Every day, come rain or shine or internet tubes breaking, Film School Rejects showcases a trailer from the past. What’s fascinating about this trailer is that it takes one of the wordiest movies ever made and puts all of the actors on mute for a significant amount of its run time. If you’re irritated by comedy trailers showcasing all the best jokes in an effort to spoil the movie, this trailer should be a breath of fresh air. And after listening to the speaking speed of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, you’ll hope they eventually come up for that air, too. Think you know what it is? Check the trailer out for yourself:

Classic Hollywood romantic comedies provide an interesting moment in film history where genre formation and genre subversion developed as one in the same. The premises of these films are essentially contradictory. They reveal the institution of marriage to be just that, an institution constantly reinforced by culture but one that has only ascribed rather than inherent value. They play with and thus reveal the false ideals associated with the notion of perfect couplehood that in theory should propel two people toward marriage by portraying the constant dis-union and inevitable union of their characters as one predicated on deceit and double-crossings. All this occurs to ultimately marry the couple which as an act alone functions as narrative closure in of itself without ascribing exactly what that closure means to its characters, an overlooking of contradictions that supposes the institution itself wipes away all previous tensions. Marriage here is not a means to an end, but an end – and “The End,” as the union is always accompanied by such a title card.

Every Sunday in February, Film School Rejects presents a nominee for Best Picture that was made before you were born and tells you why you should like it. This week, Old Ass Movies presents the movie behind the movie that everyone else knows in an attempt to prove that remakes aren’t necessarily all bad. Also to prove that the Academy doesn’t always know what they’re doing even when they know what they’re doing.

The romantic comedy is, in many ways, as “pure” as genre as there ever was one, as it requires the strict adherence to owning up on an audience’s specific set of expectations – you know going in that the two central characters are going to end up together, the slight variation (and appeal) of the genre takes place in the journey to that anticipated point.

Fast-taking, strong women, and Cary Grant being Cary Grant. His Girl Friday is a film over 70 years ahead of its time.