The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

86. 1940 - His Girl Friday

His Girl Friday
Colombia PIctures

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.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.