GOING TO THE MOVIES
JUNE 26, 2011. His Girl Friday (Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell) generates a breakneck conversational effervescence that’s unmatched in film-comedy.
Ros Russell is steel, glass, and tight-satin immortality. But she’s also in love with Cary, hopelessly, beyond her control.
Howard Hawks delivers a film of merciless happiness; the rocket you’re in is outfitted with chairs whose comfort is custom-made for the far edges of your worldly intelligence.
And if you wanted real religion, the film would be playing in your chapel every day as the central object of contemplation.
In acting schools, teachers say, “Reveal! Don’t indicate!” His GirlFriday contains not a single word or gesture that indicates.
The first time I saw it, on television, I lost track of my living room, and whether it was day or night.
It was as if curtains had parted on an astral island where the law of gravity was banished, and the inhabitants walked on the earth merely because they loved to.
Without a particle of compromise, His Girl lets you know life can be lived in this spirit—feet in the soil, head in the sky, as Dostoevsky said.
Cary Grant plays a con man you would let into your home to take away every possession you have—and you’d be ecstatic about paying the price to have him there for a little while. He’s Hermes, the trickster god, in a suit and tie, rolling along.
During the film, a few characters are dented, but by the end there are no victims. Everyone finds his level.
Jane Roberts, author of the Seth books, wrote about an experience in which she saw a town’s Main Street spread out before her so lucidly that it rose to the level of being an archetype of itself.
His Girl does a similar trick. The first time you see it, you find it hard to believe you haven’t seen it before. You know some part of yourself has been waiting for and anticipating it. And there it is. Ordinary reality transformed without ever having to leave the street.
Cary Grant carries so much magnetic force around with him—but as in no other film, he meets his female match. Russell keeps up with him, line by line, and when she gives ground, it’s only because the plot needs that small movement. Dissatisfied with the way her character was written, she brought in her own writer to lift her to Grant’s level. It worked. That, plus bits of stirring improvisation, of which Hawks happily approved, made the Grant-Russell duo unique wizardry.
You want magic? This is it.
For the past few months, I’ve been writing articles that point out the nonsense of assuming magic is always and only an ancient subject. Magic has to be explored as something that can be invented now. Well, His Girl Friday, made in 1940, is as modern as it gets.
JON RAPPOPORT