His Girl Friday [1940]

Random Trivia For This Title:

• Walter Burns (Cary Grant) refers to some horrible fate suffered by the last person who crossed him: Archie Leach. Grant's real name was Archibald Leach and he ad-libbed the line.
• When Earl Williams tries to get out of the roll-top desk, Burns (Cary Grant) says: "Get back in there, you Mock Turtle". Grant played the Mock Turtle in the 1933 version of Alice in Wonderland.
• Burns tries to describe Bruce Baldwin, played by Ralph Bellamy. He ends up saying that he "looks like that film actor, Ralph Bellamy". The line was almost left on the cutting room floor: ^[?] Harry Cohn, the studio head, saw the dailies and responded in fury at the impertinence, but he let Howard Hawks leave it in, and it has always been one of the biggest laughs in the film.
• One of the first, if not the first, films to have characters talk over the lines of other characters, for a more realistic sound. Prior to this, movie characters completed their lines before the next lines were started.
• ^[?] Jean Arthur was the first choice to play Hildy. Among the other actresses who also turned down the role were Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Claudette Colbert and Irene Dunne.
• Rosalind Russell was borrowed from MGM for this film. She resented the fact that she wasn't the first choice to play Hildy for director Howard Hawks. She showed up to the audition with her hair wet from swimming.
• The only music is in the first and last two minutes of the film.
• Ginger Rogers wrote that she was offered the role of Hildy Johnson. She read the script, but this was before Cary Grant was cast, and she turned it down. After learning that Grant was cast, she regretted it.
• Many critics in 1940 felt that Cary Grant was badly miscast as Walter Burns, and that Clark Gable would have been much better in the part.
• [The Screen Guild Theater] broadcast a 30 minute radio adaptation of the movie on March 30, 1941 with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant reprising their film roles.