keep her from hopping the train that’s supposed to take her to Albany and a new life as a housewife. When adapting Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s smash hit play The Front Page, director Howard Hawks had the inspired idea of turning star reporter Hildy Johnson into a woman, and the result is an immortal mix of hard-boiled newsroom setting with ebullient remarriage comedy. (Synopsis courtesy of Criterion Collection)

“If you tell me, ‘I’ve seen this on TV,’ I will seal you up in a rolltop desk like Cary Grant’s conniving editor Walter Burns and shoot it full of holes… Hawks and screenwriter Charles Lederer run with the genius idea of transforming the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur warhorse The Front Page into breakneck romantic comedy, with the con-is-on rapport between Burns and star reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell in the play’s male role) wound tight with sexual tension. Here words are bullets and everyone in the room has a machine gun, and by the second hour the rat-a-tat delivery has you laughing at almost every syllable...Take a date to see this, fellas, and if she laughs as hard as you do, get down on bended knee in the lobby and propose.” —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (Jan 24, 2011)