Of all the classics of the Golden Age of Hollywood, the most overrated is His Girl Friday (1940) — and I say this as a great lover of Howard Hawks’s movies. This is his big clunker. It’s frenetic, regularly unfunny, and completely lacking in the vivid and memorable supporting-actor parts that are so important in the true classics. (And in other Hawks films.) The only way you could possibly rescue the movie is by seeing it as a very different kind of story than its self-presentation woul...
