This post gives away the endings of both films.
Hildy Johnson is saying goodbye. She has her hat on, a train to Albany to catch, and a speech ready for the reporters in the press room of the criminal courts building, the men she worked beside for years, before she divorced the paper's editor and quit. She is going to marry an insurance man and live a quiet life. The speech is barely under way when gunshots sound from the jail yard: the prisoner due to hang in the morning has escaped. The reporters run for the telephones. Hildy stays by the door until the last of them is out of sight, then crosses the room, picks up a telephone and calls Walter. A few minutes later she is running down the street in a skirt and heels after the prison warden, and she brings him down with a flying tackle.
At no point has she decided to stay. By the time she finds out, she is already reporting.
His Girl Friday, released in 1940, is usually filed as a comedy of remarriage. Stanley Cavell gave the genre its name in Pursuits of Happiness, his study of the Hollywood films in which a divorced or divorcing couple is brought back together, and Howard Hawks's film is one of his central cases. Walter Burns, Hildy's editor and former husband, sabotages her engagement from start to finish by every means available, which include having her fiancé arrested more than once. The marriage plot supplies the machinery, and the film uses it to tell a story about work. It is a comedy of recognition, and the person Hildy recognises is herself.
The distinction worth drawing is between two kinds of change a story can show. The first and far more common kind is a change of mind. A character holds a position, new information arrives, and the position alters. The scene that produces it can be written cleanly: the letter is opened, the truth comes out, the character sees that she was wrong.
The second kind is rarer and more satisfying. Nothing new arrives. What changes is the character's sight of something that was there from the first scene, and the drama lies in her catching up with it. Aristotle's word for the moment is anagnorisis, the passage from ignorance to knowledge, and his great example is a man discovering who he is. Elizabeth Bennet has the English novel's most famous version when, having taken in Darcy's letter, she concludes, "Till this moment I never knew myself."
Hildy's opinions of the two men do not change at all. She arrives at the paper knowing that Walter is a charming liar who would sell his own mother for a front page, and she leaves knowing exactly that. She thinks her fiancé, Bruce, is kind, decent and dull, and nothing in the film revises the view. Ralph Bellamy plays him with such good nature that the audience agrees with her on every point, and likes him, and is still relieved when he leaves. What revises is her account of herself. She came in to announce that she was finished with newspapers and wanted an ordinary life, and the film gives her body ninety minutes to contradict her mouth.
The evidence is on screen from the first shot. She walks through the newsroom trading greetings with half the staff, and the audience can see who she is some time before she can. When Walter persuades her to write one last story, she drives a hard bargain on her fiancé's behalf, then pays the warden to let her interview the condemned man and writes it up at once. The escape does the rest.
After the tackle comes the scene that finishes the argument. Bruce, bailed out of jail a second time, comes into the press room looking for her and for his mother, and Hildy is typing. She hears him and does not look up. He talks, and she types. He leaves, and she barely notices he has gone. Hawks films her discovery as a failure of attention, which is how people usually make it.
Recognition is harder to write than a change of mind because the evidence must be planted in plain view and never pointed at. Point at it and the audience gets there too early and waits, impatient, for the character to catch up. Hide it and the ending feels arbitrary. Hawks solves the problem with speed. The dialogue in His Girl Friday is famous for overlapping, lines running over one another faster than a first viewing can follow, and the evidence about Hildy goes past in the same rush. The audience catches her giving herself away at roughly the rate she fails to notice it.
The recognition carries more weight because of a change Hawks made to his source. In The Front Page, the 1928 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, Hildy Johnson is a man leaving the paper to get married. Hawks turned Hildy into a woman and made Walter her former husband, and the change folded two plots into one. The question of which life she wants and the question of which man she wants become the same question, and a single recognition answers both.
It is worth being honest about the answer. Walter has not changed either. In the last scene he is still scheming, and the honeymoon he offers her is to be a strike in Albany, which Hildy accepts after a moment's regret. Cavell thought these films were about a marriage chosen again with full knowledge, and the knowledge here includes knowing precisely what Walter is. The film makes no promise that the marriage will be easy. It promises only that Hildy now knows what she is, and it lets her choose on that basis, which is more than most romantic comedies allow.
Encanto, eighty-one years later, runs the same architecture through an animated musical about a Colombian family. The Madrigals live in a house that is alive, and every child in the family receives a magical gift at a ceremony, by opening a door that appears for them. One sister is superhumanly strong, another makes flowers bloom wherever she goes, a cousin hears everything in the town. When Mirabel's turn came, no door appeared. She is the only Madrigal without a gift, and the family has made a quiet space around that fact in which she is loved and not quite counted.
The house begins to crack, and Mirabel is the only one who sees the cracks. The story then looks as though it will be the first kind, a change of mind brought about by action: she will find out what is wrong, fix it, and earn her place. Her lost uncle Bruno, who sees the future, left behind a vision of her standing in front of the broken house, and when it comes out, the family reads it as proof that she is the cause. The vision was accurate, and everyone, Mirabel included, read it wrongly.
The climax removes the fixing altogether. Mirabel and her grandmother, Alma, finally quarrel in the open, the house collapses, and the candle that held the family's magic goes out. Mirabel runs away and ends up at a river. Alma finds her there, and it turns out to be the river where Alma's husband was killed the night the miracle began. What follows is a double recognition. Alma sees that her fear of losing the miracle had turned into a demand that every one of her grandchildren justify it, and that the demand was what had been cracking the house. Mirabel sees her grandmother's life for the first time, and with it her own place in the family, which was never a failure to be corrected. Her part was to see the family clearly, and she had been doing it since the film's opening number, in which she introduces every Madrigal and every gift before anyone else can.
Nothing new has been added to Mirabel by the end. The family rebuilds the house with the help of the town, and when it is finished they give her a doorknob, which she fits to the front door. She has no gift of her own. The house comes back to life anyway.
The smaller recognitions in the film follow the same pattern. The sister who makes perfect flowers discovers, in the middle of a quarrel, that she can grow a cactus, and that she never wanted the perfection or the engagement arranged for her. The strong sister admits that she is tired. Neither has changed her mind about anything. Each has finally looked at something she had been carrying for years.
The two films share almost nothing on the surface, a screwball newspaper comedy with overlapping dialogue and a family musical for children. They share the same account of what a character arc is:
The end state is present in the first scene.
The audience sees it before the character does.
The drama is the character catching up.
The resolution is a recognition rather than a decision.
A writer who builds a protagonist this way gets something a change of mind cannot provide, which is an ending that feels inevitable and surprising at the same time, because the answer was on screen all along and the character was the last to see it.
I have watched the press room scene more often than the rest of the film. What I go back for is the pause at the door, the few seconds in which Hildy waits for the last reporter to leave before she lets herself pick up the phone. It is the whole film in a gesture: the recognition has already happened in her body, and the rest of the running time is her mind being informed.
Several of the novels this project retells are built around the same kind of moment:
Robert Audley opens Lady Audley's Secret as a barrister who has never had a brief nor wished for one, and closes it as a rising man on the home circuit who has distinguished himself in the great breach of promise case of Hobbs v. Nobbs: a man who found out what he was for by being unable to let a question go.
Edmond Dantès, deep into his revenge in The Count of Monte Cristo, reaches the point where he has to recognise what the revenge has made of him.
Dorian Gray is shown the truth about himself again and again, in the portrait upstairs, and never once accepts it. His novel is built around a refusal of recognition.
Watch His Girl Friday if you have not, all ninety-two minutes of it, and watch for the pause at the door.