His Girl Friday

After a weekend of watching a lot of heavier, more thought-provoking or artful movies, I was looking for something simple. Something light-hearted. Something breezy and fun. A screwball rom-com with Cary Grant sounded exactly like the medicine I needed. 30's and 40's screwball rom-coms are fun, and Cary Grant is the coolest human being alive. What could go wrong? When the rom-com turns out to have very little rom or com, and Grant is made to be an awful human being, that's what could go wrong. About thirty minutes in, my wife, who loves rom-coms and can make excuses for most any movie, turns to me and says "I really don't want her to end up with him", and I said that I was sure there'd be some redemptive arc for Grant's character. He had to learn his lesson. Nope. He's the same lying, scheming, selfish, manipulative jerk in the first frame as he is the last. He's charismatic, sure, but that's not the character, that's Cary Grant. Charisma is not an inherently positive trait. Ask anyone in Germany circa the 1930's, or any former Manson Family members, charisma can be dangerous when the person is bad. I'm not saying Walter Burns is that bad, but I am saying that his natural charisma is not a function of the character. Burns is a rotten human being that schemes to break up his ex-wife's impending marriage, almost gets her arrested, gets her fiance arrested three times, and when he wins her back in the end, shows absolutely no hint that whatsoever that he's changed. He convinces Hildy (played with plenty of sass and steel by Rosalind Russell) to blow up the life she wanted, the life she was happy to move on to, for a second bite at a rotten apple. It's not charming, it's depressing, and all the madcap antics they get into along the way can't change that fact. It's disheartening. And then there's the movie's infamous dialogue. The average word count of regular American speech is 140 words per minute; His Girl Friday breezes past that with an average of 240 wpm, much of it overlapping. From all accounts, director Howard Hawks wanted to do this as some sort of challenge. For some, this is a signature positive, giving the movie a speed that feels as wacky and frenetic as its story. For me, it was exhausting. It felt less like a cute quirk or a fun gimmick and more like a distraction or a crutch. I watched this movie shortly before going to bed for the night, and I felt like I needed a nap first. But if the obnoxious male lead doesn't annoy you, and you can somehow weather the fatiguing dialogue, the tonal whiplash will snap your spine like a Mortal Kombat fatality. I'm told by sources that this is supposed to be a comedy, but His Girl Friday seems to be out to challenge that notion at every turn. Walter's attempts to woo his ex-wife back center on getting Hildy to write a column at the last minute for his newspaper, a column that might help sway the governor to pardon a man about to be executed for a crime he didn't commit. And then there's a jailbreak, where a prison psychiatrist is shot in the process. And then there's corruption by the mayor and the sheriff to bribe a process server with a job to bury a last-minute reprieve. Walter has Hildy's fiance arrested three separate times on trumped-up charged: theft, carrying counterfeit money, and some kind of low-grade sexual assault or harassment of a woman. Hildy is held hostage at one point, and then she and Walter conspire to hide the escaped convict until the morning so they can "capture" him for the benefit of the paper. And we get to see rehearsal after rehearsal of the gallows' functionality. HOW IS THIS A COMEDY?!? I enjoy some dark humor, but not when I'm expecting something light and whimsical. His Girl Friday wants to be zany and wacky and screwball because of its pacing and how the events occur, but hiding a condemned fugitive in a rollaway desk and obstructing a manhunt for a better (and fabricated) headline does not comedy make. A mayor and a police chief railroading an innocent man into the hangman's noose to curry favor in an upcoming election is not funny. I know this has a place in history, even spawning a turn of phrase due to its (misleading) title. I know my review is not going to change the legacy of an 86 year old movie. But I'm not sorry to be on the opposite side of the masses here. I just don't see what everybody else sees, and I don't see HOW everybody else sees what they do. All the charm and frantic pacing (and choppy editing, woof) can't save the movie from being mean-spirited, cruel, and leaving the audience with the feeling that they just watched a woman self-destruct all so she can revisit misery she's already familiar with. If I want to see that, I'll watch a daytime talk show.