Programme notes CH 04 — The Matinee
His Girl Friday
An editor has one afternoon to un-divorce his best reporter.
Hawks took The Front Page, made the reporter a woman and the ex-wife of her editor, and turned American speech into a percussion instrument — dialogue overlapped and compressed until 92 minutes contain roughly 190 minutes of talk. It is the fastest film ever made about the fact that some people are only alive at full speed, and that the story — there is a hanging at dawn — will happily eat every scruple in the room. The remarriage comedy at terminal velocity.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Howard Hawks
- Photographed by
- Joseph Walker
- With
- Cary Grant · Abner Biberman · Billy Gilbert · Rosalind Russell · Gene Morgan · Regis Toomey
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Two newsrooms a year apart, both running on a story that is not quite true. Hawks plays the manufactured scoop for speed and lets nobody pay for it; Capra follows his until it fills a ballpark in the rain, and then sends the bill.
The same play twice in nine years: Milestone’s Hildy is a man trying to get married, Hawks’s is a woman trying to stay divorced. The escaped prisoner, the roll-top desk and Walter Burns’s conscience survive the trip unchanged.