His Girl Friday (1940)
Saturday Morning Classics
Cinema 21 – Portland, Oregon
Theater 1 | 11am
My ticket was already waiting on my phone when I stood outside the 101-year-old Cinema 21 on a bright Saturday morning in August. Above the entrance, the theater’s red neon name curved across the old marquee.
The building had already been showing movies for more than a century. Cinema 21 opened in 1925 as the State Theater, when silent films were accompanied by a live organ. Its original auditorium survives today as Theater 1, and despite modern seats, projection and sound, it still feels unmistakably like an old movie house.
His Girl Friday wasn’t listed there; its return to the screen was a smaller affair, an 11 a.m. entry in Cinema 21’s Saturday Morning Classics series.
I had seen His Girl Friday before, but never like this.
Inside, the theater seemed to belong naturally to the movie I was about to see. The red auditorium, the old posters, even the “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” reel gave the place the feeling of an older kind of moviegoing that had somehow carried on into the present.
Before the feature came an old-fashioned “Prevues of Coming Attractions” card, followed by previews for films such as 8½ and M.
The auditorium was also much fuller than I expected. Older moviegoers sat alongside younger ones, all turning up on a Saturday morning for a black-and-white comedy released eighty-six years earlier.
Then His Girl Friday began.
And people started laughing.
I remembered Howard Hawks’s 1940 comedy being fast. I remembered the overlapping dialogue, Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson and Cary Grant’s Walter Burns firing words at one another, and Grant playing Walter as a charming menace who regards every obstacle as something to manipulate his way around.
What I had forgotten was how much funnier that speed could become in a room full of people.
Walter Burns is a chaos agent in a very nice suit. Hildy has divorced him, plans to marry insurance man Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) and intends to leave both Walter and the newspaper business behind for Albany. Walter spends much of the film refusing to accept any of these things as particularly settled.
But it was the final stretch in the press room where the movie seemed to reach full velocity.
By then, escaped prisoner Earl Williams (John Qualen) is hiding inside a rolltop desk. Hildy is at the typewriter hammering out the Morning Post’s exclusive while Walter works beside her, turning the increasingly impossible situation into something resembling a newsroom operation.
At one point Walter taps on the desk. Earl taps back.
Walter has apparently established a system: three taps means him. He opens the cover and discovers that Earl could use some air, so he fans a little into the desk before closing it again.
“You’re sitting pretty,” he assures him.
The theater laughed.
From Walter’s perspective, perhaps Earl was. The most wanted man in Chicago was hidden inside the furniture, nobody else had the story, and Hildy Johnson was writing the lead.
From there, everything seems to happen at once.
Walter starts devising ways to get the desk out of a building crawling with police—carry it out, lower it with pulleys, maybe start a fire. There is apparently no logistical problem Walter Burns cannot solve by creating a larger one.
Meanwhile, Bruce arrives and tries to have an entirely different kind of conversation. He’s taking the nine o’clock train, he tells Hildy. She is so consumed by the story that she begins typing “taking the nine o’clock train” into her copy.
Her personal life has literally become tangled in the lead.
When Bruce finally tells Hildy that he doesn’t think she ever loved him, her answer cuts through the frenzy: she isn’t a suburban bridge player. She’s a newspaperman.
Walter barely misses a beat. “That’s the stuff, Hildy. Keep it coming.”
Then Earl starts climbing out of the desk.
“Get back in there, you mock turtle!”
Down goes the cover again.
It is ridiculous, but underneath all the chaos is something revealing about Walter and Hildy. For all their fighting, they are perfectly synchronized when there is a story in front of them. Hildy throws Walter questions without looking up from the typewriter; Walter supplies the answers and keeps moving. Everyone else seems overwhelmed by the disorder.
Walter and Hildy thrive in it.
Walter is simultaneously on the telephone with Duffy, dismantling the next edition of the Morning Post to make room for Hildy’s scoop. The European war can go. So can a Chinese earthquake and the Polish Corridor. The Miss America photographs on page six aren’t safe, either.
A rooster story, however, survives. That’s human interest.
And eventually Walter goes one better: Hitler can be moved to the funny page.
Amid all the laughter, one phrase caught my attention: “the European war.”
Hearing it in 2026 creates a strange little collision of time. To us, it is World War II, with everything that name now carries and everything we know came afterward. To Walter Burns, it is simply the international news already taking up space on tomorrow’s front page.
For a moment, 1940 stopped feeling like a black-and-white past. And that was what I enjoyed most about seeing the film at Cinema 21. There is a difference between knowing an old comedy is funny and hearing that it is still funny.
A laugh would move through the auditorium and another line would already be arriving. Sometimes the movie barely seemed willing to wait for us. Grant and Russell kept going, Walter kept creating disasters, Hildy kept writing, and Earl Williams remained, somehow, inside that desk.
The surroundings felt old. The movie was old. The experience didn’t. An eighty-six-year-old comedy wasn’t an artifact that morning. It was playing to a room.
And the room was laughing.
The Scene
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