First Word

Cary Grant is a newspaper big shot. His girl friday Hildy (Rosalind Russell) was his assistant that wrote great stories, and was also his wife before she divorced him in disgust at his preoccupation with work. She shows up at his office to tell him to stop phoning a dozen times a day, and sending 20 telegrams: she is to be married to insurance salesman Ralph Bellamy (one of the Duke brothers in Trading Places 43 years later) the very next day. But Cary Grant would like to remarry her, and makes all kinds of plots to delay Hildy’s trip to the place of the other wedding.

The genius of this movie is overlaying a love comedy on top of a story of political corruption. A man (John Qualen) is to be executed for shooting a cop, but everyone knows the man is simple, that it wasn’t intentional. The powers that be are going to execute him out of purely political motivations.

Most of the subsequent action takes place from the perspective of the press room at the Criminal Courts building, with a view of the jail and the gallows. The press men play poker and talk like wise guys. There is a jail break, guns going off, robberies, beatings, the pathetic Molly figure (Helen Mack), and nervy, aggressive dialogue that give the story a grim and tense overcast.

There are several surprise twists and turns that maintain interest, right up to the end. Will the girl catch the guy? Will Qualen escape execution?

There is an aspect that is interesting from a sociological point of view. When he first hears about Qualen’s plight, Bellamy asks why the state doesn’t just put him into the nut house.

Cary Grant: “Hm! Because it happened to be a colored policemen — you know what that means, Hildy” (looking over at her).

Hildy: “The colored vote is very important in this town.”

Think about how that same situation would be treated in today’s milieu. Note that cow-towing to the “colored vote” was just as prominent then as now; but in 1940, a popular movie could satirize that cow-towing as an evil, as political corruption.

Despite this flash of honesty in its treatment of racial politics — an honesty that would be shocking if portrayed today –, unfortunately, the movie needs to be evaluated chiefly as anti-anti-communist, and more broadly, anti-conservative political propaganda.

The anti-anti-communism is brought over by the newsmen via sarcastic references: the authorities are worried about an uprising of radicals at the execution; yea, the Red Army itself will be arriving in a few minutes. The mayor (Clarence Kolb) mentions the Red Menace, at which they joke, “it’s said you’re on Stalin’s payroll. Yes, you sleep in red underwear.” The contemporary real-life mayor of New York Fiorello LaGuardia is even mentioned by name as a good guy. (LaGuardia was against immigration restrictions, half-Jewish himself, pro-Roosevelt and pro-war.)

The general anti-conservative message is brought out with the not very subtle hint that the coterie of corrupt politicians are Republicans: for example, when Grant promises the governor that the paper will support his bid for the Senate if he offers Qualen a pardon, his editor protests against the plan, because the paper has a long tradition of being Democratic (i.e. the corrupt governor must be a Republican). Recall that then, as now, the myth of the Republican Party as the bastion of conservativism was well established. In the Hollywood vocabulary, one must take “Republicans” as metonymy for anti-New Deal reactionaries, or power-hungry elitists willing to shoot “innocent bystanders, spreading their reign of terror” (1:07).

The crisp dialogue and romance was probably able to lure the 1940 viewer into absorbing the blatant political message at a mostly subliminal level. It is mainly for this reason that I urge a viewing. Hollywood’s unrelenting programming of the goyim is more obvious to our eyes after the passage of a couple generations. Director Howard Hawks was just warming up with this one: Sgt York and To Have and Have Not were soon to follow. Jewish provocateur Ben Hecht did the screenplay.