His Girl Friday (4K UHD Review)
Director
Howard HawksRelease Date(s)
1940 (December 2, 2025)Studio(s)
Columbia Pictures (The Criterion Collection – Spine #849)- Film/Program Grade: A+
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: B
- Extras Grade: B+
- Overall Grade: A
Review
While it’s easy to criticize the Hollywood of today for releasing a seemingly endless stream of sequels and remakes, it’s just as easy to forget that there’s nothing new under the sun. Remakes are as old as the cinema itself, and they even predate the feature film era. The first 1896 Georges Méliès short Une partie de cartes was actually a remake/rip-off of the Lumière brothers short Partie d’écarté (perhaps it was his revenge for the fact that they refused to sell their camera equipment to him). Filmmakers have been recycling ideas ever since then, and Hollywood has never been an exception to the rule. Yet there’s an art to remaking other works that’s akin to recording a cover version of a song. Some of the best covers completely re-invent the original, and even supplant it in the popular consciousness. When Aretha Franklin recorded her own version of Otis Redding’s Respect, she made it decisively her own—even Redding had to grudgingly admit that she ended up taking the song away from him. The best cinematic remakes have done something similar, becoming so indelible that the originals end up being overshadowed. Such is the case with the Howard Hawks version of The Front Page, which he immortalized as His Girl Friday.
The Front Page began life as a successful 1928 Broadway play written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. It takes place in the press room of a prison where newspaper reporters are biding their time until Earl Williams is executed for the murder of a policeman. Ex-reporter Hildy Johnson stops by to say goodbye to rest of the boys before he runs off to get married. When Williams escapes, Hildy finds himself unwillingly drawn back into the business, especially since his conniving former editor Walter Burns is willing to do anything to keep him on staff, including sabotaging his upcoming marriage. Eventually, Hildy discovers that he was really married to the news business all along.
The Front Page was first brought to the screen in 1931 by Lewis Milestone, who offered a relatively straightforward adaptation. When Howard Hawks brought his idea for a remake to Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures, Cohn wasn’t particularly thrilled, but Hawks had an ace up his sleeve: the twist of having Hildy Johnson played by a woman. Hawks saw The Front Page as a love story anyway, and since he wasn’t any more comfortable with homoeroticism than the Breen Office would have been, swapping genders for one of the characters seemed perfectly natural to him. Cohn still had his doubts, but Hawks wasn’t wrong. Cohn had suggested Cary Grant to play Hildy Johnson, but Hawks thought that Grant would be better as Walter Burns. Casting Johnson was a little more tricky, but once the sparkling Rosalind Russell took the part, everything clicked. Add in Ralph Bellamy as Hildy’s hapless fiancé Bruce Baldwin, John Qualen as the equally hapless Williams, Helen Mack as Williams’ girlfriend Molly Malloy, Abner Biberman as Burns’ henchman Louis, and Billy Gilbert as the Deus ex machina who inadvertently saves the day, and everything else fell into place as well.
Almost everything else, anyway. While the gender swap is one of the most celebrated changes in His Girl Friday, Hawks wasn’t quite done yet. The Front Page was noted for its rapid-fire dialogue, but it still wasn’t rapid enough for Hawks. He took things to the next level by letting the dialogue overlap, but he kept the important details comprehensible by employing a trick that he explained to Joseph McBride in Hawks on Hawks: “All you need is a little extra work on the dialogue. You put a few words in front of somebody’s speech and a few words at the end, and they can overlap it. It gives you a sense of speed that actually doesn’t exist. And then you make people talk a little faster.”
As a result of changes like these, when Hawks remade The Front Page, he ended up taking it away from Lewis Milestone, and arguably from Ben Hecht as well. That’s especially ironic considering that Hecht ended up helping Hawks with the screenplay in an uncredited capacity, in exchange for Hawks helping him with a different project. The screenplay for His Girl Friday is credited to Charles Lederer, who had also contributed some additional dialogue to The Front Page. Lederer would go on to work with Hawks on several more films, so they were clearly simpatico, but there’s no doubt that both Hecht and Hawks had their fingers in the final shooting script as well. The biggest contribution that Hawks made (aside from the legendary gender swap) was the result of something that was near and dear to his heart: the concept of professionalism.
Hildy Johnson is supposed to be one of the best reporters in the business, but the reasons why are never made clear in either the play or in the 1931 film. Hawks added the crucial scene where Hildy interviews Earl Williams, showing how skillfully she manipulates him to generate the pull quote that she needs for an effective story. More importantly, Hawks used professionalism to define the relationships between the three main characters in the romantic triangle. To put it bluntly, Bruce Baldwin never stood a chance with Hildy because she’s out of his professional league. He may be somewhat professional in terms of his skills as an insurance salesperson (although that’s a debatable point), but Hildy and Walter’s professionalism are in perfect sync with each other because it’s the same kind of professionalism, working toward the same goal.
Hawks delineated their respective relationships by using one of his favorite visual techniques: the cigarette gag. Smoking always defines the relationships in a Howard Hawks film. When Hildy first returns to the newspaper offices, Walter ends up tossing her a cigarette and makes her light it herself, confident in the fact that while their own marriage may have fallen apart, she’s still a part of his life that he can take for granted. Once he finds out that she’s leaving for good in order to marry Bruce Baldwin, he panics and invites both of them out to lunch. At the table, he assumes his old comfortable familiarity with her. When she lights her cigarette first this time, he takes her hand with the match in order to light his own. Bruce, meanwhile, says that he doesn’t smoke. With that admission, his fate is sealed, and the ending of the film becomes a fait accompli. The scene demonstrates that Bruce was never a part of her world, and so he can never really be a part of her life.
That’s because while Hildy may long for the traditional role of wife and homemaker, that longing is weak tea compared to her magnetic attraction toward a good story. She’s a professional, after all. His Girl Friday may end up being a love story between Hildy and Walter, but the love that they share is more in terms of mutual interests than it is out of any real deep affection for each other. The savage joy that Walter exhibits while manipulating Hildy and Bruce is just an extension of his love for manipulating the truth in order to get a good story, and while Hildy is initially irritated by his machinations, she ultimately recognizes that it’s just an outgrowth of the professionalism that they both share. They’re both yellow journalists who deserve each other, and frankly, the sweet-natured but ineffectual Bruce deserves something better.
That’s one reason why the gender swap proves so interesting in His Girl Friday. Changing Hildy into a woman may retain the heteronormative view of relationships that was acceptable to Hawks and the censors of the day, but it doesn’t completely eliminate the homoerotic elements from the original story. Strong female characters are often defined in terms of masculine characteristics (see anything directed by James Cameron), but while Hildy does retain her essential femininity throughout the film, it’s Walter’s perception of her supposedly masculine skillset that attracts him to her. He never treated her like a woman in the first place (he wouldn’t even hold a door open for her), because in his mind, she’s a newspaperman, and that’s why he loves her. The role of Hildy could have been played by a male actor after all, and it wouldn’t have made any real difference to the story. Mind you, Hawks would have rejected that interpretation (when McBride asked him about critics pointing out the homoerotic subtext in his films, Hawks responded that “It’s a goddamned silly statement to make.”) Yet the subtext is still there, even in an ostensibly heterosexual relationship like the one between Hildy and Walter.
That subtext also helps to explain the ending, which has been criticized for having Hildy Johnson return to a seemingly subservient role for Walter Burns. On a superficial level, that looks a bit regressive for a character who had previously been such a force of nature of her own. Yet it’s not her feminine side that’s being submissive, but rather her masculine one. She’s also not submitting to him at all, but instead to her own drive as a reporter perpetually in search of a good story. Her feminine side is still there, as are her dreams of a conventional married life, but it’s the newspaperman in her that’s once again become locked to the whims of Walter. She’s just acknowledging the reality of who she is and of who he is as well. The thing that holds them together isn’t heterosexual norms, but rather a deeper bond that transcends gender. The reality of His Girl Friday is that Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns really do deserve each other, on every possible level. The ending of the film was predestined from the moment that she walked back into his newspaper office.
Cinematographer Joseph Walker shot His Girl Friday on 35mm film using spherical lenses, framed at 1.37:1 for its theatrical release. His Girl Friday was the subject of a photochemical restoration back in 1991, working from the original nitrate negative and a nitrate print. The 35mm fine-grain masters that were produced from that were used as the source for all subsequent SD and HD home video releases. This 4K digital restoration, which first appeared on Sony’s Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection: Volume 4, was based on new 4K scans of the original camera negative. Scanning and restoration work were done by Cineric, Inc. in New York, which included generating new digital frames to replace a few that were missing from all available film elements. Additional digital restoration work and grading were performed at Motion Picture Imaging in Burbank, including High Dynamic Range grades in both Dolby Vision and HDR10.
The results are as impeccable as you would expect given everyone who was involved. While there’s only so much detail available on the original negative, there’s still a slight uptick in perceivable resolution compared to Blu-ray. There’s more clarity to the weave in Cary Grant’s suit, as well as in some of the other textures. That also means that the text of the articles in the background newspaper seen during the opening credits is actually readable this time—the articles themselves, not just the headlines. The focus falls off toward the edges of the screen, but it’s clear enough in the center. The focal plane of the lenses that Walker used for the main shoot was equally shallow, so there’s quite a bit of unavoidable softness in parts of the frame, but the primary plane of focus is always crisp and clear. (This isn’t quite the deep-focus cinematography that Jean Renoir and Orson Welles favored.) Everything looks immaculately clean, and the regenerated frames are imperceptible in motion. The grayscale is flawless, as are the contrast, black levels, and shadow detail—there’s also a slight uptick of fine detail in the darkest portions of the frame thanks to the improvements in contrast. His Girl Friday looks simply gorgeous in 4K, which isn’t surprising considering that everything was done under the aegis of the inimitable Grover Crisp.
Criterion has encoded His Girl Friday onto a BD-100 instead of the BD-66 used by Sony, although with a 92-minute windowboxed film and no extras, there wasn’t necessarily much need for it. Yet Criterion’s bitrate does run slightly higher on average than Sony’s. The grain is slightly sharper in this version, which is probably more noticeable in screencaps than it is in motion. Still, the differences are there, especially when viewed from closer than normal viewing distances. That does raise an interesting question, however: does that automatically mean that Criterion’s version is better? The reality is that applying some light filtering to a film like this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because no one ever saw grain that sharp on a theatrical print. It’s not really how films were intended to be seen. But however much that we say that we want 4K presentations to respect how films originally looked, that’s not what we really want; we want them to look better than they originally did, with razor-sharp grain that no theatrical print ever possessed. From that perspective, Criterion’s version does have a slight edge over Sony’s, but either way, the differences are relatively minor.
Audio is offered in English 2.0 mono LPCM, with optional English SDH subtitles. The source was the original optical tracks on the nitrate negative, with audio restoration work completed at Deluxe Audio Services in Hollywood. Any clicks or pops have been eliminated, and noise or hiss has been reduced to barely audible levels. Distortion from the original elements is minimal, and the dialogue is always clear and comprehensible—if you can keep up with it, that is. (Though it’s worth noting once again that Hawks was careful not to allow overlapping dialogue to overwhelm the most important lines.)
The Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD release of His Girl Friday is a three-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film and a second Blu-ray with The Front Page and additional extras. The insert features artwork by Randy Glass, and there’s also an 8-page foldout booklet, designed to look like a copy of The Morning Post, with essays by Farran Smith Nehme and Michael Sragow. There are no extras on the UHD, but the following extras are included on the Blu-rays:
DISC TWO: HIS GIRL FRIDAY (BD)
- Hawks on Hawks (HD – 10:27)
- Lighting Up with Hildy Johnson (HD – 25:04)
- Featurettes:
- On Assignment: His Girl Friday (Upscaled SD – 8:47)
- Howard Hawks: Reporter’s Notebook (Upscaled SD – 3:23)
- Funny Pages (Upscaled SD – 3:28)
- Rosalind Russell: The Inside Scoop (Upscaled SD – 3:13)
- Lux Radio Theatre (HD – 59:30)
- Teaser (HD – 1:22)
- Trailer (HD – 2:50)
Despite the title, Hawks on Hawks has nothing to do with McBride’s book. Instead, it’s a collection of interviews that were conducted by Peter Bogdanovich in 1972 (audio only) and Richard Schickel in 1973. It covers some of the same material that McBride did, like the changes that Hawks made from the play and the Milestone film, as well as how he worked out the overlapping dialogue in his version. The interview segments are interspersed with clips from the film, including a helpful side-by-side comparison of the relative speed of the dialogue in each of the films.
Lighting Up with Hildy Johnson is an appreciation of His Girl Friday by the late film scholar David Bordwell, although he points out up front that it’s not going to be an orthodox appreciation. Orthodox or not, it’s still carefully organized, divided into the following chapters: How to Be a Hawksian, Now You’re Talking, Becoming Classical Classic, The Big Switcheroo, Reverse Engineering a Classic, Cutting: Visible and Invisible, and Figures in a Frame. In barely 25 minutes, Lighting Up with Hildy Johnson manages to provide both an overview and an analysis of His Girl Friday, examining it from within and without. Bordwell passed away in early 2024, so watching this interview today is especially poignant. His contributions to film scholarship were immeasurable.
Criterion has included a set of featurettes that date back to the various DVD releases of His Girl Friday. Out of all of them, On Assignment: His Girl Friday is the only one that offers much of interest, featuring interviews with author/critics David Thompson and Molly Haskell. On the other hand, Howard Hawks: Reporter’s Notebook, Funny Pages, and Rosalind Russell: The Inside Scoop are all pretty basic puff pieces that aren’t really worth the time, however brief that they may be.
There’s also a Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of His Girl Friday that originally aired on September 30, 1940, eight months after the film was released. Claudette Colbert played Hildy Johnson, Fred MacMurray played Walter Burns, and Jack Carson played Bruce Baldwin. With all due respects to a fine group of actors, they can’t hold a candle to Russell, Grant, and Bellamy (although Carson sometimes sounds like he’s doing an impression of Bellamy).
DISC THREE: THE FRONT PAGE (BD)
- The Front Page (HD – 101:08)
- Restoring The Front Page (HD – 24:01)
- Ben Hecht (HD – 25:43)
- Radio Theatre:
- 1937 (HD – 58:45)
- 1946 (HD – 31:42)
This 4K digital restoration of The Front Page is also offered with English 1.0 LPCM audio, but the source was quite different since the camera negative no longer exists. Instead, it’s based on 4K scans of a print that had been held in the Howard Hughes collection. Scanning and restoration work was done in 2016 under the aegis of The Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation, with funding for it provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation (which still does honor film preservation, even its namesake tends to forget about that in regards to his own work). The source does show its limitations, with the expected generational loss of fine detail and washed-out contrast (don’t look for shadow detail here, because there isn’t any). While the cleanup work was generally effective, there’s still some light scratches and speckling visible at times. Given that it was a 4K remastering, some people may be disappointed that Criterion didn’t upgrade The Front Page to 4K as well, but there’s really no need for it. It looks as good as it ever will on Blu-ray.
Restoring The Front Page features interviews with Hart Wegner, Francisco Menendez, and Heather Addison from the film department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, as well as Michael Pogorzelski and Heather Linville from the Film Archive at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. They step through the restoration process, starting with discovering a print in the Howard Hughes archive—and the real discovery that it was significantly different than the print held by the Library of Congress. From there, they address scanning and restoration work, including the fascinating process of piecing the audio back together, and they also break down some of the key differences between all of the different versions (there was actually three, not just two). While The Front Page is interesting as a more direct adaptation of the original play, Restoring The Front Page is arguably even more interesting than the film itself, and it’s essential viewing for anyone interested in film preservation.
Ben Hecht is a biography of the iconic screenwriter, hosted by “Hecht expert” David Brendel. Brendel explains how Hecht’s views of journalism in The Front Page were shaped by his own experiences as a journalist. Hecht really wanted to be a novelist, but the success of The Front Page ended up shaping his own career as much as he shaped it.
Finally, Criterion has also included two different radio adaptions of The Front Page. The 1937 Lux Radio Theatre version features Walter Winchell as Hildy and James Gleason as Walter, while the 1946 House of Squib version offers Pat O’Brien and Adolphe Menjou reprising their roles from the film. Yet the 1937 version ends being far more interesting due to an unintentional historical footnote: during the introduction, the announcer mentions that they had originally planned to have Amelia Earhart on the show that day, but since she hadn’t yet completed her flight around the globe, they hoped to have her on next week instead. Sadly, that didn’t work out the way that anyone expected, including Earhart herself...
There are a handful of extras from Sony’s Columbia Classics version that aren’t included here. They offered the commentary track with Todd McCarthy that was originally recorded for the 2000 DVD, as well as two new featurettes: Screwball Style: The Iconic Costumes of Robert Kalloch, and Breaking the Speed Barrier: The Dialogue of His Girl Friday. They also offered a brief collection of Vintage Advertising. Of course, that version has only been available as a part of the Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection: Volume 4 boxed set, so Criterion has the edge as a standalone release. Considering that Criterion also includes Hawks on Hawks and The Front Page with all of its own extras, none of which were offered by Sony, then Criterion has the edge in terms of extras as well. (And, a very slight edge in terms of the encode.) Is it worth the upgrade if you already own the Columbia Classics set? That’s for you to judge for yourself, but if you missed out on that one, or only own Criterion’s previous Blu-ray version, then don’t miss out on this new 4K upgrade.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).