21His Girl Friday (1940)

Of the rapid-fire, overlapping banter between Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, Howard Hawks told Peter Bogdanovich: “I had noticed that when people talk, they talk over one another, especially people who talk fast or who are arguing or are describing something. So we wrote the dialogue in a way that made the beginnings and ends of the sentences unnecessary.” Many consider His Girl Friday the best newspaper movie of all time. Screenwriter Charles Lederer’s credits include Oceans 11 and the big screen adaptation of The Front Page. His Girl Friday was another remake of that famed play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Hawks told Bodganovich that Hecht remained un-credited on the script “because Ben was in trouble at the time – he’d insulted all of England. During the crisis in Israel he said that he felt happy every time a British soldier was killed – something like that.”