His Girl Friday

“His Girl Friday. Classic screwball comedy of course. This in particular I remember watching this when I was really young and this is one of the examples I always cite about representation's important because seeing Rosalind Russell as a reporter, I remember so distinctly watching it and thinking I could be like Hildy Johnson.”

“His Girl Friday. Come on, man. This is like Hawks at his absolute best. Very influential film for me, even though it features old-timey people and stuff. Generally, I’m not a fan of old-timey, but this movie *censored* slaps, as the kids probably don’t even say anymore.”

“I think all of this film, His Girl Friday. Howard Hawks, very important and very—I'm very shy when I'm watching Hawks. I feel like I'm such a failure. Hawks is always giving a lesson of how bad I am somehow. He's magic, yes.”

“His Girl Friday, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Pre-Stanislavskian acting taking over movies, pre-Brando movie. One thing I think about with this movie is the power of having actors who are that good with really kind of stage acting in the sense that they're able to sustain takes for 10 minutes and stay on. And actors with that level of craft but who are still very real inside of that and have to do crazy technical things. It's just magnificent.”

“Oh, this is a good one: His Girl Friday. These movies I play for my kids who are 18 and 22 and they love them. Showing fast dialogue, kind of crazy screwball stuff. An amazingly timeless—that all these generations later they can play. Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, thank you.”

“His Girl Friday. Often these films, it’s best to always see them on a big screen because they don’t go in for close-ups. They just rehearse it, almost like it’s a play. And they stay on the wide. And they just have these characters who... Your eye goes to them, the way it would in the theater. Someone gives a Performance, you just check them out and then you look over here. You sort of do the edit yourself. But they’re so well rehearsed that all the cues are really fast... This is Hollywood a...”

“This is a movie, His Girl Friday, that I had not seen many of these except on TV. These kind of fast-talking comedies... This is based on a play that Ben Hecht was one of the writers for. This is one of those dialogue-driven movies where the dialogue is so good that you forget the filmmaking's actually pretty good too. This is Howard Hawks and he was one of the first American directors to really capture that people often talked at the same time.”