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Add rebound caught in the crossfire to the list of screwball tropes. Think some pathetic hick. Or someone who otherwise contrasts one of the partners who’ve just split up so drastically that we harbor a desire for a reconciliation with the person whom they’re better matched with—even if the relationship itself seems problematic, because hey it’s not real life, it’s the movies. 

     Think about Heat (1995, Michael Mann). The last time I saw Heat in the theater, more than anything else, for the first time I laughed harder than I ever had before during the fight between Vincent Hanna and his wife. With all the yelling and cussing between them, the way there’s this totally random perfectly cast Xander Berkeley character as the other guy, who has no idea what he’s walked into. It’s even funnier because Berkeley plays it as this boring, poor sap who we feel sorry for due to the excessive amount of abuse he’s obliterated with. Screwball is pretty dark sometimes. 
     Ralph Bellamy has been typecast in this exact role twice. In both The Awful Truth (1937, Leo McCarey) and His Girl Friday (1940, Howard Hawks). And what is Xander Berkeley’s character’s name in Heat? Ralph. Have I stumbled onto something here?
 

His Girl Friday is a cyclical codependent narcissistic abuse screwball copkiller comedy that ultimately proves yet another emerging screwball trope: that those best suited for successfully maintaining a romantic relationship with their partner also happen to be the most unscrupulous. 
     Even among Hawks’s screwball trifecta—the other two are Twentieth Century (1934, Hawks) and Bringing Up Baby (1938, Hawks)—His Girl Friday is the one that’s the most relentlessly fast-paced. Both in terms of the delivery of its dialogue and the narrative’s plot. HILDY (Rosalind Russell) and WALTER BURNS (Cary Grant) have just divorced. And in the blink of an eye it seems she’s already become engaged to a rebound. And their train leaves in 2 hours for Albany where they’re getting married the next day. So the conniving Walter has to break them up, remarry Hildy, get a reprieve for a man sentenced to the electric chair for murdering a cop whom Walter believes is not guilty by way of insanity but really has an ulterior motive based on a corrupt sheriff and mayor getting re-elected by the end of the movie. Now that’s how you craft a ticking clock plot device.
     This is my favorite Cary Grant role. The suave effervescent gaslighting defines Walter Burns. The slicked hair, double-breasted gray suit, and cigarette smoking to be forever iconic. Walter lies, steals, traffics in counterfeit money, prostitutes, hired guns, and by all appearances himself a louse conman. But we like him? He prefigures the Scorsese anti-hero. Everything in His Girl Friday is so maddeningly thrown into a frenzy that we accept all of this nasty stuff part and parcel with the comedy. Even more than EARL WILLIAMS, think about that girl MOLLY who is so exasperated by this whole rotten system, this whole rotten world, that she jumps out the window. And we’re right back to laughing the next minute. How does this movie get away with it? Is Hawks a Walter Burns? Does Walter want Hildy back more as reporter or wife? Does this question even matter?
     I don’t know where else to fit this in but another screwball trope: Williams’ backstory leads us to understand that he lost his mind because he lost his job of 20 years. Tough times. But His Girl Friday is also this shimmering example of a comedy still able to laugh at all manner of tragic human vice right before the war. When Hildy gets her scoop Walter barks “Throw the front page out. Never mind the European war we got something more important that that. Take Hitler and stick him on the funny page.” It’s a little prophetic. Because soon, the war would be too horrific to laugh about. To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch) pokes fun, but by Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino) Hitler is indeed on the funny page.
     Another tenet of screwball is that through all the insanity, to highlight the insanity of real life and adequately convey it, at the end of the film, the couple are right back where they started. Hildy outs Walter as thinking she’d be stupid enough to buy him pushing her out as a reverse psychology ploy, while simultaneously falling into it. She accepts his second marriage proposal on the contingency that this time they get a honeymoon and the next second he reneges. And she concedes to it nevertheless. Right back where they started. Doomed to repeat for eternity their same roles. 
     Beneath all this toxicity I find His Girl Friday the kind of cynical mockery of romantic relationships to be the most romantic of all. The crook scamming his mark to defeat her as just another of his criminal enterprises to keep him afloat in a sea of other sharks just as blood-thirsty as he.