His Girl Friday (1940), starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, produced and directed by Howard Hawks:
A delightful screwball romantic comedy and a far-reaching political (and politically incorrect) satire on feminism, democracy, and the press—all rolled into one!
His Girl Friday (1940) is the best known version of an American classic (“The Front Page” by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur) that has been remade countless times (as screen adaptations in 1931, 1940, 1949, 1974, and 1988; as radio broadcasts or Broadway plays, regularly from 1928 to the present). The plot centers on a fast-talking newspaper editor named Walter Burns (played by Cary Grant) who is about to lose his ace reporter and ex-wife, Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), newly engaged to another man, genial lunkhead Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy). Grant suggests they cover one more story together, getting themselves entangled in the case of a murderer facing execution for killing a black police officer.
The newspaper reporters are cynical skeptics of democracy; they use sob stories to win tears from the public and goons to cut ahead of corrupt and hypocritical politicians playing for the black vote even at the cost of a man’s life. At the same time, Cary Grant has to use devious tactics of his own to win back his rightly distrustful ex-wife, Rosalind Russell. The film perhaps most famous for feminism in its elevation of Rosalind Russell, who easily puts her male rivals in their place, oddly also vindicates a politically incorrect world run by tough, impious men.
Manuel Lopez
Manuel Lopez has taught political philosophy at Harvard and at the University of Chicago, after receiving his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. His J.D. thesis, as an NSF graduate fellow in political science, was on Alfarabi's analysis of the principles of the religious opinions underlying all societies. He has written on the effects of the democratic bias in justice on American social and legal institutions for several academic and law journals. He is currently working on a dissertation on Plato's view of eros and its ultimate end, and the light that casts on the rise of the new atheism and the theological premises of modern science. He is also an entrepreneur in the futures industry, having served as principal and adviser of trading funds in Boston and Chicago.
