His Girl Friday

One of the cinema's fastest and funniest works, Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday, adapted from the Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur stage play The Front Page, is inspired screwball comedy, featuring bravura performances from Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Grant is sarcastic, scheming newspaper editor Walter Burns; Russell is Hildy Johnson, his wisecracking ex-wife and former ace reporter. She’s determined to settle down in suburbia with staid insurance salesmen Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy); the conniving Burns is just as determined to win her back. The pacing is furious, the breakneck overlapping dialogue justifiably famous. Rounded out by a magnificent supporting cast, this is comic perfection. "A spastic explosion...Word gags take the place of the sight gags of silent comedy, as this race of brittle, cynical, childish people rush around on corrupt errands...[It has] some of the best farce lines ever written in this country, and Grant hits those lines with a smack" (Pauline Kael, The New Yorker) "Perhaps the funniest, certainly the fastest talkie comedy ever made...Quite simply a masterpiece" (Geoff Andrew, Time Out). B&W, 35mm. 92 mins.

His Girl Friday also screens at 9:20pm on Wednesday, September 9 and at 7:30pm on Thursday, September 10. Regular admission prices and membership requirements in effect for Sept 9 & 10 screenings.