David Thomson's Top Ten Films: His Girl Friday

Hollywood, as in "Hurray for...", one year after the sombre prospects of La règle du jeu. Are we living in the same world? Is "Hollywood" the daft pit of irresponsibility, or decades ahead already, refusing to be solemn? Was director Howard Hawks an authentic Californian, a dandy who affected English tweeds and superiority, a contented if mere entertainer who happily ploughed the set fields of American genre? Or a sly insurrectionary, easing us towards a notion of art for art's sake in which the screen did not just dispense with "reality" but ignored it? Was he an old-fashioned male chauvinist, or a ghost who knew that nothing existed but fantasy?

Consider His Girl Friday. There had been a play, The Front Page, by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, a salty comedy about an editor and a reporter, warring male pals, and how the editor just wants to keep the reporter in the newspaper business, instead of "getting on with life". Hecht and MacArthur knew newspapers, so it all rings true – but it took Howard Hawks to notice that the only thing required of the truth (in 1940) was that it rang a pretty tune.

So he turned The Front Page inside out – this is the first demolition re-make (a noble form). He said, suppose the editor and the reporter are a man and a woman, a married couple (just divorced), and the woman is on the point of leaving the paper to get married to a decent, wholesome, truthful idiot? Thus agreeable entertainment becomes ravishing art; thus a sentimental tribute to friendship becomes a frenzied rhapsody on the perils of being in love while guarding the love against all those plausibly "real" things.

The post-demolition phoenix is a "comedy of remarriage" in which Walter Burns (Cary Grant) will use every bit of cunning to keep Hildy Parks (Rosalind Russell) on the job, with the paper and "his girl Friday" – which assumes that in their packed, noisy newsroom they inhabit a desert island.

The alternative for Hildy is that stalwart, umbrella-bearing insurance man, wood through and through, played with splendid dedication by Ralph Bellamy.

Bellamy is a likely husband (if your view of marriage is that pessimistic). He is a chump, a stooge, the dumb wall off which Cary Grant plays his tormenting drop shots. The intriguing question is whether Hildy really loves this Bruce, or whether – in the cruel, playful mood she shares with Walter – she has simply discovered him as a pretext. For what Walter and Hildy have found is that their love only works when set on the brink of disaster. And so the "comedy of remarriage" is an overly polite label for a Hawks who saw flirtation as an art form. Yes, these are lovers, all right, but they have no hope for marriage or family. Settling down in their game is a version of death, like daylight for Dracula.

That's where the newspaper business is such a convenient convention. It seems socially conscious, driven by the public interest and a sense of outraged fair play, etc. Yet all it really wants is one damn crisis after another to sell papers and permit the exhilaration of changing the front page at the last minute. The fun of it all has eclipsed any sense of responsibility – that's why the sub-plot of Earl and Mollie gets twisted into monkey-puzzle shapes. This artful situation is the excuse for the fastest film ever made.

To say that His Girl Friday is 62 years old is to mock every wishful fallacy about the world getting more sophisticated and progressive. As well as being a warning about taking care with any 62-year-old wolf you might meet. Film style has never been suppler or more taut. Reflect on how so much is crammed into 92 minutes; track the intricacies of the crazed plot; listen to the delirious talk – for Walter and Hildy are locked in lethal conversation, one that takes no prisoners. Then allow that this could only happen with a director so savagely modern and an actor (Grant) so far ahead of popular taste that he was able to retire early and wait for people to catch up with him.

Is this fun comfortable or comforting? I think not. Whether you are in love or in the newspaper business, this film is a reminder that not only has the safety net been cut loose but the high wire itself was just erased. This froth, this brilliance, stays aloft through will-power and the refusal to stop talking. It means you shouldn't trust the paper you read, or the person you wake up with. But you knew those things already, deep down. You just need an old-fashioned movie to admit them.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk