His Girl Friday

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, in referring to another character during a phone call! Such a nugget points back to a director or screenwriter who knows his or her craft well enough that the finished product has multiple levels without breaking the viewers' suspension of disbelief (i.e., being engrossed in a film's story-world). 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.

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1. Donelson R. Forsyth, Group Dynamics, 5^th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), p. 253.

Conclave

In the film, The Godfather, Part III (1990),  Cardinal Lamberto laments that Christianity, like water surrounding a stone that is in a water fountain, has not seeped into European culture even after centuries of being in Europe.  Watching the movie, Conclave (2024), a person could say the same thing about the Roman Catholic Church, though the ending does provide some hope that internecine fighting and pettiness for power, even aside from the sexual-abuse epidemic by clergy, need not win the day.

Concerning the dead pope, we are told at the beginning of the movie that he never had any doubts about God; what he had lost faith in was the Church. Through the movie, the reason is obvious. At one point, the new Cardinal Benitez from Kabul, Afghanistan aptly characterizes his fellow cardinals as “small petty men” concerned with power. Even thusly characterized, the cardinals elect Cardinal Benitez as pope, and it is only fitting that he chooses the name, Innocent. It is in the innocence of a person who has no ambition to be pope and is genuinely surprised to be elected that the Church has hope.

The outcome of the election is subtly anticipated early on by the notably unique sincerity in the blessing of the food that Cardinal Benitez gives at the beginning of the conclave, and is implicitly guaranteed by the rebuttal that he later makes in front of the other cardinals to Cardinal Tedesco’s claim that the Church is at war with Muslims. After the second bomb, Tedesco declares, “We need a leader who fights these animals,” who are the Muslims in Europe. Cardinal Benitz disagrees: Inside each of us is what we are fighting. This is exactly what Mary Magdalene tells Peter and the other disciples in the upper room after the resurrection in the film, Mary Magdalene (2018); rather than waiting for Jesus to come on clouds to vanquish the evil Roman soldiers, the change starts within, “in the transformation of our own hearts.” Accordingly, the kingdom of God is already here even as it is not yet—pending us vanquishing the enemy within, which is done in part by being compassionate to people who are suffering.

In the conclave, “the men who are dangerous are the men who do want it.”  Cardinal Bellini says he doesn’t want it, but he does. He has progressive views (e.g., more of a role for women in the Curia), which he refuses to hide in his campaign, and this strategy makes him appear to have integrity, but he doesn’t. Even though he is a Christian, and even a cleric, he angerly rebukes Cardinal Lawrence’s claim, “This is a conclave, not a war,” by saying of Cardinal Tedesco and the conservatism which that cardinal represents, “This is a war!” This is the first of two mentions of being at war—Tedesco’s war with Muslims being the second.

Even Cardinal Lawrence, the dean of the College of Cardinals, who laudably seeks the truth concerning Cardinal Tremblay and even Cardinal Benitez, is a partisan. The homily that he gives on the first day of the conclave subtly favors the progressive platform of Cardinal Bellini, whom Lawrence was still supporting to become pope. Cardinal Lawrence lauds the Church’s diversity in being comprised of people in different countries, whereas Cardinal Tedesco wants an Italian pope. “Certainty is great enemy of unity,” Lawrence tells his brothers. “Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. . . . Faith walks hand and hand with doubt. Otherwise, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.” This message is in line with Cardinal Bellini’s liberal platform because the presumption of certainly saturates Cardinal Tedesco’s ideology. As the Cardinals sitting at tables at the first dinner, Cardinal Tedesco observes that the tables are “divided by language.” He suggests to Lawrence that the next pope be Italian so it is not Cardinal Adeyeme, a black African. Cardinal Lawrence is rightly disgusted and leaves the table. Lawrence even prays with Adeyine as he cries, and puts his hand on Adeyine’s hands even though Lawrence knows that Adeyine had impregnated a teenage woman when he was 30.

Furthermore, at some point in his search for the truth concerning whether the dead pope had fired Cardinal Tremblay, Cardinal Lawrence tells a bishop, “No more secrets; no more investigations; let God’s will be done.” That Lawrence himself later investigates by entering the sealed-off papal apartment is justified by what he uncovers not only concerning the dead pope, but also Cardinal Tremblay. Finally, Lawrence is justified in keeping Cardinal Benitez’s medical secret after that Cardinal's election. Even though Benitez’s rather unique medical situation technically violates church law, Lawrence earlier said to Cardinal Bellini, “I thought we were here to serve God, not the Curia.” 

As truth-oriented as Cardinal Lawrence is, faith without love is for naught in Christian terms. In this regard, Cardinal Benitez steals the show; he is the true protagonist in the end. Just as Mary Magdalene’s rebuttal to Peter on the nature of the kingdom of God gives the film, Mary Magdalene, so much theological value for audiences, it is Cardinal Benitez’s rebuttal to Cardinal Tedesco that the Church is at war with Islam that not only gets that cardinal elected, but also provides the theological value, and thus hope, of Conclave. Take on the enemy within—one’s own hatred of Muslims—rather than fight them, Benitez tells his brothers. He could have gone further by preaching to the petty, power-seeking men: feel and exercise kindness and compassion to Muslims; go out of your way to serve them, especially those who dislike you, for something more is involved spiritually than the much easier, "love thy neighbor as thyself." Then you will find that you have conquered the enemy within and entered the kingdom of God.