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His Girl Friday (1940) is Howard Hawks' speedy and hysterically funny, modern-style screwball comedy, and one of the best examples of its kind in film history. The film marked the beginning of a number of screwball comedies in the 1940s that emphasized the conflict for women in deciding between love/marriage and professional careers. But this screwball masterpiece lacked even a single Academy Award nomination. With screenplay writer Charles Lederer (scriptwriter of the original film version The Front Page (1931) produced by Howard Hughes and released by United Artists), Hawks brilliantly transformed Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's newspaper classic, George S. Kaufman-directed 1928 Broadway play The Front Page, with a major script change. One of the main male characters, Hildy Johnson, became female - renamed Hildegard Johnson (played by Rosalind Russell). The major star, Cary Grant, was the leading man from Hawks' two previous films: Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and Bringing Up Baby (1938). The gender swap brought an entirely new angle to the film, making it more than a satirical view and social commentary on the operation of a newsroom under the management of a hard-boiled, smart-alec managing editor (Cary Grant in this version, Adolphe Menjou in the earlier film), and providing an additional feminine-romance angle. This second screen version of the original play was again remade (with the same gender twist, but in a TV news environment) as Switching Channels (1988), with Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner in the lead roles.
Approximate Word count = 901
Approximate Pages = 3.6
(250 words per page double spaced)
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