His Girl Friday (1940)
Directed by Howard Hawks
Walter Burns is an irresistibly conniving newspaper publisher desperate to woo back his paper’s star reporter, who also happens to be his estranged wife. She’s threatening to quit and settle down with a new beau, but, as Walter knows, she has a weakness: she can’t resist a juicy scoop.
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What critics compared His Girl Friday to
It's made by people so dumb they really think that references to The Lady Eve and His Girl Friday will augment their project for its imaginary "discriminating" audience (let me break this to you gently: no one who respects film is voluntarily viewing The Holiday) while simultaneously mystifying the "broader" audience with a depth of movie knowledge.
In summary: putting Eli Wallach in your movie as an aging Hollywood legend is cute, but including an actual scene from His Girl Friday is a reminder that we could be watching that movie instead.
He's introduced her to classic movies and heroines such as Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday.
The true story of the Boston Globe’s investigation into child abuse in the Catholic Church is a winningly old-fashioned newsroom depiction in the vein of All the President’s Men or His Girl Friday.
"Spotlight" is a great newspaper movie of the old-school model, calling up not only obvious comparisons with " All the President's Men " and " Zodiac ," two movies with similar devotion to the sometimes crushingly boring gumshoe part of reportage, but also Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell shouting into adjacent phones in "His Girl Friday."
From “The Front Page” and “His Girl Friday” to “All the President’s Men” and “The Paper,” America has been in love with newspaper movies.
Many truly great movies — "Citizen Kane," Howard Hawks' "His Girl Friday," David Fincher's "Zodiac" — involve newspapers.
Fourth-estate-centric films tend to focus on the glamorous or dangerous world events their protagonists are covering ( The Parallax View , The Year of Living Dangerously , All the President’s Men with its Deep Throat intrigue), or satirize the sensationalism of a corrupt media ( Ace in the Hole , Network ), or throw in a workplace romance just to glory in zingy reporters’ banter ( His Girl Friday , Broadcast News ).
…a las screwball comedies (Ayuno de amor / His Girl Friday)…
Penelope Cruz, fantastically miscast as a kind of neo-His Girl Friday…
There are serious threats of sexual violence, along with playful song-and-dance numbers, a detective and a His Girl Friday.
…acts like “His Girl Friday’s” Rosalind Russell…
The best romantic movies aren't these dreamy tales of lovers destined for happiness; they're the movies--Gone With the Wind, His Girl Friday and Adam's Rib come to mind--that dramatize exactly why two characters are perfectly matched.
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He spends his days mooning over old movies on the TV ( Casablanca , Wings of Desire , His Girl Friday ) as Ellie helps pay the bills by ghost-writing essays for half the senior class.
Wu finds ways to spin it positively, though, including a scene where Ellie goes to a classmate’s party and is greeted with the legitimately welcoming yell of “The Chinese girl came!” There’s no sense of artificiality here even as Wu peppers Ellie’s daily life with atypical pop culture references including movies (from Wings of Desire to His Girl Friday ), music (from artists like Gordon Lightfoot and Chicago), and even philosophers (from Camus to Plato).
He’s also, it seems, still numb with grief—his wife, Ellie’s mother, is dead, and he spends his days watching movies like Casablanca and His Girl Friday as a way of improving his English, though it’s clear they simply give him solace.
Philosophical by nature and culturally literate (it quotes Plato and Oscar Wilde and features films like His Girl Friday and Casablanca ), The Half of It pitches itself at youthful, and not so youthful, romantics who know or suspect that love doesn't come easy, and can handle a half-happy ending.
Understated scenes where they watch classic movies like His Girl Friday and Casablanca together are most moving.
No sooner has the 1858 story itself started than we find Dr. King Schultz agreeing to a price for Django by crying, “Sold American!” — a gag probably lifted from Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940) and derived from the 1930s Lucky Strike (American Tobacco Co.) tobacco auctioneer ads that ended with “Sold American.”
Except for Mudbound, no recent movie has voiceovers so lengthy and impressive as literature, and critic Manohla Dargis estimates that the script equals the 240-words-per-minute record set by His Girl Friday in 1940.
His Girl Friday, one of the great comedies of the 1940s, is remembered less for what it says, than how it says it.
Chastain and Elba bat dialogue back and forth like they were Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday.”
At his best he seems like the natural heir to the crackling screwball sensibility that powered 1940s classics such as His Girl Friday and The Lady Eve .
Instead of the shadowy film-noir thrillers that inspired Pakula, Spielberg reaches further back into cinema history by imitating pre-World War II newspaper comedies like His Girl Friday, Libeled Lady, and Nothing Sacred, with their bright tone, deadline-driven pace, rapid-fire dialogue, and editors and reporters who are always quick with a wised-up joke.
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That is, the most famous voice talent that money, and the cachet of Dreamworks animation honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg, can buy, e.g., Will Ferrell as the title not-quite villain, Brad Pitt as his fatuous comic-bookish hero opposite number Metro Man, Tina Fey as a kind of post-modern, " His Girl Friday "-inflected Lois Lane type, Jonah Hill as her schluby, not-very-nice-inside cameraman who is unwittingly given superpowers, with ill result, and David Cross as Megamind's hench-thing -- one of the movie's most inspired creations, as it happens: a super-smart fish in a water-filled dome screwed atop an ape body, an homage of sorts to the anti-classic sci-fi cheesefest " Robot Monster ."
…modern liberated spin on the feisty writers of classic films like HIS GIRL FRIDAY…