His Girl Friday (1940)

I am not sure how hard it is going to be to actually analyze films, but I am really enjoyinig watching old movies with my youngest son related to a film analysis class that he is taking.  This is just one of a number that I have been watching this month.
The context of a working woman in the pre-World War II era is an interesting one.  Many women worked during WWI, but they largely left the workforce after the war was over, or they remained in jobs that did not have educational requirements.  Rosalind Russell plays a top notch newspaper reporter, Hildy Johnson, who has divorced her newspaper editor husband, Walter Burns (Cary Grant), and is looking to settle down with a house and a family.  Or is she?  She stops by the newspaper to let her ex-husband know that she is remarrying.

  She knows his double crossing wily ways and yet she allows herself and her new fiance, Bruce Baldwin (played by the ubiquitous Ralph Bellamy), to be sucked into first lunch and then a hot fast-breaking new story.  Baldwin quickly realizes that Hildy is by no means ready to give up the rough and tumble world of a star reporter and asks her if she is sure that she doesn't want to keep working.  He seems like a very decent guy, who gets shafted repeatedly by both Hildy and her ex-husband.  There are some great use of costume to convey Hildy's transformation from sophisticated society girl back to work-a-day reporter--her hats are a dead giveaway, as are her facial expressions and her body language.  It is a great demonstration of transformation in a character so that the audience has anticipated the change before it happens.  Burns is an unscrupulous character, but as the snappy lines are delivered in this screwball comedy, he holds up well.  Lots of fun, even though the social themes are dated.