In Intro to Film courses, Citizen Kane (1941) and His Girl Friday (1940) typically play major roles
in the teaching of film-analysis. Hidden gems include novel camera angles in Citizen
Kane and the use of dialogue and editing to quicken the pace of certain
scenes in His Girl Friday. In the latter film, Cary Grant, who plays the
newspaper editor, Walter Burns, hurriedly mentions Grant’s real name, Archibald
Leach, during a phone call. Such nuggets point back to a director or screenwriter
who know their respective crafts well enough the finished product has multiple
levels. Typically, films have both “task” and “romance” elements, which should
in some way be connected, such by involving a protagonist’s “love-interest” somehow
involves in the protagonist’s task-objective. His Girl Friday is both a
crime drama and a romance film. This distinction is similar to Donelson Forsyth’s
model of leadership in which behaviors of a given leader can be classified as
either performance maintenance or relationship maintenance.[1]
The crime-element of the film includes not only a man who did not mean to shoot
someone due to be executed anyway, but also the mayor and police chief of New
York City being utterly corrupt so as to stay in office by having the criminal
executed even in the knowledge that the governor has cancelled the execution.
The romance-element is perhaps just as harsh even though (and even because) it
is centered on the phenomenon of falling in love.
The expression, all is fair in
love and war, applies to His Girl Friday. That electoral politics are a “constrained”
channeling of the instinct for war is well known. Less well known, perhaps, is
the nature of the phenomenon of falling in love. It may or may not come as a surprise
that the ancient poet, Ovid, classified lovesickness as an illness. In Phaedrus,
Socrates describes love as “madness” (mania), owing to the overwhelming
quality of the intensity that hits once a person has fallen in love with
another person. Although beauty may serve as an initial attractor, falling in
love is really of another person’s personality.
In His Girl Friday, Walter
Burns and Hildy Johnson are already divorced, and she is engaged to Bruce
Baldwin. Burns, the editor of the newspaper where Hildy still works, repeatedly
manipulates both Hildy and Bruce so she will dump the mild-mannered man from
Albany, who lives with his mother, and return to the conniving editor and ex-husband,
Walter. For instance, Walter directs Louie, an employee, to give Bruce counterfeit
money so that Bruce will be arrested (again), and thus kept away from Hildy
long enough for Walter to seduce her to stay at the paper rather than move to
Albany to marry Bruce. Watching Hildy working with Walter on the execution
story, Bruce finally says to her, “You don’t love me; you are just like him.”
She keeps working in indifference to what her fiancé is saying. Even though
Hildy has figured out that Walter has been tricking Bruce, she loves Walter in
spite of his sordid character. In fact, at the end of the film, when she admits
to Walter that she is still in love with him, she even gleefully recounts to him
the time when they had stolen someone in the process of pursuing a story. Furthermore,
she is in love with Walter even though when she is crying, Walter barely even touches
one of her shoulders. Walter even admits that Bruce can give her a better life.
Even though Walter is a lying, manipulative person, Hildy is still in love with
him, and ends up remarrying him. She is utterly indifferent to Bruce even
though she agreed to marry him. Bruce comes to realize both Hildy’s indifference
to him and that she is just like Walter. Left unsaid, however, is whether, as I
suspect, Bruce has realized that Hildy is still in love with Walter. Bruce makes
a wise decision nonetheless not to compete with Walter; competing for a woman
who is in love with another man is bound to result in humiliating failure. Even
though Walter seems to be incapable of physical and even emotional intimacy, the
fact that Hildy is in love with him is enough for her to be fine with Bruce
returning to Albany so she can remarry Walter. Such is the depth of falling in
love with another person that prospective suitors are wise to walk away rather
than fight the gravitational pull that exists when a person falls in love with
another person.
In The Godfather, Part III (1990), Kate admits to Michael Corleone, the head of the Corleone crime family, that she still loves him even after decades since their divorce and even though he is at bottom a murderous thug. She says to him, “I guess, if it’s any consolation, Michael . . . I want you to know that I’ve always loved you, and I always will.” She admits to this even though she knows that he is and has been a ruthless murderer as the head of, and then head of, a crime syndicate. Falling in love with someone transcends ethics—whether the beloved is ethical or unethical—and thus can be considered to be deeper, or more fundamental, to human nature than is the ethical dimension. Kay is too smart to remarry Michael. Similarly, Bruce wisely leaves Hildy to Walter because she is still in love with the latter, even though Bruce is arguably a better person. In fact, Bruce realizes where Hildy's heart is directed before she does. In fact, the quickness with which Hildy realizes this about herself in the last scene of the film may be unrealistic and thus trite. So too is the saying that good people can fall for bad people.
His Girl Friday is arguably about the extraordinary depth that
falling in love reaches in the human psyche and heart. Even so, Plato’s dictum
that reason should have the upper hand over emotions, or passions, is powerful
too, and a person who has fallen in love with a manipulative, self-centered
liar can draw on inner fortitude in spite of being in love to walk away so as
to obviate years of suffering in being betrayed. Although Hildy has divorced
Walter, she agrees to remarry him, perhaps because she is just like him,
ultimately in being just as comfortable as he is in distancing emotional and
physical intimacy. That falling in love
can exist even in such a condition goes to show just how deep, or fundamental, the
phenomenon is.
1. Donelson R. Forsyth, Group Dynamics, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), p. 253.
