When Howard Hawks adapted The Front Page into His Girl Friday in 1940, he retained most of the original film’s plot and even some of its dialogue. Both films center on a newsroom covering a politicized murder case. However, Hawks made two key changes: softening the film’s more overt political messages and changing a major character from male to female.
Most likely due to the stricter enforcement of the Hays Code, His Girl Friday tiptoes around the Red Scare whereas The Front Page openly satirizes it. In The Front Page, directed by Lewis Milestone in the pre-Code Hollywood of 1931, the mayor of Chicago blatantly exploits a soon-to-be-hanged suspect for votes by labeling him as a Communist. Conversely, the mayor in His Girl Friday berates one of his cronies for attempting to pull a similar move on his behalf. The Front Page exposes the Red Scare as a political tool used to manipulate the public rather than a genuine threat, which passed censors in 1931 but would almost certainly not have made it to the big screen a decade later.
However, in terms of gender politics, His Girl Friday is far more progressive. In The Front Page, the only significant female character is the protagonist Hildy’s fiancée, Peggy. The film portrays her as a nagging girlfriend who gets in the way of Hildy’s career, signaling the end of his free-wheeling bachelorhood and the beginning of monotonous married life. The newspaper room is an entirely male world, saturated with rampant misogyny that the film neither supports nor challenges. His Girl Friday, however, places a woman at the center of the story. Rosalind Russell’s gender-flipped Hildy is a talented journalist who struggles between her vocational ambitions and her desire for a stable home life. She is universally loved and respected by her colleagues, and Cary Grant’s Walter even describes her as the best writer the paper has. She stands out amid a room of humorously incompetent male journalists, and Walter sees her skill as an attractive quality rather than a threat to his masculinity. Furthermore, Hildy is a divorcée at a time when divorced people (especially divorced women) were often viewed as inherently immoral. It’s noteworthy that the film refrains from judging her marital status — a low bar, to be sure, but one that I wouldn’t expect a film from 1940 to clear.
Another notable difference between the two films is the use of rapid and overlapping dialogue in His Girl Friday. The film’s quick pace and Grant and Russell’s superb comedic timing deliver plenty of laughs. While much of the dialogue between the two films remains unchanged, the advances in sound design and the actors’ snappy delivery in His Girl Friday render it far more understandable and entertaining. For example, in a hilarious early scene, Walter mistakes an elderly man for Hildy’s fiancé, ignoring his protests to the contrary and the real fiancé’s attempts to introduce himself. When Walter realizes his mistake, he immediately dismisses the old man and chides him for “intruding” on his personal affairs. Grant’s alternating rapid-fire lines to both men and Russell’s exasperated bemusement as she looks on sell the scene.
