His Girl Friday

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

Columbia Classics has done a wonderful job restoring His Girl Friday from the original negative. While it contains the obvious levels of grain and dirt that come with age, the picture is clear and bright. Images are well defined within the 1:33.1 transfer, and it looks far superior to VHS versions of films from this time period. Due to the film's age, the audio is available only in a mono version. However, this transfer contains a surprising level of clarity, which is especially important during the lengthy dialogue scenes. This is a fairly quiet audio track, but it succeeds because the story is composed almost entirely of rapid-paced, journalistic speech. It's refreshing to see a classic film like His Girl Friday receive a nice selection of extra features. The highlight is an impressive audio commentary by Todd McCarthy, film critic and author of Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. He provides plenty of background information on the film, especially concerning Hawks' relationships with the actors. McCarthy is a virtual encyclopedia of knowledge on Howard Hawks, and it's unfortunate that he disappears for several lengthy sequences. Nevertheless, this is an insightful commentary and is helpful for viewers with little knowledge of Hawks and classic cinema. This disc also contains four brief but informative featurettes on Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Hawks, and the origins of the story. It also contains seven different language subtitle selections, including Portuguese, Korean, and Thai. ~ Dan Heaton, All Movie Guide

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 1
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 (Pre-1954 Standard)
• Audio: Dolby Digital
• Screen: Pan and Scan, Black and White
• Subtitle: English, Spanish, Thai, French, Korean
• Features:
  • Digitally mastered audio and video
  • Full-screen presentation
  • Audio: English [mono], Spanish
  • Subtitles: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Thai
  • Audio commentary with film critic and author Todd McCarthy
  • Four exclusive featurettes
  • Vintage advertising
  • Theatrical trailers
  • Talent files
  • Interactive menus
  • Production notes
  • Scene selections

AWARDS

• Library of Congress

•     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1992

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       Cary Grant - Walter Burns
       Rosalind Russell - Hildy Johnson
       Ralph Bellamy - Bruce Baldwin
       Gene Lockhart - Sheriff Hartwell
       Helen Mack - Mollie Malloy
       Porter Hall - Murphy
       Clarence Kolb - Mayor
       Roscoe Karns - McCue

• Director:

  Howard Hawks

• Producer:

  Howard Hawks

• Play Author:

  Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur

• Screenwriter:

  Charles Lederer

• Cinematographer:

  Joseph Walker

• Composer (Music Score):

  Sidney B. Cutner, Morris W. Stoloff

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Morris W. Stoloff

• Editor:

  Gene Havlick

• Art Director:

  Lionel Banks

REVIEW:

• It's doubtful that one could find a movie as fast-paced as Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday, and next-to-impossible to find a film of the period more laced with sexual electricity. Decades after its release, the comedy-thriller adapted from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play The Front Page holds up as a masterpiece of pacing and performance, and even manages a few healthy swipes at some of officialdom's sacred cows. At the time, His Girl Friday was also a piece of groundbreaking cinema for the rules it broke: Hawks' version added an element of sexual tension that was about the only thing missing from the original play and the 1931 film version, in which main characters Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson are men engaged in a symbiotic/exploitative professional relationship. Hawks transmuted Hildy Johnson into the persona of Rosalind Russell, who was entering her prime as an archetype of the ambitious, energetic woman. Coupled with Cary Grant's cheerful nonchalance as the manipulative editor Walter Burns, the material -- which was fairly scintillating on its own terms -- took on a fierce sexual edge that made the resulting film a 92-minute exercise in eroticism masquerading as a comic thriller. Russell may never have had a better role than Hildy Johnson; she became a screen symbol for the intelligent, aggressive female reporter, decades before Candice Bergen's star turn as television's Murphy Brown. Amid all of the jockeying for superiority, and the sparring between Grant and Russell -- which, in many ways, anticipates the jousting between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in Hawks' own The Big Sleep, made four years later -- His Girl Friday found room to enhance some of the issues from the original play, including cynicism about government, the justice system and freedom of the press. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

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