Charles Lederer – His Girl Friday
His Girl Friday is very much the epitome of the 1930’s/1940’s rapid-fire style of screenwriting. Building on the success of films like It Happened One Night and Bringing Up Baby and sitting proudly amongst films like The Big Sleep and The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday is everything a film should be – exciting, meaningful, well-written, performed to a tee and intelligent in spades.
Charles Lederer, having contributed additional dialogue to 1931’s The Front Page, then wrote the whole script for 1940’s reworking, His Girl Friday. In terms of his credentials for qualifying for this list – solid, consistent work, at least one real stand-out – we can look no further than Kiss of Death, I Was A Male War Bride, The Thing From Another World, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Ocean’s 11 and Mutiny on the Bounty. His Girl Friday however stands head and shoulders over those (and pretty much everything else too).
Although it appears to have the trappings of a screwball comedy – newspaper editor tries to keep his ace reporter (who also happens to be his ex-wife) from leaving the paper to remarry – and it certainly has the quick-fire banter for that genre, the fact that the big story that the paper is covering is a case of a (possibly wrongly) convicted murderer due to be executed and the action unfolds over a single day and night really adds to its sense of urgency, gravity and narrative propulsion.
Juicy exchanges like:-
Walter Burns: What were you when you came here five years ago – a little college girl from a school of journalism. I took a doll-faced hick…
Hildy Johnson: Well, you wouldn’t take me if I hadn’t been doll-faced.
Walter Burns: Well, why should I? I thought it would be a novelty to have a face around here a man could look at without shuddering.
feel so far ahead of their time. Thankfully Lederer proved not to be a one-hit wonder and delivered over many years thereafter. But if any script qualifies as the Best of the Best, it’s this one.
