Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Charles Lederer
Based on the play: The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur
Starring: Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy, Gene Lockhart, Porter Hall, Ernest Truex, Cliff Edwards, Clarence Kolb, Roscoe Karns, Frank Jenks, Regis Toomey
Country: United States
Running Time: 92 min
Year: 1940
BBFC Certificate: U (disc rated 12 due to extra features)
Bristol-born Cary Grant had made more than 30 films by 1940 when he appeared in one of his all-time classics His Girl Friday, directed by the great Howard Hawks. By this point Grant, who had first appeared in Broadway plays in the 1920s under his birth name Archie Leach, had built up a growing reputation for comedies.
These included Merrily We Go To Hell (1932), Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937), the hilarious Bringing Up Baby (1938) with Katharine Hepburn, and George Cukor’s Holiday (1938), together with appearances alongside the likes of icons Marlene Dietrich and Mae West.
Perhaps the two films that really cemented his status as a comedy leading man were Bringing Up Baby and the subject of this review, the screwball comedy His Girl Friday, which was the second big screen adaptation of the 1928 Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur play The Front Page. The earlier film version, 1931’s The Front Page, is included as a bonus film on Blu-ray for the Criterion release that’s the focus of this review.
For the Howard Hawks version, the gender of one of the lead characters, Hildy Johnson, was changed to a woman, and the dialogue was delivered incredibly fast, with Hawks apparently attempting to break the record for fastest film dialogue set by the earlier adaptation of the source material.
The film follows newspaper reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) who is given a chance to scoop her colleagues with the story of an impending execution. That carrot is dangled by her editor and ex-husband Walter Burns (Cary Grant), who is using it to prevent his former wife from leaving on a train to Albany for a new life as a housewife with her insurance-selling husband-to-be Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy).
What immediately stands out is the pace of the dialogue – it’s incredibly rapid, with dialogue overlapping, characters talking in an incredibly fast-paced way. It almost has a musical rhythm to it.
Then there’s the quality of that dialogue. The script is wonderful with some fantastic and incredibly quotable lines, really good zingers and some outstanding scenes from the outset. The opening that sees the first sparring between Hildy and Walter is an all-time great opening sequence. It’s impeccably acted, perfectly scripted, and brilliantly shot with plenty of movement, with Walter walking from side to side whilst Hildy sits on a table. Opening scenes don’t come much better than this.
Russell and Grant are sublime in the lead roles; simply perfect with excellent dialogue delivery, marvellous physical comedy, and excellent expressions. They bring the characters to life wonderfully and are a fantastic lead duo. They’re supported by an excellent cast, though it’s certainly the Russell and Grant show, the film never better than when they’re sharing the screen.
Russell wasn’t the first choice for the role of Hildy, with Carole Lombard proving too costly and the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert and Ginger Rogers all turning it down. Russell certainly made the role her own and is fabulous.
The many brilliant scenes are edited with a fast pace by Gene Havlick, who worked extensively with director Frank Capra, including on another classic comedy, It Happened One Night (1934). The Capra link continues with cinematographer Joseph Walker, who collaborated with the director on 20 films, including that aforementioned comedy and one of my favourite films of all time, the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).
The story zips along through many hilarious sequences to a perfect finale for a romantic screwball comedy that stays in the memory long after the film has concluded, and the movie leaving me with a big smile on my face again (this was far from my first viewing).
The world feels very lived in thanks to the production, costume design, and some great supporting characters. It’s a pleasure to spend time with Hildy, Walter, the supporting cast and the 1940 world of the newspaper reporters.
In closing, His Girl Friday remains a masterful screwball comedy classic and one of the funniest films of all time. Stars Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are both wonderful, the jokes come thick and fast, there’s plenty of memorable scenes, and the film continues to be an absolute belly-laugh-inducing joy from start to finish.
Film: 
His Girl Friday is released on 4K UHD, with two Blu-ray discs, by the Criterion Collection on 8th December 2025. The film’s 4K debut is absolutely wonderful. The film already looked brilliant on Blu-ray for its previous UK Criterion edition, but the 4K disc’s presentation breathes even more new life into the classic. The black and white cinematography looks ravishing, and there’s plenty of fine detail shining through – blemishes on faces, fine detail on the costumes and much more. It’s a showreel for how to present a classic black and white film in 4K.
Special features:
New 4K digital restoration of His Girl Friday, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film, The Front Page, and the special features
4K digital restoration of The Front Page, made from a recently discovered print of director Lewis Milestone’s preferred version, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
Interview with film scholar David Bordwell
Archival interviews with His Girl Friday director Howard Hawks
Featurettes from 1999 and 2006 about Hawks and actor Rosalind Russell
Radio adaptation of His Girl Friday from 1940
Program about the restoration of The Front Page
Program about playwright and screenwriter Ben Hecht
Radio adaptations of the play The Front Page from 1937 and 1946
Trailers
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: Essays on His Girl Friday and The Front Page by film critics Farran Smith Nehme and Michael Sragow
I was only provided with the 4K disc to review, which makes it difficult to review the whole package for a release, when that disc only contains the film itself. Thankfully I have the previous UK two-disc Blu-ray edition in my personal collection, which seems to be exactly the same as the new release, with the addition of the 4K disc, so I was able to review the rest of the extra features from my personal copy.
The His Girl Friday Blu-ray disc extras kick-off with Hawks on Hawks, which features excerpts of an audio interview between director Howard Hawks and Peter Bogdanovich from 1972, and a 1973 interview Richard Schickel carried out with Hawks. The 10-minute piece doesn’t provide too much illuminating information but is a welcome inclusion.
Lighting up with Hildy Johnson sees film scholar David Bordwell provide an excellent visual analysis of the film, and why he finds it so memorable. Running for 25 minutes, Bordwell focuses on why he’s loved it for decades. It’s one of the highlights of the package.
A featurettes section contains four brief pieces from 1999. First, On Assignment: His Girl Friday is a nine-minute archival piece in which a range of talking heads wax lyrical about why the film is such a classic, touching on what Hawks brought to the adaptation, the wonderful opening scene and more. There’s plenty packed in to the brief running time.
Next, Howard Hawks’ Reporters Notebook is a three-minute piece containing evocative archival footage and looking at the early works of the director. It’s brief but gives an enticing glimpse of some of the other stone-cold classics the director made.
Also running for three-minutes is Funny Faces, which touches on the Broadway play, the first screen adaptation, Hawks’ earlier film 20th Century (1934), and gives a couple of snippets about the filming and release of His Girl Friday.
Concluding the featurettes section is Rosalind Russell: The Inside Scoop, which does a decent job at running through the career of the star, given its brief runtime.
A Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of His Girl Friday from September 1940 is also included. Starring Claudette Colbert as Hildy Johnson and Fred MacMurray as Walter Burns, it’s a good hour-long version of the story.
The first Blu-ray disc concludes with an 80-second teaser trailer and three-minute trailer.
The standout extra opens the second Blu-ray disc: the original film adaptation of the play, 1931’s The Front Page. It’s a good version of the play which gets away with plenty as a pre-code film. His Girl Friday is a much, much better adaptation for me, but the original version is well worth a watch in its own right and it’s a delight that Criterion have again included it as an extra. It looks pretty good thanks to a 2016 restoration.
Also on the disc for The Front Page are a few other extras. First, a 2016 piece called Restoring The Front Page, which runs for 24 minutes and looks at the differences between the restoration carried out by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation and a previous version of the film, which used some camera takes made for overseas releases of the film, so didn’t reflect director Lewis Milestone’s vision for the movie. That vision is restored for the version included on this release.
A piece entitled Ben Hecht sees Hecht expert David Brendel exploring the life of the screenwriter, who drew on his experiences working in newsrooms and living in Al Capone-era Chicago to craft masterful scripts for the likes of Underworld (1927), The Front Page (1931), Scarface (1932) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Cary Grant-starring film Notorious (1946).
Concluding the on-disc extras, are two Lux Radio Theatre radio adaptations of The Front Page. The first is a 59-minute one from 1937 which features Walter Winchell as Hildy Johnson and James Gleason as Walter Burns, and the second, a 32-minute version from 1946, reunites Pat O’Brien and Adolphe Menjoy in the roles they played in the 1931 film. Both are good listens and welcome inclusions.
I wasn’t provided with the leaflet, but hope it’s the same as the one from the Blu-ray; it certainly looks to include the same two essays by film critics Farran Smith Nehme and Michael Sragow. The Blu-ray leaflet was designed like a newspaper, so from an aesthetic point of view it was fantastic and fit the film perfectly. The two essays were also excellent.
In closing, Criterion’s presentation of the Howard Hawks classic His Girl Friday on 4K gives a strong reason to double dip for those who have the previous Criterion Blu-ray edition. The audio-visual presentation on the 4K disc is outstanding, and the set packages that new disc with the previous two-disc Blu-ray edition, meaning all the extras, including the original 1931 adaptation of the film’s source material The Front Page are carried over. Highly recommended for fans of Hawks, Cary Grant and classic Hollywood comedy films.
Disc/Package: