Cary Grant sits down at a table with Ralph Bellamy and Irene Dunne in 1937 and says: 'So you two are going to get married.' It is The Awful Truth. Grant sits down at a table with Bellamy and Rosalind Russell in 1940 and says again: 'So you two are going to get married.' It is His Girl Friday. Asked what the Bellamy character in the film, the man who plans to marry his former wife, looks like, Grant replies: 'Like that fellow in the movies. What's his name? Ralph Bellamy.' Jokes within jokes. Howard Hawks having a joke with Leo McCarey. Hawks perhaps treating McCarey's The Awful Truth like the front page of a paper, something to be revised at speed in the light of new and startling developments. Hawks perhaps doing this to The Front Page itself, the play from which His Girl Friday comes. For His Girl Friday, the fastest of a set of wonderfully fast Hollywood films of the Thirties and Forties, not only moves by cut and splice at a pace that a play never can. It also, as the film it is, refers repeatedly to itself.

LRB 1 April 1982 | PDF Download