His Girl Friday

Saw this today, in a 35mm double-feature with Notorious. Grant city! This was so great though, man what amazing dialogue and timing from both of the leads. One of those things where you just get lost in the repartee because if you actually paused to consider what the characters are doing and trying to accomplish, they all turn out to be kind of, yes, heartless cynical monsters. That's charming when they're just chasing scoops, but it gets really weird when a couple of sympathetic (but vaguely-sketched) supporting characters' lives are at stake and over the course of things it becomes clearer that our heroes treat them as pawns (rather than, as we expect, discovering that they both really have hearts).

None of that was as distracting and disappointing as the two pointless jolts of racism tossed in, one of which figures directly in the core of the plot: the original crime of the white defendant is killing a black police officer, which is a political football because of the importance of the "colored vote" but not because anybody actually sincerely cares whether the guy's legitimately guilty or legitimately insane. The dead man is never mentioned again. I gather that the whole thing is just taken wholesale from the original Broadway Front Page, but while they were making Hildy into a woman they might have also changed this really unfortunate premise. Sigh.

not in 1938 they wouldn't

it is true to the era and the tabloid ethos, as Hecht & MacArthur intended

i believe the language is a lot worse in the play and the '31 film

Yeah, my limited Googling backs up that last point.

Criterion essays on HGF and the '31 Front Page (packaged together in the new release):

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4380-his-girl-friday-the-perfect-remarriage

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4382-the-front-page-stop-the-presses

Sragow on TFP:

Now it’s possible to appreciate this movie’s colloquial punch and showbiz razzmatazz without having to make allowances for dead spots or busted tempos. As a fan of the play, I had always wondered why “Pocahontas” became “Lady Godiva” in a riff about a Peeping Tom, why a male doctor dubbed the Electric Teaser for treating wives with a jolt of electricity became a Swedish masseuse doing the same for husbands, and why New York newsmen were not called “lizzies” but instead said to “use lipstick.” (As it turns out, one bizarre, witless vulgarity—a gentleman of the press giving the middle finger to the mayor—appeared only in the general foreign version.)

What’s most elating about Milestone’s preferred cut is not merely the restitution of more authentic language but the reclamation of more vibrant rhythms and images. Mark Twain said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” The same goes for visual compositions. In this Front Page, the right shots take the place of the almost right shots—and the result is galvanizing. When the lens takes in a two-shot of opposing journalists instead of a wide shot of the entire company, or when a star reporter who’s “going New York” spits out his new address to his colleagues, then writes it on the wall in one unbroken move—instead of delivering his speech in a flat profile—it’s not just great “filmed theater,” it’s also a real live movie.

Billy Gilbert!

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6226-the-funny-man-with-the-pardon-billy-gilbert-in-his-girl-friday

Rewatched las night, Gold (though I do prefer the ending (and last line) of The Front Page.