His Girl Friday (1940)
This is a genre I haven’t seen too much of, and doesn’t really exist any more, but I always thoroughly enjoy. That is, the screwball romance, a movie where two people talk at each other at three hundred miles per hour from start to finish while a plot happens somewhere. Cary Grant (have heard of) and Rosalind Russell (have not) are the talkers in question. He is a newspaper editor and she was both his star reporter and wife, and is now neither. She comes to tell him she’s marrying some other dude, tomorrow, so he tricks her into sticking around because he knows she can’t resist a good story. The story is that of Earl Williams, on death row and due to be executed, and the sheriff and mayor are pushing it through because he supposedly killed a black cop, and they don’t want to lose the black vote.
Half of this movie is Grant and Russell throwing verbal digs at each other at hurricane speed, and a lot of the rest of it is them doing the same to other people. This includes the new fiancé Bruce, who gets set up to be arrested (and his mother kidnapped) on multiple occasions to get him out of the way. I feel like I heard about three hours of dialogue in a 90 minute movie, most of it hilarious. Everyone is kind of terrible, and in that they deserve each other.