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His Girl Friday

HFA members admitted free
Screening on Film
Directed by Howard Hawks.
With Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy.
US, 1940, 35mm, black & white, 92 min.
Print source: UCLA

Ace reporter Hildy Johnson wants to forsake journalism for a quiet, married life in Albany with an insurance salesman, but she can’t resist covering one last blockbuster story for her editor (and ex-husband) Walter Burns, who’s determined to win her back—professionally and romantically. Amid the ever-present clacking of typewriters and ringing of telephones, Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant give virtuoso performances of the film’s rapid-fire dialogue, delivering more lines in one film than most actors do in an entire career. The greatest of the classic Hollywood “comedies of remarriage,” His Girl Friday is also a film about how a woman’s place can be the newsroom.

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Alain Kassanda,
2026 McMillan-Stewart Fellow