silver nitrate notes

His Girl Friday at 240 Words a Minute

28 oct 2012

Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940) is the film that proves talking can be an action. The average word count per minute of dialogue in a 1940 Hollywood picture was around 90. Hawks and his cast push His Girl Friday past 240. Lines overlap. Actors cut each other off. Sentences are completed by whoever grabs them first. The result is not chaos; it is, once you adjust, one of the cleanest editing styles in American cinema, because the overlaps do the work that cuts would normally do.

The film is a remake of The Front Page (1931), Lewis Milestone's version of the Hecht and MacArthur play. Hawks's innovation is to change the gender of the reporter Hildy Johnson. In the Hecht and MacArthur original, Hildy is a man. Hawks makes Hildy a woman (Rosalind Russell), sets her up as ex-wife of the editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant), and turns what was a buddy picture about journalism into a screwball remarriage comedy that also happens to be about journalism.

Joseph Walker (1892-1985), Hawks's cinematographer, shot the film in conventional studio setups with a preference for two-shots at medium distance. The visual style is not especially interesting. The style is in the dialogue and the blocking. Russell and Grant are usually photographed in the same frame, moving through the newsroom at speed, the camera tracking back to keep them both in shot. When one of them is on the phone, the other is still in frame, usually doing something that contradicts what the first is saying. Hawks uses the wide two-shot the way other directors use cross-cutting.

The racism of the film, specifically the corrupt sheriff's casual bigotry and the lynching subplot that hangs in the background of several scenes, is not incidental. Hawks and his screenwriter Charles Lederer were using the newsroom setting to satirise exactly the kind of 1930s local American politics that ran on casual racism. Whether the satire fully comes off is a live question; I think it mostly does. What Hawks is definitely not doing is endorsing any of it.

Pauline Kael called the film the fastest ever made. This is probably true. The second-fastest is almost certainly also Hawks, the poker-game scenes of The Big Sleep (1946), shot by Sid Hickox. Nobody else in Hollywood talked this quickly.

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sources
[1] McCarthy, Todd. Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. Grove, 1997.
[2] Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made It. Knopf, 1997 (Hawks interview).
[3] Kael, Pauline. 5001 Nights at the Movies. Holt, 1991.
[4] Lederer, Charles. His Girl Friday screenplay (Rutgers ed., 1996).