The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

Honourable Mentions: The Grapes of Wrath, The Mark of Zorro, Rebecca

Another Hawks masterwork this time, albeit one that exemplifies a different but no less integral part of his filmmaking talents - his gift for comedy. Hawks' comedies were whip-smart and relentlessly chatty, films that were propelled at a locomotive pace by actors like Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and which developed their own niche within the genre: the "screwball" picture, the best of which Hawks premiered in 1940 with His Girl Friday.

Pairing regular Hawks collaborator Grant with Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday unleashed Hawks at his most unyieldingly ridiculous, with improvisation, rapid, tongue-twisty dialogue, and a generally unignorable pitch of noise resulting in a film that's both hilarious and somewhat stressful to sit through. It's the good kind of stress though, making His Girl Friday one of the most gratifying pictures of the 1940s.