In Intro to Film courses, Citizen Kane (1941) and His Girl Friday (1940) typically play major roles
in the teaching of film-analysis. Hidden gems include novel camera angles in Citizen
Kane and the use of dialogue and editing to quicken the pace of certain
scenes in His Girl Friday. In the latter film, Cary Grant, who plays the
newspaper editor, Walter Burns, hurriedly mentions Grant’s real name, Archibald
Leach, in referring to another character during a phone call! Such a nugget points back to a director or screenwriter
who knows his or her craft well enough that the finished product has multiple
levels without breaking the viewers' suspension of disbelief (i.e., being engrossed in a film's story-world). Typically, films have both “task” and “romance” elements, which should
in some way be connected, such by involving a protagonist’s “love-interest” somehow
involves in the protagonist’s task-objective. His Girl Friday is both a
crime drama and a romance film. This distinction is similar to Donelson Forsyth’s
model of leadership in which behaviors of a given leader can be classified as
either performance maintenance or relationship maintenance.[1]
The crime-element of the film includes not only a man who did not mean to shoot
someone due to be executed anyway, but also the mayor and police chief of New
York City being utterly corrupt so as to stay in office by having the criminal
executed even in the knowledge that the governor has cancelled the execution.
The romance-element is perhaps just as harsh even though (and even because) it
is centered on the phenomenon of falling in love.
The full essay is at "His Girl Friday."
1. Donelson R. Forsyth, Group Dynamics, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), p. 253.
