YMMV / His Girl Friday

• Award Snub: The film failed to receive any traction at the Academy Awards.
• Fair for Its Day: The film can be somewhat troubling today with Hildy's talk of wanting to "become a woman" by getting married. On the other hand, Hildy is a strong-willed, intelligent, and hardly submissive woman (some of the men even start making bets on how much time it will take before she will want to come back to the paper) and is respected by her male colleagues as an equal, as well as being acknowledged as one of their best reporters (likely helped by the character being a man in the original play). This is all quite impressive for a movie released in 1940, but even better, she ends up overcoming her previous aspirations and sticking to her work in the newspaper, albeit on the condition of remarrying her boss and getting a proper honeymoon this time.
• Memetic Mutation: Burns' Get Out! moment is used on some internet forums when someone expresses a controversial and/or unpopular opinion (or makes a particularly atrocious pun).
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: A reporter tries to pull back his divorced wife by repeatedly landing her fiance in jail, hiring a thug to give him counterfeit money, and kidnapping his mother. The divorcee, unaware of this, pulls an Exact Words ploy so she can tear up an interview he requested her to write because he made her late, even though she's aware loss of that interview could cost a man his life. They both work to expose a coverup by the mayor and the sheriff to kill a legally insane man so they can get reelected. All of the other reporters that appear on-screen are a bunch of sleaze-mongers just as relentlessly rotten. And of the five truly innocent people that appear, two are the film's Butt Monkeys, one is kidnapped as one of Walter's ploys to keep Hildy around, one is a completely useless idiot (although ironically he is the Deus ex Machina that saves Williams) and one attempts to kill herself after becoming collateral damage of said relentlessly rotten reporting. Not many good guys here.
• Values Dissonance: Most of the reporters' casual racism from the play has been cleaned up for the movie, but today's audiences can wince at Hildy talking about the importance of the "colored vote."
  • Moments like Walter calling Louie "that dumb immigrant".
• Values Resonance: The story deals with corrupt city officials who exploit issues like crime, race and the Red Menace to get elected.

---