Making Light of the Dark: Understanding the World of His Girl Friday

Abstract

Making Light of the Dark:Understanding the World of His Girl Friday James Walters (bio) The Meaning of Worlds In the final sentence of a study of performance in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Andrew Klevan makes claim for a particular achievement of the film's cast, whereby "they embrace [the plot's] linearity to create other dimensions, seamlessly, so that straightforward narratives become worlds" (102). Although focused closely on the special intricacy of the central performances in Hitchcock's film, Klevan's remark holds further value for the broader study of cinema, referencing the extent to which our horizons for speculation about a film's fictional world can often surpass the somewhat narrower concerns of plot development and, crucially, how such conjecture is profoundly influenced by the complex behavior of people in films. The following discussion expands on these two issues, outlining in precise terms some ways in which the actions and attitudes of characters in Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940) function to construct the tone and nature of the fictional world they inhabit and the extent to which an appreciation of this fundamentally shapes our understanding of Hawks's film. The intricate tenor of His Girl Friday's fictional world motivates its selection. Although undeniably comedic (often described as "screwball"), the film harbors elements that evoke a darker mood more usually associated with the melodramatic, resulting in a blend defined succinctly by Robin Wood as a "disturbing complexity of tone" (70). Although the play between Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) and Walter Burns (Cary Grant) in particular is a source of pleasure and amusement, a more oppressive environment exists around the characters, one that becomes entwined with the somewhat lighter story of their prolonged (re)courtship. This fusion originates, of course, from a series of creative choices that Hawks made in adapting His Girl Friday from the stage play The Front Page by Charles McArthur and Ben Hecht, of which a film had already appeared in 1931, directed by Lewis Milestone. Hawks's famous key decision was to change the gender of reporter Hildy Johnson from male to female (Bogdanovich 57). This transforms the story from one in which a controlling editor schemes to keep hold of his ace male reporter to one in which he wishes to claim back his ex-wife "in other capacities than that of a star reporter" (Wood 66). A central ramification of this alteration is that Hawks's film debates gender politics in a way that Milestone's film never attempts, exploring how a female reporter can exist within the ostensibly male world of newspaper reporting, an interest I return to later in my account of the film. Furthermore, the result of Hawks's decision is a narrative pattern focused far more on the dynamics of the relationship between Walter and Hildy, now male and female, involving a brand of effervescent, sparring dialogue for which Hawks had displayed his particular [End Page 90] comedic genius two years earlier with Bringing Up Baby (1938). In generic terms, this crucial shift blurs the film's status from belonging firmly to a cycle that deals with the ruthlessness and moral ambiguity of the press1 to incorporate traits strongly associated with romantic comedy, or more specifically still, the comedy of remarriage, as Stanley Cavell, in Pursuits of Happiness, has termed films of this kind (a concept discussed more fully in a further section of this article). The integration of these generic elements results in the thematic complexity that forms the basis for critical discussion in this article. Within this structure, the film's organization of space and narrative events results in a compound pattern of the comedic and the melodramatic, so that moments of inventive banter and improvised teasing become inextricably bound to darker instances involving desperate outbursts, near-suicide, and wrongfully ordered execution. Dismissing the uneasy integration of these events as merely symptomatic of screwball-comedy logic unhelpfully averts our attention from the precise nature of the film's narrative composition, providing a convenient but unfulfilling account. A more sustained appreciation of these contrasts, I suggest, is useful in understanding the film's playfulness and its oppressiveness and in explaining...