I was having a hard time imagining what this film would be like with a male lead character, as it was originally intended to be, given the fact that the heterosexual romance is at the very center of the film.
But I did notice that Hildy does take on a decidedly masculine role, functioning in the newsroom as a “newspaper man,” as she says. Cavell points out that Walter is far more vain than Hildy, which I thought was an interesting gender role reversal. For some reason, I found Walter to be the least appealing of all Cary Grant’s characters–and perhaps that is because of this vanity.
But Hildy also is able to assert her feminine characteristics–for instance, she is extremely nurturing to Earl, the accused murderer, at first–she seems to exert both her cunning newspaper know-how and her “natural” nurturing feminine instincts to promote his innocence. However, in the end, her presence as a woman in a “man’s world” is reaffirmed at the end when she rejects her dreams of domesticity and life with Bruce to live with Walter in the world of newspaper.
