Top 250 Challenge: 166

His Girl Friday (1940)
Number 228 on IMDb's Top 250

Cary Grant is hard-boiled newspaper editor Walter Burns, Rosalind Russell his ex-wife and former star reporter. She wants to marry Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) and settle down to a normal life, but Burns has other ideas. When a convicted murderer escapes from the bumbling sheriff (Gene Lockhart) on the eve of his execution, Burns entices Johnson to cover one last story, and then the hilarity really ensues.

Trivia: Some memorable moments incorporate real life references: Burns tries to describe Bruce Baldwin (played by Ralph Bellamy). He ends up saying that he "looks like that film actor, Ralph Bellamy". Walter Burns (Cary Grant) refers to some horrible fate suffered by the last person who crossed him: Archie Leach. Grant's real name is Archie Leach and he ad-libbed the line. One of the first, if not the first, films to have characters talk over the lines of other characters, for a more realistic sound. Prior to this, movie characters completed their lines before the next lines were started.

This was a neat little movie to watch, but the dialog as so fast and so full of quick one-liners and off hand remarks that it left you exhausted just watching. The director Howard Hawks allowed ad libbing from his actors but Rosalind Russell was a little uncomfortable with doing that. She decided her character needed more lines so she hired a writer to write more lines for her to "ad lib" in her scenes, Hawks never realized this, but Cary Grant did and would ask Russell every morning, "So what have you got for us today?"