The first film in the Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection, Volume 4 is wonderful and fantastic, His Girl Friday, helmed by the incredible Howard Hawks, and starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, I was very eager to dig into the film to see how the upgraded image looked, as well as the chance to delve into the wealth of extras.

I’ve always loved a good newspaper movie, and if you can make it a romantic comedy simultaneously, you’ve pretty much got me locked in as your target audience. Grant is Walter Burns a newspaper editor, whose ex-wife, and now ex-reporter Hildy (Russell), shows up to inform him that she’s getting married tomorrow and leaving journalism behind. Walter, however, schemes to win her back and get her to write one more story for him, a big story, a political story, something that could rock the city.

Grant is always fun to watch, the physicality, the ad-libs, the facial expressions, he’s fantastic, and pairing him with Russell, who goes toe-to-toe with him and it’s a fantastic sight to behold.

The 4K scan of the film’s negative brings the image into sharp clarity, the greys, blacks and whites are stunning, I say this with great confidence, as I recently watched the film on a streaming service, and this image is leaps and bounds above that. It looks and sounds great, the image is so clean, and you can’t help but grin as the dialogue comes fast and furious.

I love film extras, I love the look behind the scenes to see how a film came together, and His Girl Friday delivers. The accompanying Blu-ray disc is packed with extras, and it was a lot of fun to explore. There are classic trailers, a look at the vintage advertising which includes classic posters and lobby cards.

There are also a slew of featurettes, one about the film including the changes of Hildy from a man to a woman and adding in the love story, and its origin, the stageplay The Front Page, a compressed look at the careers of Howard Hawks, Russell and Grant. I was intrigued by a half-hour doc on Ben Hecht the author of the original play, and there is a look at the incredible fashions designed for the film by Robert Kalloch while commenting on the importance of costume design for story and character, and a delightful featurette on the importance of sound in the film, considering the dialogue comes at 250 words a minute!

And to top it all off, there’s an insightful audio commentary by renowned film critic Todd McCarthy.

I’m only one film into the fantastic Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection Volume 4 and I’m already floored by the look and sound of the 4K upgrade as well as the extras. This is definitely a must-have for cinephiles, and it’s available now!