His Girl Friday
1940 · 92 min · Comedy · Romance · Crime
Hildy Johnson, the star reporter who divorced her editor Walter Burns, comes back to the paper to tell him she is marrying Bruce Baldwin, an insurance man, and leaving for Albany. Walter has other ideas, starting with the Earl Williams case: a man due to hang in the morning. Directed by Howard…
This film has an audio description track, written and recorded here, so a blind or low-vision viewer can follow it by ear. There is nothing to switch on — the description is in the film’s own sound, so pressing play is the whole of it.
We describe films like this for archives and filmmakers: see what audio description costs and audio description for independent films.
Free to watch via internet-archive.
Is His Girl Friday public domain? The rights evidence — the copyright registration, the renewal search and the sources we checked, written out in full so you can check them too.
Watch it here
This is our restoration, with the audio description track mixed in. There is nothing to switch on: press play and the description is in the sound. It is free, there is no account, and nothing is counted.
Sound only — 179 MB rather than 3.0 GB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
Or watch it with the picture:
The same film without description, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Every film here that carries audio description — what description is, who it is for, and how ours are made.
How this print was restored
This copy of His Girl Friday was restored here, from a print that had been through a good deal before it reached us. The work finished on 2026-10-01. Every step is listed below, because a re-encode passed off as a restoration is worth nothing and the only way to tell them apart is to say what was done.
- 72 described cues across a 91 minute 50 second runtime, filling 3 minutes 42 seconds of gaps between dialogue -- 4.1 percent of the film -- at 158 words per minute. The film is wall-to-wall overlapping dialogue; the description goes only where the dialogue leaves room.
- Figures measured from the shipped sidecar and the shipped master.
- The original soundtrack was repaired from the laserdisc copy: rumble filtered below 60 Hz, the top end rolled off above 7 kHz, loudness matched in two passes.
- Described track flagged default and visual_impaired, with the original audio kept as a separate selectable stream.
- Captioned verbatim: 1,877 cues, every disputed line ruled by Mike.
The print we started from is here, so the before and after can be compared.
More like this: Free mystery and crime films, Free comedy films, Free drama films.