A Movie a Day, Day 89: His Girl Friday

I hate to be asked what my favorite movie is (how can you pick just one when there are so many great films, which you love for so many different reasons?), but I was asked in an interview a few years ago, so I had to come up with an answer. The one I eventually came up with—His Girl Friday—is still what I'd say if anyone asked. Other movies (not a lot, but some) may be as wonderful as Howard Hawks's brilliant adaptation of The Front Page, but I don't think any others mean quite as much to me personally. So I watched it again this morning, as I have every couple of years since I first saw it in a revival theater in Austin.

That was in the late '70s, a few months after I'd dropped out of college. I was free to a fault then, alienated and untethered, with a pretty good idea of what I was running from but no clue what I was going toward. I hadn't yet found my tribe. Then I walked into His Girl Friday and there it was, a word-drunk world where the only thing worse than hypocrisy and corruption was lacking a sense of humor, where chivalry was nothing but paternalism in a top hat, where you knew Hildy should ditch her dull fiancé for her ex-husband, Walter, because of the sheer joy with which Hildy and Walter duked it out, toe to toe and newspaperman to newspaperman, in a battle of wits they both wound up winning. (Well, that and the fact that Walter is played by Cary Grant, the greatest romantic comedy star the movies have ever produced.) It hit me like a ray of hope for my future beaming straight out of the past—not that there was anything the least bit dated about it, aside from the black-and-white film stock and the references to things like Stalin and "the European war." Read the rest on The House Next Door, Slant Magazine's blog.