His Girl Friday
![Watch film His Girl Friday — His Girl Friday (1940) Original Trailer [HD]](https://www.acmodasi.in/amdb/images/posters/0/30/his-girl-friday-1940-Gc3RD.webp)
Short description
Walter Burns runs a newspaper and will do almost anything to keep his star reporter from walking away. The problem is that the reporter, Hildy Johnson, is also his ex-wife, and she has decided to quit the paper, marry an insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin and settle into a quieter life. Walter, who still carries a torch for her and cannot bear to lose his best writer, keeps inventing reasons to hold up her departure. He dangles one last assignment in front of her: covering the final hours of a condemned man, Earl Williams, along with the sheriff handling the case. Hildy's instinct for a story pulls against her plans for a peaceful future, and Walter works every angle to keep her in the newsroom.
Howard Hawks directed and produced this 1940 Columbia Pictures release, the fifth of the nineteen films he directed in chronological order, arriving between Only Angels Come True and Sergeant York. The screenplay is by Charles Lederer and Ben Hecht. Cary Grant plays Walter opposite Rosalind Russell as Hildy, with Ralph Bellamy as Bruce, Gene Lockhart as Sheriff Hartwell, Porter Hall as Murphy and Ernest Truex as Bensinger among a credited cast of thirty-six. The film runs ninety-two minutes and blends comedy, crime, drama and romance.
On IMDb it holds a 7.8 rating from roughly sixty-eight thousand votes, and on TMDB a 7.4 from close to a thousand. A critics' rating of 9.3 from 107 reviews places it well above the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- To record sound (and specifically, rapid exchanges of dialogue), Hawks decided to use not one microphone held to the actors on a boom, but multiple microphones. Since the microphones were not switched on simultaneously, a dedicated sound engineer would turn them on in sequence. Up to 35 microphones were used simultaneously in one scene.
- This is Quentin Tarantino's favorite film comedy.
- Filming wrapped up several days later than planned. The delay was caused by the difficulty of shooting dialogue scenes where lines were spoken very quickly and had to be delivered at a specific moment to coincide with the visuals. Four days were spent filming the restaurant scene where Hildy and Bruce are invited. Initially, only two days were allocated for filming this scene.
- Rosalind Russell (1907-1976) disliked that her character had fewer quality lines than the character played by Cary Grant (1904-1986), so with the help of her brother she enlisted the services of an advertising slogan and copywriter, who slightly altered the lines written for her character. This went unnoticed by Hawks, who allowed his actors to improvise, as well as by the crew and other actors, with the exception of Grant.
- There was a lot of improvisation during filming, which seriously complicated the work of cinematographer Joseph Walker (1892-1985). It was especially difficult to film Rosalind Russell in a way that she looked perfect on screen, as Walker didn't know in advance exactly where she would be in any given scene. The actress had a prominent lower jaw, which required lighting during filming. In the end, Walker solved this problem by asking Russell's makeup artist to shade the actress's jawline, so that she could be filmed without any further issues.
- It is estimated that lines in a typical film are spoken at an average rate of 90 words per minute. In Howard Hawks' (1896-1977) screwball comedies, the average rate reaches 240 words per minute.
- A loose adaptation of the play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.
- One of the first films – the very first being Gregory La Cava's (1892-1952) 'Stage Door' (1937) – in which characters speak over each other, before the other character has finished their line, was done to make everything look and sound more realistic. Previously, characters always let their scene partners finish speaking before starting their own line.
- At the end of the film, Walter mentions a man named Archie Leach, which is Cary Grant's real name.
- The scene in which Walter and Hildy hide the criminal in the newsroom was based on a real-life case where an editor of The New York Evening Graphic hid a fugitive criminal in the newsroom, interviewed him, wrote an article about it, waited for sales of that issue of the newspaper to begin, and only then handed the criminal over to the police.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
