One of the finest examples of 1930s comedy, and an excellent adaptation of a story that has been told many times, *His Girl Friday* is Hollywood at its best. Perfectly pairing Grant and Russell with an excellent script by Charles Lederer, based on Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's 1931 play, *The Front Page*, it is the kind of studio magic that could occur when the powers-that-be assigned the best work to the best candidates. Grant, whom I found arrogant and repellant later in his career  not to mention redundant  is at his suave-and-smooth best here as Walter Burns, newspaper editor,, with the perfect foil in Rosiland Russell. As Hildy Johnson, Burns' ex-wife, Russell plays was in the process of cutting her teeth developing characters like this. Hildy is the archetype that gave Russell her reputation as a fast-talking dame, with machine gun delivery, and a smart-mouthed answer for everything. Hildy is off to marry Bruce, played by Bellamy, but her ex, Walter, still needs her to be his star reporter and cover the execution of a convicted killer. Every early journalistic stereotype is in full force  from reporters who would stop at nothing to get their story, to the city editor with a visor and sleeve-garters. Gene Lockhart, Ernest Truex and Clarence Kolb are all in fine form, but even the finest supporting performances pale against Grant and Russell. They are both delightful in this stylish slapstick farce that had previously been filmed as *The Front Page* (and later, again as *The Front Page* in 1974, and as *Switching Channels*). It also spawned a slew of imitators, not the least of which was TV's *Moonlighting*. Screenwriter Lederer's scripts have a freshness even today  1995 saw a remake of his script *Kiss Of Death* and 2001 brings us *Ocean's Eleven*, which Lederer wrote the script for in 1960.