Hildy Johnson, former star reporter of The Morning Post, drops into the paper to see Walter Burns, the paper's editor, and also her ex-husband. It's no idle visit: Hildy is there to let Walter know that she's recently become engaged, and intends to quit the newspaper business to become a stay-at-home wife and mother.
Walter expresses pleasure at the news, insisting on meeting Hildy's fiance (a rather bland insurance salesman) and taking them both out to lunch. This, of course, is nothing more than step on in a barrage of schemes to torpedo the impending nuptials. Walter, you see, wants Hildy for himself - though rather more for her journalistic skills than for romantic reasons, I feel - and is pretty confident that if he can delay their departure long enough, he can find a story his ex-wife's reporterly instincts won't let her leave alone. He may be right, at that: it just so happens there's a man on death row for fairly flimsy reasons.
The rest of the film depicts the battle of wills between Walter and Hildy and the pair's equally fierce struggle to write a story that the city's corrupt mayor and sheriff have no intent of letting see the light of day.
His Girl Friday is a seminal 'screwball comedy', with the razor-sharp banter and rather cynical view of love that generally characterised such works. It's mostly good fun to watch, though at the end of the day it's hard to say that it's got a "happy ending". On the one hand, both Hildy and Walter seem to have got what they think they want ... on the other, I'm not sure what they want is all that sensible!
If you want to watch some skilled 1940s thespians deliver snappy dialog at a thousand words a minute, this film definitely has you covered. Just don't expect anyone to be a better person at the end of the film than they are at the beginning!
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