His Girl Friday

“This will bring us back together again. Just the way we used to be.”– Walter Burns, His Girl Friday

Celebrated for its humor, spontaneity, unpredictability, and quick tempo “overlapping” dialogue, His Girl Friday is a noteworthy 1940 American screwball (a subgenre of romantic) comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, starring Hollywood legends, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, with Ralph Bellamy and Gene Lockhart.

Wanting to win back his ex-wife “Hildy” Johnson (Russell), who is also his star reporter, newspaper editor Walter Burns (Grant) tries to convince her to cover one more story together, and he gets them enmeshed in a prominent murder case.

The script for His Girl Friday was written by Charles Lederer and famous writer and director Ben Hecht (uncredited), and is based on Hecht’s prominent 1928 play, The Front Page, that he co-wrote with Charles MacArthur. The film, ranked in the past in the top 100 films by The American Film Institute, features numerous special techniques, including the use of rapid, often witty, overlapping lines to make conversations in the screenplay sound more real-life.

In this beautifully designed book edition of the original film screenplay, the original dialogue from the film is reproduced complete with an accompanying commentary that enables the reader to understand the splendor of this Hollywood classic.

Considered an overall favorite of leading Hollywood critics, and the legendary director Quentin Tarantino, His Girl Friday is also held in popular esteem – enjoying a Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 99% based on 100 reviews, with an average rating of 9 out of 10. 

Charles Davies Lederer was an American screenwriter and film director. He was born into a theatrical family in New York, and after his parents divorced, was raised in California by his aunt, Marion Davies, actress and mistress to newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst.