His Girl Friday premiered at the Radio City Music Hall in New York, where it earned a respectable $155,000 during its two-week engagement.

"Overlapping dialogue carries the movie along at breakneck speed; word gags take the place of the sight gags of silent comedy, as this vanished race of brittle, cynical, childish people rush around on corrupt errands." -- Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies. "A tour de force for both Grant and Hawks...His Girl Friday represents a culmination for screwball comedy. With it the form has been pushed to its outer limits." -- Richard Schickel, Cary Grant: A Celebration.

"His Girl Friday is one of the very few screwball comedies that actually merits the label 'satire,' for unlike most others, this satire has an object -- journalism as practiced in the United States -- its tone is openly derisive." -- Ed Sikov, Screwball: Hollywood's Madcap Romantic Comedies."

"Perhaps the funniest, certainly the fastest talkie comedy ever made...Charles Lederer's frantic script needs to be heard at least a dozen times for all the gags to be caught; Russell's Hildy more than equals Burns in cunning and speed, and Hawks transcends the play's stage origins effortlessly, framing with brilliance, conducting numerous conversations simultaneously, and even allowing the film's political and emotional thrust to remain upfront alongside the laughs. Quite simply a masterpiece." - Geoff Andrew, TimeOut Film Guide.

"Film is not so much about the traditional battle of the sexes as it is about sexual differentiation. Hawks repeatedly shows that when characters put their guards down, they take on characteristics of the opposite sex and stop paying attention to others' genders. When no one's looking, the tough-talking male reporters become as gossipy as a women's bridge group...Grant is exceptional, particularly doing physical comedy...Russell is dynamic playing the most fascinating of the era's wisecracking women reporters. She's unabashed as this cunning, bawdy, aggressive, cigarette-smoking, unladylike female - it's a shame she wasn't offered such parts more often." - Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic.

"You only realize how good a film Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday is when you remember that Rosalind Russell is in it. Top-speed comedy and the floating aggression of Cary Grant actually managed to control the bossiness and overemphasis that spoiled so many of her films." - David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.

"The film is so mannered, especially in its pacing, that the degree of stylization calls attention to itself. When Walter Burns describes Bruce Baldwin [played by Ralph Bellamy], he says that he looks like "That actor - Ralph Bellamy." He later quips to one of the film's characters, "The last man that said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat." (Archie Leach is Cary Grant's real name.) Such references do not really disrupt the film but merely add to the movie's hilarious message on the absurdity of believing in the characters as real people...His Girl Friday was the first screwball comedy to depart from the money-marriage-ego conflicts of Holiday [1938], My Man Godfrey [1936], and The Philadelphia Story [1940], inserting into the same comic structure and pattern of action a conflict between career and marriage." - Lauren Rabinovitz, The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers.

"One of the fastest of all movies, from line to line and from gag to gag." - Manny Farber, 1971.

"Frantic, hilarious black farce with all participants at their best; possibly the fastest comedy ever filmed, and one of the funniest." - Halliwell's Film & Video Guide.

"With more of the feminine-romance angle injected than was in the original, this new edition becomes more the modern-style sophisticated comedy than the hard, biting picture of newspapermen that Hecht and MacArthur painted in their stage play. Its remake in this revised form was a happy idea, especially since it still moves punchily, retains plenty of its laughs and almost all of its drama." - Variety Movie Guide.

AWARDS & HONORS

In his book Alternate Oscars® (Dell Publishing: 1993), cult film critic Danny Peary named Rosalind Russell Best Actress of 1940 for her performance in His Girl Friday. The film did not receive a single Oscar® nomination.

His Girl Friday was voted a place on the National Film Registry in 1993.

Compiled by Frank Miller & Jeff Stafford