December 7–14, 2000

movies

Screen Picks

The week in repertory film, TV and video.

by Sam Adams

His Girl Friday

($24.95 DVD)

Looking for the right version of classic films is like trying to find the right melon at the supermarket: They look the same, but the quality varies wildly. Even on DVD, it’s not uncommon to find cheapie transfers masquerading as "collector’s editions." But the new Columbia Classics edition of His Girl Friday (not to be confused with the multiple other versions floating around) is the real deal: a beautiful, rich image of one of the great classic comedies, enhanced with audio commentary by Variety scribe and Howard Hawks biographer Todd McCarthy. (McCarthy’s critical and biographical insights are far more enlightening than Peter Bogdonovich’s disappointing job on Columbia’s The Lady from Shanghai disc. McCarthy switches from history to analysis with admirable ease, while Bogdonovich merely recites an interview he’d formerly conducted with Welles.) Cary Grant is at his most theatrically exuberant as tyrannical, conniving newspaper editor Walter Burns, a scurrilous blowhard who will do and say anything to get his former ace reporter (and wife) Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) back on his staff and into his life. Both supremely stylized and giddily offhand (catch his fleeting references to co-star Ralph Bellamy and to his own real name, Archie Leach), Grant reminds you here how much more than a suave matinée idol he was. But the most supreme joy is Russell’s performance, the more so because she never quite equaled it. Cast only after scores of actresses had turned down the part, a chagrined Russell clearly set out to knock Hawks and company off their feet, and the breathless ease with which she shoots out Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s dialogue is nothing short of astonishing. (Russell’s manic style is delightfully parodied/paid tribute to by Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hudsucker Proxy, which made the mistake of trying to sustain His Girl Friday’s lightning pace for over two hours — an exhaustion compared to Friday’s terse 92 minutes.) Whether or not it’s the fastest comedy in sound history — a claim that’s been disputed as often as it’s made — His Girl Friday is a sparkling gem, and if its appeal has dimmed in the 60 years since its original release, it’s hard to imagine it could have been funnier then than it is now.

Voyages

(Sat., Dec. 9, 8 p.m., Sun., Dec. 10, 2 p.m., Mon, Dec. 11, 7:30 p.m., Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St., 215- 446-3033)

The latest entry in the Jewish Film Festival is, yes, another movie about Holocaust survivors, but one which situates itself in the fluid world of memory rather than the terrain of history. Composed of the interlocking stories of three elderly women, Voyages deals with the necessity of keeping the Holocaust’s memory alive, as well as the mixed blessing that that memory fades the further we get from it. Even a trip to Auschwitz is derailed by a bus breakdown, as if to emphasize the unbridgeable gap between us and the past — even our own past. At times, Voyages is so intellectualized it threatens to dissolve, but it still poses profound questions, even if it can’t possibly offer any answers.

Uncensored Cartoons: The Dark Side Of The Golden Age Of Animation, Part 2

(Fri., Dec. 8, 8 p.m., Moore College of Art & Design, 20th & Race Sts., (215) 568-4515, ext. 4099 or www.voicenet.com/~jschwart)

Following up one of its most popular programs ever, Secret Cinema presents a second installment of off-color cartoons from the glory days of animation. Among the more intriguing/disturbing possibilities are Goldilocks and the Jivin’ Bears, a 1944 Fritz Freleng cartoon with the bears as a black jazz trio and Goldilocks as a "jitterbug addict", and animated versions of Amos n’ Andy and Little Black Sambo.