The kind of work executed in His Girl Friday is no shorter than masterful; it should be a frenzy, a fiasco of dialog going and overlapping and reverberating and the pacing clocking in at ridiculous amounts at times (other times, oddly enough, it slows down just enough for us and the actors to catch respective breath). But Howard Hawks and his screenwriter Charles Lederer have the material down to a T. The film brilliantly interweaves a newspaper story that unfolds over the course of a day and night around a man who's to be (wrongfully) sentenced to death, and a love-triangle played out between Walter (Grant), Hildy (Russell) and Bruce (Bellamy), as Walter can't stand that his ex-wife is not only leaving the paper- which she's wildly amazing at as a writer and reporter- but for Albany insurance man Bruce Baldwin as new husband. He constructs an ingenious lot of tricks, mostly to put Bruce in jail, so that he can play on Hildy's ego to come back to the paper and, maybe, to him too. But it won't be easy.<br /><br />Hawks overcomes what could have been stagey picture- since it is based on a play, and feels it at times with its main set at the newspaper office- with what is first a true intuition to how to tell the story without getting in the way of a good conversation; sometimes going in three directions! It's not exactly a movie that brings out a whole lot of belly laughs; rather it's the accumulation of just solid chuckles, guffaws, and the occasional fall-on-the-floor moment that hit the best with characterization, behavior, mannerisms, manners. Matter of fact, it's extremely, keenly observed about how every character is who he/she is, and is fairly stuck in their ways, from the headstrong Hildy, the good but flabbergasted Bruce, his old mother, the "I'm innocent!" pleading man on death row, the Sheriff, the Mayor, the bunch of gruff and grizzled and card-playing newspaper men. But everyone's about as close to being, if not incredibly, fully realized, and there's barely a scene where someone doesn't say something, or repeat something, or refer or make some quip that doesn't get a laugh. This is how it's done, basically, in the best "screwball" style.<br /><br />Even Hildy, who seems to be completely set upon leaving the newspaper biz, isn't without moments of vulnerability that crack through her tough, Hawksian-exterior. And Russell, I should add, comes off a lot of the screen time stealing the show. While Grant is no sleepwalker and puts to work his skills at being charming and amusing while also playing a conniving persona, Russell puts everything she's got into a character that is probably far stronger than Bruce can take and is just about an even match for Walter Burns's double-crossing. Hell, she can even do a dramatic scene here or there, or make it so that she's right on the level with another actor (i.e. the one playing the death-row guy) so that comedy and drama come and go depending on the beat of the scene. It's breathtaking to watch her work, and it's likely her best performance (Grant, too, comes away with much of his screen time).<br /><br />Just make no mistake, this isn't a comedy that is based on the actors for most of the support. It's a wild combination of the pacing of the story, of the rat-tat-tat-tat style of overlapping and interweaving dialog (the likes of which one might see today on the TV show Gilmore Girls or, more cinematically, Altman) and that it never comes along as too rushed within the suspenseful narrative. And it floored me as being somewhat unique, and it only takes itself so much seriously in the world its set in so that it's always entertaining. If you're tuned into His Girl Friday, Hawks won't bore you for a second, and it's a mighty achievement.