Clint Eastwood names cinema’s greatest rom-com: “Absolutely one of my favourite films”
Clint Eastwood has been the stereotypical man’s man for nearly seven decades, a feat that really should not be underestimated. He started out playing cowboy Rowdy Yates in the television series Rawhide before landing his timeless role as The Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy. For years, he played cowboys, tough guys, and tough cops who ran the streets like it was the Wild West.
When he turned to directing, his style was pretty consistent. His films tend to be dark, gritty tales about America, whether it’s a harrowing story about an amateur boxer or the countless movies he’s made about male loners fighting against an unjust system. He’s been directing movies for more than five decades, but in that time, he’s stuck to what he likes – westerns, biopics, political thrillers, and gritty police procedurals.
All of this would suggest that he would have a stereotypically masculine taste in movies as a viewer. You could imagine him kicking back with a beer and watching a Sam Peckinpah or William Friedkin movie. Maybe, if he was feeling a bit spicy, he might watch some pre-2000s Oliver Stone.
However, it turns out that Eastwood isn’t so easily pigeonholed. His taste in movies is much more expansive, and he’s even happy to admit that one of his favourite films of all time is not only a comedy, but a romantic comedy. Yes, Dirty Harry himself has a soft spot for the rom-com, and the one he loves most is one of the best ever made. During a 2010 interview with the American Film Institute, the Unforgiven director said, “His Girl Friday remains one of my absolute favourite films.”
Released in 1940, Howard Hawks’s film is one of the greatest screwball comedies ever made. Cary Grant plays Walter Burns, the editor of a Chicago newspaper who discovers that his ex-wife and former star reporter, Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), is about to get married and quit her career to become a housewife. Determined to prevent this from happening, Walter entices her to write one last piece for the paper about a convicted murderer who is facing execution. The story sets off a string of mishaps as Walter makes repeated attempts to frame Hildy’s fiancé for stealing while she grows increasingly involved in her reporting.
The most famous and distinct aspect of His Girl Friday is the speed of the dialogue. Walter and Hildy bicker at the speed of light, lobbing razor-sharp insults back and forth with a precision that most of us – divorced or otherwise – could only dream of. “Carrie Grant I was a tremendous fan of,” Eastwood said. “He was another one of those guys that was a very distinctive personality on the screen – probably never got as much credit as he deserved. But he was one of the kings of doing that sort of thing… because he had such brilliant timing.”
Grant had already shown his aptitude for the genre time and again with films like The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby, but Russell was an unknown quantity as a comedic actor at the time. Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, and Carole Lombard had turned the role down, and her casting was a gamble. She turned out to be one of Grant’s greatest on-screen sparring partners, however, and ensured that the film could sustain its impossibly quick pace without losing its charm.
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