Tough newspaper editor Walter Burns (played by Cary Grant) tries to break up his top reporter’s plans to leave the paper, get married, and settle down in the country. The reporter, Hildy Johnson (played by Rosalind Russell), finds it hard to resist covering one last big scoop before she retires. Dialogue flies fast and furious as she tries to save a convicted murderer from what seems like a political hanging while keeping Burns at bay, and her fiancé from getting arrested. A witty, and at times moving adaptation of the Broadway play, The Front Page, which Hawks changed by making the star reporter a woman, rather than a man.
BRUCE: He’s not the man for you. I can see that. But I sort of like him. He’s got a lot of charm.
HILDY: Well he comes by it naturally. His father was a snake.
Super Storytelling: Dialogue
This is a great film for dialogue. It’s so fast, you’ll need to watch the movie a couple of times to get all the gags. Hawks made sure characters would talk over each others’ lines and interrupt each other to keep the news room atmosphere crisp and realistic. Hildy and Walter, the two main characters, talk in rapid fire, in that tough news hound style. They are at odds at the beginning of the movie, but because their way of talking is so similar, we already sense they are made for each other, and that these news birds of a feather should end up together. Hildy is engaged to Bruce (played by Ralph Bellamy), but the audience knows it isn’t going to work: Bruce speaks slowly; he doesn’t have the hard, sharp fast wit of the other two.
Take a look at how you can use dialogue in your movies and stories to tell us about the characters, the world they feel most comfortable in, and their relationships to each other.
This film went out of copyright in the US in the 1960s, so it’s pretty easy to find on Amazon, YouTube, and even on its Wikipedia page, but just make sure you’re watching a decent copy. The Criterion Collection has a good-looking restored version.
His Girl Friday is an American screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks, and released by Columbia Pictures in 1940. Filmed in black and white, it runs 92 minutes and is rated G.
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