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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the new books network. Hi, I'm Mike.
- [00:18]
B
And I'm Dan.
- [00:19]
A
Welcome back to 15 Minute Film Fanatics. You know how the podcast runs by now. This week we got something very special. It's one of those movies we've been saving for a while because we're not actually sure that you can record a podcast episode on it. Dan, what is it?
- [00:31]
B
We're doing his girl Friday, 1940, obviously. Howard Hawks, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, based upon the front page, the play, and then the movie by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and then rewritten by Charles Lederer to suit this idea that Howard Hawks had to say, wouldn't it be funny if Hildy were a woman?
- [00:48]
A
The best idea ever.
- [00:50]
B
Because apparently he had a secretary read those lines out loud. And that's how he got the idea.
- [00:55]
A
That's. I didn't know that you got to go first because I don't even know how we're going to approach this movie. This movie is. It's perfect in every way, and I don't know how we can. How we can even contain it.
- [01:06]
B
Mike and I have done over 300 movies so far, and we keep putting off certain movies, and this is one of them. And the reason we keep putting it off. You think we would do this one early on, but we keep putting it off because it's. It's. It's. Describing what's great about this movie is like trying to describe why somebody is beautiful. It's really, really hard to do.
- [01:23]
A
It's like why you can't do surgery.
- [01:24]
B
On your mom, I guess. So anyway, let's talk about. Let's. Let's talk about what's great about this movie. Well, first of all, watching it again, it's like the sheer speed of the whole thing, right? So I read. I read somewhere that the estimated number of words per minute in a movie is something like 90. And this one has the record. It got clocked at 240 words a minute.
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A
I'm not surprised at all.
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B
And that it was deliberately done that way. Like Hawks wanted people to improvise, he wanted to keep doing. When you watch it again, you can't believe how long some of these takes go on and how unbelievable they are. Here's what I want to start with. David Thompson, a friend of the pod, he has a book about the Big Sleep, another Howard Hawks movie, which is great that we haven't done yet. But he talks in the intro about how when he was a kid, that movie was playing at a local theater in England. And he just went to see it over and over, over the course of a weekend. And he said it was like getting on a roller coaster. Like it was over. He just went back on it again. That's how I feel about this movie. A couple years ago it was playing at a independent movie theater near my house and I went to see it on a Friday and it was still there on. So I said, let's go see Here's a Girl Friday again. We just saw it and not even like, you know how people aren't into movies like us. They'll say, well, I saw that already. And I'm like, well, it's here. We can go in the, we can see it on the big screen again. Let's just go. And that's how I feel about this movie. It's not even a movie. It's like an amusement park ride.
- [02:46]
A
And it's, it's the perfect length. I mean, you know, I have this thing on the, on the podcast about how that movie should be 90 minutes or less, but this one is right on the button. I mean, I don't know how you get that much movie into 90 minutes. Like even for me, you know, I'm an appreciator of great economy. I don't understand how this movie works.
- [03:06]
B
Right. And so our listeners understand. Michael is not a rube. Mike is not saying like I wanted them long movies. I don't like, like Michael, watch a 12 hour movie if it does the job of a 12 hour movie. But it's funny that you're right. And I want to talk about that. This whole idea of how much it does in 90 minutes. I want to bring up something that we find tiresome talking about when other people do it. And it's tiresome when people talk about it in movies and in books. So I'm just going to throw out a word here and I want you to talk about this thing. You ready? World building.
- [03:37]
A
World building. This. So first of all, in its content, this movie is like extra dimensional space. It's like a science fiction movie where the house only measures a certain size from the outside, but inside it's like a mansion.
- [03:52]
B
It's like the bag of holding in Dungeons and Dragons.
- [03:54]
A
It's a bag of holding in Dungeons and Dragons. That's what it is. It's an extra dimensional space. The second thing that's unbelievable about this movie is that of course it was, as you alluded to, is based on the play, the Front Page, where Hildy is a man. And it's kind of like a best friend type relationship more than it is anything else, rather than the romantic relationship that we have in his Girl Friday. But of course, all the blocking and the scenes from the play are actually present in the movie. And there's some great directors that never get away with that. Like even David Mamet in some of his later movies. Some of his films have been plays that he staged, but they used the plays blocking and they looked like filmed plays. This does not look like a filmed play at all. It looks like a filmed film, but it reuses the same three sets over and over and over with the same stage blocking. I mean, it very well could be a play, but you never get that effect. The little press room in the criminal court is so unbelievably claustrophobic. You only have Walter's office, you've got that one little diner and you've got the area downstairs where Hildy conducts her interview and that's about it. But they pack everything into these four or five scenes and you never ever, ever get the sense that you're anywhere else but the city.
- [05:15]
B
And that's why I brought up World Building, because, you know, I have this pet peeve. When you read a novel, a fantasy or sci fi novel, and there's a, there's an appendix with a bunch of maps and a glossary, I'm like, check please. Because you want it to be like organic. You want the World Building to be organic. And I think that's what happens here. I mean, within 10 minutes, not even 10 minutes, within like five minutes or five seconds, you know what kind of newspaper office we're in. You know what the Morning Post is like as a newspaper. You know what the city's like, you know what passes for news. You know how these people, you know, relate to each other. And it's not spoon fed. That's why I love the LA Quartet by James Elroy is that it's filled with all these people and all this intrigue and you get a sense of the city, but there's no glossary and there's no like it just kind of comes up through the way people interact. And it's the exact opposite reason of why like I couldn't get into Dune where you need like an answer key.
- [06:06]
A
And Hildy's fiance is the perfect naive, that's, that is the perfect Bruce Baldwin. That is the perfect trope right out of literature. But you never see it working, right? So Bruce is necessary because Bruce is the one that doesn't know that these guys are criminals. They'll just make stuff up. Somebody will take your wallet, right? You get this sense of overwhelming vulnerability and innocence, which at the same time is coloring how jaded and aware Hildy and Walter and everybody else are. And so that. That kind of two for one is the perfect economy. It's like a microcosm of the economy of this film. But that works on every level. That works when she comes into the press room and there's six guys sitting around playing poker in the press room, and you know instantly how they relate to her, how she relates to them. And that's all colored through dialogue and blocking, but it's there in the first 30 seconds. I mean, this is. This is the. A perfect film. It's like a beautifully built engine that runs quiet, maximum horsepower, and you just have no idea what's going on in there. You couldn't build it. You can just appreciate it.
- [07:15]
B
They called it mashing. I love when Ralph Dellamy says that when he's a cause of record. They called it mashing. And also, let's not forget that one more point I want to make. But let's not forget that in the midst of all the speed and everything, it's also so funny. I mean, it's so funny.
- [07:33]
A
Every. Every single part of it is funny, including all the meta humor, which is, you know, Howard Hawks wanted Cary Grant to stop saying that Ralph Bellamy looks like Ralph Bellamy, and he would just flip it into every take he can.
- [07:43]
B
And he said, it's like they haven't looked like that since they said R.G. leach. You know, like all those things in there. Apparently there was also a moment where Cary Grant broke the fourth wall, but that got. That got edited out. But, yeah, it's so damn funny. And it's so constant, and it's like you can't even keep up with the jokes. It's not setup, setup, setup, joke. It's just one after another. And if you get. The first time you see it, if you get, you know, 80% of them, that's great. The other thing I want to bring up in part one related to the speed was this. There's a. I think. I think Walter Pater said this. Stay with me. He says somewhere that all art aspires to the condition of music. I don't know if you ever heard that, where, you know, the form of the content match each other so well. And when I thought, watching this movie for the podcast, I thought to myself, you know, this is the closest you can get to a musical with no singing. Because I was Struck by the fact that there is no movie music, there is no diegetic or non diegetic music until the very, very end when they're gonna go to Albany. And I thought to myself, that's really interesting. It reminded me of another movie we've done where we did the Umbrellas of Cherbourg, right? That's a musical technically, but there's no songs in it. They just sing the whole time. But it's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, whatever. Guys and Dolls. Oklahoma. So what I love about this is that just as you can listen to a song over and over, that's why one of the reasons Peterson, music is the ultimate art form, because you can keep going through it, right? You can watch this movie over and over. I mean, you could watch this movie the way you listen to your favorite song when you first got that album. And you couldn't get past the first, like, two songs because you just kept playing them again. And the musicality of the way they talk is so wonderful. You mentioned David Mamet before. I mean, this is like, you can. You can see why someone like David Mamet or Quentin Tarantino, who apparently loves this movie as well, love it. But, you know, Mamet's full of, like, weird pauses and ambiguities and repetitions and, like, non sequiturs. But this is people talking as fast as they can and they're still intelligible. And there's such a musicality to it that it's. It's so. It's so endlessly repeatable.
- [09:37]
A
I think that there's a deeper connection to the content because, of course, that's what, like, being a second behind is what the news is about. What they're trying to do as part of a newspaper is things are happening and everybody wants the scoop. So you can present it in as close to real time. But you're always, by nature, by. By ver virtue of the enterprise, two seconds behind. And so there's so many trailing jokes that Walter, Cary Grant, as Walter gets off and you only hear them, he's already on, like, two sentences beyond while you're registering jokes. And that actually is the news. That's the form and content of the news being expressed.
- [10:16]
B
Welcome back. In Part two, we always talk about a favorite moment or a favorite line or a favorite scene that leapt out at us when we rewatched the movie for the podcast. Mike, what's yours?
- [10:25]
A
There's only one scene scene where somebody speaks intelligibly and everybody stops what they're doing. To listen to them, which is Molly's monologue in the middle of the. The newspaper office in the criminal court. And it's. It's the one time where the news is not. Seem. Does not seem to be the. The whimsical enterprise that.
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B
That.
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A
That the screenwriters would have us believe that it is. And I think that this would be a very different movie without it. And I just wanted us to unpack that together for a second, because this. This movie, for all of Hildy Johnson's complaints, seems to say, like, you are actually born and made to do this. There's nothing else you can do. You might as well give in. And the question is, why would Hildy actually resist it for so long apart that she's heartbroken or she never got the honeymoon that she wanted, or she's got some lifelong grudge against Walter. Like, what is it that she's actually responding to? And Molly seems to lay out the charges very well, which is that you distorted reality. You've libeled me. You've made me a laughingstock. You don't care about this guy's death. It's just grist for the mill for you. All you care about is yourselves. And there's something also then, which. Which, by the way, is. It's probably all true. These are just all charges, you know, that. That have been laid on both sides to every media outlet that's ever existed since the beginning of time and on towards eternity. But then there's one counterpoint, which is when the guys crowd around Hildy's typewriter and read the end of the story that she wrote. And I just was wondering what you make of those two moments, because they. They both stuck out at me like they have a dotted line that connects them. This episode is brought to you by FX's Love Story. John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bassett join host Evan Ross Katz on the Official podcast for FX's new series Love Story. John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette. And go behind the scenes with cast and special guests featuring Sarah Pidgeon, Paul Anthony Kelly, Grace Gummer and Naomi Watts.
- [12:34]
B
FX's Love Story.
- [12:35]
A
John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette.
- [12:38]
B
Wherever you listen to podcasts, they do. And I thought to myself, watching it again, how easy it would have been to take those out. And when she jumps out the window, let's. Let's not forget that she jumps out the window, all of a sudden. It's like you channel surfed into a different movie, which is going to be an indictment of the Press. You know what? It's so funny. It's like that's the. That's the 30 seconds where all of a sudden you're like, are we watching Absence of Malice? Are we watching network or something? Like, what happened? But my thought was that that's in there. It's a pause. It's a great way to slow things down because Molly does have their number. And what she says we all not along and all the. I love it. Because she's the only one that can shut them up. Now, of course, Cary Grant's not in the room, but she's the only one that can shut them up. And then they all kind of do their awkward muttering, like, we just cranks up again. So maybe. Maybe it's there to show that they're not completely soulless, and neither are we. I think you've probably heard in Seinfeld that when they wrote the series, they said there were two rules. Do you ever hear the two rules of Seinfeld?
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A
Yeah, it's like, no hugs and no lessons.
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B
Yeah, no hugs and no lessons. Right. And I think that, like, this movie obeys that, except for, like, a little sliver in the middle, I think.
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A
But I think it's a different movie if you don't accept the factual nature of Hildy's complaints, which is, you know, that death. That death, either Molly's, you know, or anybody else is not just grist for the mill for these. For these journals guys. Essentially, if it's not life, it's just about the reflection of life, then this is all just the wizard of Oz. And I think that this is. It's just anchored in some way so that you're not in Oz all the time. But at this. But at the same time, as soon as you're shaking your heads at the newspaper guys and you're like, shame on you, they start to do the dance again, and you're swept up. And so it's. It's both real but forgivable at the same time.
- [14:28]
B
So my moment has very much to do with being swept up. My moment. And I could have picked any of them at random, so I'll just throw one out at random. Is right in the beginning when she says to Walter, we're divorced, and he says, divorced? That's just something mumbled over by a judge, you know? And what makes Cary Grant so funny in this movie is that he is the news business. You just said before that every media outlet since, you know, Alexander the Great on has been criticized and Cary Grant is the personification of the news cycle. I mean, if you made this today, he is Instagram.
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A
He's its avatar.
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B
That's exactly what he is, right? He's the self aware. He's the AI. Moment of singularity. He's the moment of singularity. Thank you. Right, so. And of course, the joke is that Cary Grant knows this about himself, but when he says divorce is just something mumbled over by a judge, what that made me think about is how everybody in the movie, except for that moment with Molly, right, is completely aloof from the actual stakes of what they're actually talking about. And nobody cares if Earl Williams is innocent. Nobody cares, like, why he shot the guy. He's an object. The mayor comes in and says, if we don't hang him, we're gonna lose 200,000 votes. So he hides the reprie, but at the end, he has the reprieve. And what's odd about this is that Cary Grant's right on board with all that. He doesn't care about Earl Williams. He just hides him at the desk. There's that great bit where he's holding his arms out to see if the desk will fit through the window because he wants his friend Butch to come and lower him out the window. But what's great about that is that Cary Grant is so aloof and so I guess you could say immoral if you were a grouch. But we don't care because you're swept up by the exuberance of the whole thing. So I think what you just said is spot on. You're swept up. Then you get this reality check and you have this little moment, and then all of a sudden they just start saying, yeah, but look at me, look at me. And then Cary Grant walks back in the room and you're like, okay.
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A
And it's not immoral. It's amoral. It's.
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B
Well, you could. You could make a case that it is immoral to use. To exploit people's suffering, to sell newspapers. That's why I took that word.
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A
Yeah, no, I'm with you. It's just if. When you're amoral, you just. You take no sides, right? Because he says, well, then we'll, you know, we'll be Republican. And the guy says, you can't. And he says, why? Because we've been a democratic paper for 100 years. And, and the, the. When you're held aloof, if you really don't judge either side, there's sort of an esthetic purity to it. But the movie interrupts its own esthetic Purity to say, we realize that this is a layer that's built on reality. So we will acknowledge reality. But then we want you to acknowledge how seductive this is. So you can't imagine it didn't exist. And the movie was an hour 27 minutes. And those four minutes were erased. And somebody went out of there shaking their head and saying, like, this is just Hollywood all over. But they. They read the list of charges before, and they've already countered them.
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B
Right? Imagine if I said to you, mike, I got a great movie we have to watch for the pod. It's all about Molly. It's all about Molly and her pining away for Earl Williams. It is called Friday, which I'm surprised someone hasn't tried to reboot or something. You would say, yeah, I don't. I don't need to watch the whole.
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A
But it's like Eugene o'. Neill. But it's like it's.
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B
Or that would be absence of malice. Like that. Which is a very good movie. Right? But that is all about the corrupting power of the press or network, which we love. That's what's so funny, is that it's like you get this little moment where Howard Hawks acknowledges the real world. It says, okay, yes, I get it. Fine. Are we good now? Let's go on. I mean, what I. One of my notes was that this movie is so unbelievably cynical, yet joyful at the same time. Those things never go together. There's no joy in network. Network is deeply cynical. But it's never. This movie is. Like I said, it's. They might as well be singing and dancing because it's.
- [18:13]
A
This movie knows something that we are arguing about now, but it knew it then, which is that it's just entertainment. We are not. We're not really even creating the news, although everybody's attempting. The news is attempting to create reality. But we're a reflection of reality. And the reflection of reality reflected back to you that matches your own interiority is amusing. It's pleasing. And so Cary Grant is the great newsertainer, and everything around him is the great newsertainment. Welcome back. So in Part three, of course, we always talk about the title or the ending or the key takeaways. Dan, what are you working on over there?
- [18:54]
B
It's so hard to try to nail this down. But one thing I would bring up for the ending is that this phrase, this cockamamie phrase, they invent production for use about the gun. And they tell the poor Earl Williams, who, by the way, is In Casablanca, he's in the Searchers. He's in, like, every other movie of the eras we love. He says. She says, what's a gun for? It's for the shoot. That's what it's made for. He's like, oh, yeah, you're right. Now that is. Who in the world would ever believe that that's a reason. Like, I was holding a gun, therefore I had to shoot it. It's the most invented kind of thing to keep the movie going. Howard Hawks doesn't care and neither do we. But what's funny is that the movie is about Hildy, of course, denying her production for use, Right? That's what, that's what the movie's about. She doesn't know that we know this within the first five minutes. So what I love about this movie is that she walks in and her. Her goal there is to have this big triumphant kiss off to the rest of the staff, right? And she could leave the job, but of course the job won't leave her. And Cary Grant's the personification of everything she's trying to avoid, right? But it doesn't matter. It's. He's this itch that. That she has to scratch. So I think that what's funny is that this phrase that The.
- [20:03]
A
The.
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B
The 30th time I see this movie, I'm always like, that's like the. That is the worst excuse for a murderer. I.
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A
It's their joke on Marxism.
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B
I know, I know, is what I take.
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A
But it's. But.
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B
But I think with the joke is that, of course that's what the movie's about, right? Is that her goal? If a gun's goal is to shoot. If a gun is made to shoot. She was made to be a newspaper man, as he says to her. And that's what the movie's about. And it's kind of funny because it's about these fantasies people have of leaving their jobs. And I want to go do something else, and I'm going to go, you know, do this thing or that thing. And then they kind of. People try to do it sometimes and they come back like, I'm going to leave it. I'm going to go, you know, write sonnets. What happened to Bill from it? Oh, he got a job at a different it place. I saw him on LinkedIn. You know, the Sonic thing didn't work out. So that's kind of funny that she has her. She has her little moment. But Cary Grant is wiser because she tries to be not cynical. She Tries to leave the values and assumptions of that newsroom. But. But she can't. She can't.
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A
Well, we. I think it's a little bit different than Bill from it because we. Let's. Let's assume that the news is not just a societal function, that it is an art form, which is. I think that's what the film insists on in the background. Otherwise, as we said, you have this new Eugene o' Neill play, which is a budding socialist, gets fired, shoots his boss. He's about to be hanged. And all the news people are trying to figure out how to use that to their best advantage, which is, you know, that's the tearjerker of the century. But let's say that this about news as entertainment, and you have a central figure who does that art better than anybody else does that art. But she says she wants to leave because she never got the chance to be a real person. And basically it's like, well, I'm using my personhood to be alive just as a function or vehicle for this art. And ultimately it ends up either in her ascension to the pinnacle of her art or her destruction, depending on how you look at it. That movie would be the Red Shoes. The Red Shoes, which we've done. I mean, we're kind of back on our groove talking about the life of the artist. But the viewer, as you said, knows this about Hildy from the first time she walks in, because it's like watching a shark swim. It's like walking through that news office is, you know, everything. The character Hildy Johnson, played by Rosalind Russell, that's what she was designed to do. And so we all know that she's never, ever, ever going to get away from it. And you know that in the first. If you watch, like, the first hour when the bullets start flying and they do that gag where somebody says, what's going on down there? And then they all duck because they start shooting the window. You know that Hildy is. Is going to do the best reporting on that that's ever been done. And I think that this movie insists that art is its own form of reality, apart from real reality, but just as valid. And I think that that's why anything goes, which makes it amoral, not immoral.
- [22:55]
B
Thinking about this movie in its entirety, in this totality, of course, reminds me of the film we did last time, which is, of course, 20th century, another great Howard Hawks movie, where everyone's speaking at full. At full volume, amazing speeds. But again, it's this idea that, you know, the guy embodies that world. She's going to leave it for. For greener pastures in Hollywood. And he's disgusted. Like, why would you want to go to Hollywood in your, in your motion pictures? You have to come back to the stage. And she knows it. And we know it. We know he's going to get her back. And of course he does.
- [23:26]
A
Yeah, it's like escape velocity versus the force of gravity. And I think Howard Hawks is fantastic at using characters that have great gravity to his advantage, no matter what movie you're talking about. And just what a great director, what a multifaceted director. And this, if you ask me, is his most perfect movie. This I don't even. You can't see the seams in this movie. You can't pull it apart.
- [23:51]
B
Thanks for listening, everybody. We hope we did justice to his Girl Friday. We tried our best. As soon as we get done recording Mike, what are we going to start doing?
- [23:58]
A
Watch it again.
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B
And thinking of other things we should have said. But we had no discussion of Mr. Pettibone. We had no discussion of that poor guy, of Mr. Pettibone who is just like Molly, an innocent throat into the world who decides to refute it.
- [24:11]
A
Those are some unbelievably great bits too, by the way. I mean, if you. You might hear about vaudeville, like if you've never seen a vaudeville routine and you go, man, people were just amused by anything back in the day. But you watch that bit. That is a perfect vaudeville routine, self contained within this picture.
- [24:27]
B
You can follow us on Substack. You can follow me at pagesandframes and Mike TheGrumbler's Almanac. Thanks for listening. Let us know what to watch next and we'll see you next time.
- [24:56]
A
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- [25:16]
B
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