The News Game As It Was, Or Never Was?

 

His Girl Friday, But Not Necessarily Mine

Above is a title that opens His Girl Friday. For me, it washes up the picture before it starts. What do they mean, “The Dark Ages”? Ten years before? More recently than that? Looks like the lead for a newspaper story, in this case a chicken-hearted one. Bet someone put pressure on Columbia to add this. Means of “Getting That Story” had evidently changed, reporting now a responsible pursuit, unlike days best put behind us. Oh yeah? “Incidentally You Will See In This Picture No Resemblance To The Men and Women Of The Press Of Today,” such conduct unthinkable to kid-glove practitioners of journalism in 1940. I am as result distanced from His Girl Friday going in, more appreciative of 1931’s The Front Page, which had no such caveat, all the better as lately restored to what US audiences saw first-run. When did the press become hall monitors as to how they were depicted? Certainly not two years earlier when Too Hot To Handle came out. Or 1937 and Nothing Sacred. “Well, Once Upon A Time” completes the surrender, a too-cute distancing of His Girl Friday from any sort of contemporary reality. Why not set it in the late twenties or early thirties, when “Getting That Story” Justified Anything "Short of Murder"? 1940 had a Code alright, often enforced by interests powerful enough to make movies dance to their tune. Lots like today, if not operated on the Grand scale we cope with.

The Front Page is dark and a little gamey. People in it are not attractive. His Girl Friday announces itself, past that toadying text, as a gay lark with movie-starry sorts you want to be just like. Tobacco auctioners talk slower, this basis for one gag, a device to flatter those with as-quick minds, while others less invested feel for slower-witted Ralph Bellamy. I suspect many who adore His Girl Friday picture themselves on Cary Grant-Rosalind Russell terms. No harm there … I grew up wanting to be Basil Rathbone. HGF is treasured especially by past press people (nowadays they’re all PPP’s) looking back to when they were brash, seen-it-all, cynical in a fuzzy, do-the-right-thing-at-the-end sort of way. I bet real reporters identified much closer with Pat O’ Brien and Menjou in the 1931 version, more so the scruffy lot supporting them. Evidence suggests frontline newsmen liked a mirror that was Kirk Douglas in Ace In The Hole, a character closest to precode since precode. Cary Grant can treat people shabbily and we still want to be him, or be with him, that less because his editor is a model than simple fact he is Cary Grant. Grant is as high-octane in His Girl Friday as I ever saw him, a performance to confirm once and for all his extraordinary skill. A long middle section loses him, and he’s missed, His Girl Friday in that respect a Hound of the Baskervilles of comedy.

Clearly the 20’s roared too loudly for sensibilities in 1940. For instance, hangings as mode of execution. The Front Page dotes upon the scaffold, texture of rope a concern lest it fail to properly snap a man’s neck. His Girl Friday does not linger there. A last public hanging had taken place in Kentucky, 1937, no more done legally in the US until 1976. The Front Page has black humor in abundance, and there is a shooting onscreen when jailed Earl Williams makes his escape. The play had been strong meat on Broadway and no less was expected of the film. Critics in the 30’s extolled The Front Page for bare-knuckle storytelling. I have not seen evidence of its being reissued. Doubt The Front Page would have gotten a PCA Seal had there been a submission. Loss of access kept it warm in the bosom of reviewers. Otis Ferguson used a mixed review of His Girl Friday to recall happier experience of the original, “When they made The Front Page the first time, it stayed made.” William K. Everson located a worn 16mm print from Germany, run for his class at the New School in 1974, him assuring the group it was “almost certainly the only print that will be available from this point on.” Everson placed The Front Page among best of early talkies, due in large part to Lewis Milestone’s energetic direction. "There is no question the original is by far the better film," said Everson, "its characters real flesh and blood people as opposed to the cardboard figures of the remake." His Girl Friday was "undeniably funnier," however.

I never laugh at His Girl Friday, maybe for being suspicious of comedies that so loudly announce themselves as comedy. Humor works best for me where it is incidental to “serious” matters, even if those are not to be taken seriously. There needs to be some sort of threat, which His Girl Friday does not have. Overhanging suspense is a reason why Some Like It Hot works so splendidly, even if proposed as fall-down funny. Hawks’ own The Thing has more laughs in spite of, actually because of, scares nibbling round its edge. His Girl Friday barely wonders if “Earl Williams” will hang, then if he will be caught once he escapes. I am not concerned either way, having no investment whatever in Earl. This was true also with The Front Page, but in that case, Earl was just a prop and no one was expected to care a hoot about him. His Girl Friday wants to humanize Earl and appeal to my conscience with him. There is a killjoy moment where “Hildy” (R. Russell) dresses down what she sneeringly calls “Gentlemen” of the press for their impoliteness toward Earl’s girlfriend (or girl friend as Helen Mack’s “Mollie Malloy” characterizes herself). They bow meekly and are silent where I wish they’d throw spent cigars and paper cups at Hildy. Where does she come off judging these guys, reading a riot act to colleagues trying to do their job same as her? Smartly tailored though she is, Russell has no s.a.. Trouble I realize is my wanting them all to be Linda Darnell, so do pardon superficial personal taste. Still though, I must like His Girl Friday OK for taking minor issues so serious.

The Front Page and His Girl Friday had entered the Public Domain by the 70’s, were duped (badly) onto 16mm and later home video. His Girl Friday was “taught” by film instructors along auteur lines. I wonder if it occurred to students that the film was supposed to be enjoyed as comedy. His Girl Friday benefited at the time for director and stars still around to recall it, plus Hawks in loop mode on how he dreamed up the gender switch, another idea sprung off many fathers. What distances us from old films since 70’s summit is participants going, going, then gone altogether, like realizing one day there is no one left from World War Two, a point at which we’ve more-less arrived. Ironic to have had vet stars in many cases hale/hearty, at least ambulatory, while past work looked for a most part miserable (especially Girl Friday dupes). Now creators from the era are departed, while their films fairly gleam. Something oddly backwards about that. Much discussion has revolved around ad-libbing by Friday cast, lines contributed by crew, “side” scribes hired to speed pace further. Credited writer Charles Lederer died in 1976, poor health for several years prior to that, interviewed once by Peter Bogdanovich, but I have not come across a published transcript. Authors of the source play Ben Hecht (d. 1964) and Charles MacArthur (1956) did not, to my knowledge, discuss His Girl Friday in hindsight. Morrie Ryskind's autobiography, published in 1994, reminisced in brief on HGF. Point is these contributors had little if any opportunity to answer modern wisdom as to how the film came to be what it is.

I wonder how His Girl Friday would stand with a fresh audience, ideally in their twenties, and not instructed on how to respond by an academic/historian fanbase. Unlikely to happen, for who’d gather to watch His Girl Friday, or any black-and-white feature, outside venerable age groups? (for that matter, who's going to "gather," period) Young folks have their own definition of classic movies, and I bet few of selections date before 1990, a year that seems all too recent for me, but hold on, that’s over thirty years ago. Ones of us in the 70’s, fewer but still some in the 80’s, knew B/W from kid days before households had a color tube (many, of course, never did). Attitudes since are calcified in opposition to a format utterly alien. It is one thing to tolerate novelty of a commercial or music video done monochrome, but a full-length movie is asking too much. Film history has amounted to a series of dividing lines. Silent to sound, theatres to television, black-and-white to color. Gilbert Seldes reviewed a 1950 reprint of The Film Till Now, by Paul Rotha and Richard Griffith, for Films In Review (July-August 1950). Seldes had written books addressing the industry, gave vent to feelings of his own with regard gulfs between those born since the late 20’s who knew only talking pictures, and elders who were there before parade’s went by. Seldes' epiphany of seventy-years ago is worth revisiting:

… I took some young people to see Chaplin in “City Lights” (the 1950 reissue). Then I had a moment of illumination. I understood that we who lived through the era of the silent film had something the present generation lacks. I remember my resentment against people who told me in 1917 that if you hadn’t seen Paris before the war, you didn’t know what life is, or words to that effect. I hope no one will resent my saying that if you didn’t know the silent movie, the excitement of watching it create itself before your eyes, you missed something, and, in a sense, you don’t know what the movies are. We who went through it know something special; we are, cinematically speaking, a race apart. Was Gilbert Seldes right, not only in 1950, but today? Do none of us really know what the movies are for not having been around before sound? (I worry less about Paris, never having gone there anyway). To ignore or disdain black-and-white movies would be to renounce movies altogether so far as I’m concerned, but generations since would dispute that, and it isn’t going to be long until there is no one of our lot to hold the fort. Will black-and-white become as obscure and barely seen as silents are today? Consider what would happen if someone turned off the lights at TCM tomorrow. What we love would not be long becoming so much Sanskrit.

Greenbriar visits Billy Wilder's 1974 The Front Page at Greenbriar Archive HERE.