31 Movies of May, Day 9: His Girl Friday

May 9th viewing: His Girl Friday, chosen by my mom, Martha Stevens

Year of Release: 1940

Directed by: Howard Hawks

Written by: Charles Lederer (based on the play “The Front Page” by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur)

Starring: Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy, Gene Lockhart, Clarence Kolb, John Qualen, Helen Mack, Abner Biberman

Accompanying Beverage of Choice: Hell or High Watermelon (Wheat beer, 4.9% ABV) - 21st Amendment Brewery, San Leandro, California 
(Support Independent Breweries - buy local* when getting buzzed during quarantine)
*In spirit, at least

Just what city does the Morning Post cover, exactly?

This is a matter of some controversy, or at least some ambiguity. Film critic Michael Phillips, perhaps the biggest fan of His Girl Friday currently living, tried to answer that question in 2018, and while he may have an answer in his heart, he was unable to find a specific one to satisfy his brain.

I have opinions on this matter as well - I’m pretty much compelled to. I have loved His Girl Friday since my high school days, and now I live in Chicago, one of the cities that tries to lay claim to it. Of all the candidates, Chicago may have the most concrete case: The play on which His Girl Friday is based, The Front Page, definitively names its setting as Chicago.

But His Girl Friday is not The Front Page. Both concern the characters of Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns, a reporter and editor, respectively, who work to land a scoop on the hanging of Earl Williams, an alleged Communist who killed a cop. But there’s one major shift from stage to screen, in that Hildy goes from being just a male employee who Walter desperately wants to keep on staff to Walter’s female ex-wife (who, in addition to winning back her love, he also wants to keep on staff of his newspaper, and it’s difficult to determine which is his primary goal). When you’re changing a character this much, simply switching the locale of a story that mostly takes place in a single courthouse seems fairly simple.

That’s why you need to get into aspects of intent and tone in order to even approach an answer. And here again, Chicago has an argument. The whole story revolves around corruption, bribes, vote rigging and moral flexibility, all things that have famously been part of Windy City politics for decades. But I’m not entirely sold on this line of argument. The film’s aura is meant to be more universal - despite the title card at the beginning *assuring* the audience that the underhanded tactics on display in the film are no longer used in journalism today, Howard Hawks and his collaborators clearly paint a very negative picture of the Fourth Estate. It’s not so much that the journalists in this movie do dishonest things, it’s that they don’t seem to care about the actual things on which they report. Facts be damned, the His Girl Friday reporters only care about selling papers. I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with a great many journalists and know this to be far from the case in real life, but the important thing here is that the general critique doesn’t seem to apply just to Chicago. In fact, Cary Grant has a line bemoaning how corrupt people are in LaGuardia’s New York - a line that leads to the second general candidate for the film’s setting.

Pretty much all of the film’s geographic references are to New York State. Hildy and her fiance spend most of the movie awaiting a train to Albany, and ultimately, after Hildy and Walter get back together, they plan (at first) to honeymoon in Niagara Falls. Though this cuts both ways, too. Grant’s LaGuardia line is phrased in a way as if he doesn’t himself live in LaGuardia’s New York, and an “alienist from New York” is brought in to examine the alleged murderer, which would be weird if they were already in New York.

But the references are almost so universally New York that it’s hard to believe the movie doesn’t take place inside New York’s sphere. There are some subtle references that could possibly be Chicago - Phillips points to mentions of Chicago thoroughfares Western Avenue and State Street, though these are relatively common street names. Phillips also points out the Shoreview Hotel, though again, taken out of context it may not necessarily be a reference to the former Chicago hotel of the same name.

The only thing I can settle on is that His Girl Friday takes place somewhere in the New York tristate area. Somewhere in New Jersey perhaps - the Tribune piece says it’s “probably not” Newark, though that sounds like a good choice for me. A Connecticut town like Hartford makes sense to me as well, or even going out one state further to Providence in Rhode Island. An upstate New York city like Syracuse or Buffalo might make sense as well, though some geographic references make it sound like that might be on the wrong side of Albany. 

It saddens me to give away His Girl Friday from my current hometown, almost as much as it saddens me to disappoint Michael Phillips. In exchange, I think it’s only fair that New York allow Chicago to create a Taking of Pelham 123 remake set on some forgotten Metra line. It’ll be fun trying to decipher the weird references to Des Plaines.