Sunday, September 19, 2010
In the annals of screen comedy, Howard Hawks’ 1940 classic His Girl Friday is that rare example of a remake of a screen adaptation that somehow manages improve upon the source material on which both are based. Hawks’ decision to turn the newspaperman Hildy Johnson into a woman (Rosalind Russell) and also the ex-wife of editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) was pure genius — as was screenwriter Charles Lederer’s mile-a-minute adaptation.1 One imagines Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur kicking themselves — and each other — for not having thought of it in the first place when they wrote The Front Page back in 1929.
As brilliant a foursome as those names comprise, they each deserve as much shame as can be passed around for having perpetrated one of the most sadly gratuitous and shameful instances of racism I’ve ever seen in a popular entertainment — Hecht and MacArthur for having written it in the first place; Hawks and Lederer for seeing fit to include it 11 years later.
I’m not so naïve as to imagine that those 11 years should have made any real difference in terms of the national consciousness. His Girl Friday in fact preceded Rosa Parks and Brown v. Board of Education by a decade and a half; only then might most filmgoers’ sensitivities toward African-Americans have been stirred to the point of discomfiture if not complete moral outrage.
“Colored” was a word tossed around so matter-of-factly in those days that here, tossed around a half-dozen times in 91 minutes, its use seems relatively tame alongside the one brief scene that most grievously pulls the rug out from under the entire picture. Here, the rival newspaper reporter McCue (Roscoe Karns) rushes into the press room of the criminal courts building to phone in a “late-breaking” update to the day’s biggest story (click to enlarge):
The saddest point of all is that the racist content of the joke — a “colored” woman giving birth to a “pickaninny” — is, comedically speaking, completely unnecessary. The punch line — that the rifle squad examined the baby closely to ensure that it wasn’t the fugitive Earl Williams, who was known to be in hiding somewhere — is funny entirely on its own merits. That three certifiably brilliant writers and one of our greatest American filmmakers couldn’t see the comedy intrinsic to that one line is a devastating indictment on both their talent and their character.
In addition, I’m saddened personally, not only because His Girl Friday is one of my favorite comedies but also because it took my fourth or fifth viewing of the film before I caught the scene. If it does not immediately leap out and slap the viewer across the face, one must credit, as it were, the film’s breakneck pacing and overlapping dialogue, for the latter of which Lederer’s screenplay is a pioneering achievement.
Such camouflage is no excuse, however, for the casually gleeful mean-spiritedness of the scene, its direction and its delivery. (A reference to an unseen associate named “Polack Mike” also made it into the adaptation, while the play’s “wop” reference did not.)
If you’ve never seen His Girl Friday, I hope none of what I’ve written here will discourage you from seeing what truly is one of the greatest and funniest screen comedies ever made. For 90 of its 91 minutes, it is also one of the smartest.
UPDATE, 9/30/10: Just for my own peace of mind, I pushed Billy Wilder’s 1974 adaptation of The Front Page, starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, to the front of my Netflix queue. I’m happy to report that Mr. Wilder and his longtime collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond, rewarded my faith with a streamlined, inoffensive version of the gag that illustrates their own sterling character and comedic credentials. As delivered by the terrific character actor Dick O’Neill (called McHugh here, instead of McCue), the gag now unspools as follows:
Bing! Bang! Boom! and out. It’s snappy, it’s economical, it does only what it needs to do to set up the punch line, which is still funny 80 years after it was written, and best of all, it isn’t dripping with ugly racist contempt.During a shootout, Mrs. Phoebe DeWolfe, age 33, watching from a window across the street, gave premature birth to a five-and-a-half-pound baby boy. Sheriff’s deputies immediately examined the infant to make sure that it wasn’t Earl Williams, who they knew was hiding somewhere.
The things writers could learn if they’d just watch a Billy Wilder film once in a while.
Script image courtesy of The Internet Movie Script Database.
1 A quick cinematic lesson for your edification: In filmmaking terms, one page of a screenplay equals roughly one minute of screen time. Therefore, a 90-minute film will ordinarily have a script about 90 pages long, give or take a page or two. In the case of His Girl Friday, however, Charles Lederer’s script clocks in at more than 170 pages, meaning that the picture, with its chaotic collision of subplots and the overlapping dialogue of two, three, even six or more characters at once, moves along twice as fast as virtually any other movie you or I could name.
