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Keeping up with Hawks - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Howard Hawks
Style, Fall, 1998 by Lea Jacobs
We had an interesting thing during the making of it - the newspaper-men, who looked on the story of Front Page as a sort of Bible, were rather horrified at the idea of changing the reporter to a girl. We arranged a showing to the newspapermen, and we had the screen split into two parts. We ran the one picture on one and the other picture on the other, and they said, "My God, your picture's so much faster than the other!"
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As is well known- Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's 1928 play The Front Page was first made into a film by Lewis Milestone in 1931 and then by Howard Hawks as His Girl Friday in 1939. With Ben Hecht's collaboration, Hawks changed the protagonist Hildy Johnson from male to female. As in the play and the first film version, Johnson's boss, Walter Burns, attempts to prevent Hildy from leaving town to get married. Burns is particularly pressed to retain Hildy's services because a big story is about to break: Earl Williams, a sorry man who inadvertently killed a police officer, is being hanged for political reasons, to help garner votes for the Mayor and Sheriff who are running for re-election on a law and order ticket. In the case of the Hawks film, Walter and Hildy are recently divorced. Thus, Walter is not simply trying to keep his ace reporter on his staff, but also to regain his wife in the face of a rival. Thus, unlike the other versions, Hawks's film fits the mold of the comedy of remarriage so popular in the late thirties.
His Girl Friday is famously "fast" and, as per Hawks's boast, is often said to be "faster" than Milestone's The Front Page. But the question of what constitutes tempo in this case, or in film in general, is still an open one. Hawks himself seems to be referring to the speed of delivery and he attributes the greater speed of His Girl Friday to the device of overlapping dialogue: "You put a few words in front of somebody's speech and put a few words at the end, and they can overlap it. It gives you a sense of speed that actually doesn't exist. And then you make the people talk a little faster" (McBride 80-81). But Andrew Sarris argues that it is the result of"invisible" editing and more fluid camera movement (59). Barry Salt disagrees, noting that The Front Page is cut at about the same rate as His Girl Friday, with an average shot length (ASL) of 13 seconds, and that it actually has more camera movement than the Hawks film (224). Salt thus agrees with Hawks that the speed is a function of the rate at which the actors speak their lines, and also the introduction of more "business" in the staging of His Girl Friday. In trying to account for the spectator's sense of tempo, however, it seems important to consider how the variable rhythms of editing, speaking, and figure movement interact and how they help to articulate the rhythm of the film as a whole, its accelerandos and ritardandos. This essay aims to explain pacing in His Girl Friday, with some backward glances at Milestone's The Front Page. The comparison of these two films, which give us the opportunity to contrast the performance and staging of similar scenes--in some cases scenes which are the same line for line - may help to provide tools for analyzing acting, one of the most difficult areas to analyze.
Narrative Structure
Pacing is partly a function of variables such as editing or speech that can be more or less easily quantified in relation to the fixed time of the screening (a shot held for so many seconds, so many words per second). But it is also a function of elements that are less easily measured and that bear on the representation of temporal relationships within a narrative. Gerard Genette has succeeded in specifying changes in tempo inA la recherche du temps perduin terms of distinct conventions for relating the time of the story, defined as an abstract set of events, to the time of the narrative, the written representation of those events (122-44). He identifies conventions such as novelistic summary, in which the written discourse covers much "greater" expanses of story time, and the scene, in which there is a"match" between story time and the time of the discourse. As David Bordwell has shown, despite the fixed time of the screening, which differentiates reading from film viewing, the same arguments apply to the representation of temporal relationships in narrative film (80-88). Thus, although they may be cut at the same rate, a montage that covers the fifteen years it takes our hero to grow up is "faster" than a scene that shows him delivering newspapers in his neighborhood on a single Sunday morning.
The dramatic scene is Genette's model of a "slow" segment (understood as slow in relation to narrative summary). The play The Front Page would seem to be particularly slow by this account. It has three acts, all of which take place in the pressroom of the criminal courts building with the published version of the play specifying a twenty minute gap between the first and second act and a five minute gap between the second and third. The film versions allow for a bit more temporal manipulation, but not much. Milestone starts with a temporally continuous sequence that moves from the men testing the gallows to the reporters in the pressroom and then, via a phone call, to Walter Burns in his office. There is a temporal gap indicated by a dissolve, and then an episodic sequence that shows Louis and Butch looking for Hildy, followed by a sequence showing Hildy, his girl and her mother at their apartment intercut with Walter outside the building. This sequence is succeeded by a scene between Walter and Hildy at a speakeasy. Thus, the film encompasses a number of temporal gaps and covers a fairly wide spatial range in its opening of sixteen minutes. After this point, the action is largely restricted to the pressroom and is temporally continuous. Milestone tries to break this continuity up by alternating between the pressroom and the Sheriff s office in the sequence of Earl's prison break (as well as a brief scene outside when Hildy pursues Jacobi for news) and again in the sequence where the Mayor bribes Pincus while Hildy duns Woodenshoes for money. After Hildy has rejected Peggy, and is working frantically for Walter on the story of Earl's capture, Milestone cuts outside the pressroom in a brief sequence that shows: Peggy exiting the building, Mrs. Grant forcibly held by Louis in the taxi, Walter back in the pressroom trying to figure out a way to get the desk out the window and barking orders to Duffy over the phone, and the reporters outside the jail infirmary waiting for news of Molly. This sequence, which unites disparate spaces showing what are presumably temporally simultaneous actions, is, like the crosscut sequences, an attempt to break out of the spatial restriction of the newsroom and to increase the pace at a moment of extreme narrative tension. Later, brief cutaways to Bensinger exiting the building, and to the reporters about to return to the pressroom change location to provide a break between distinct phases of the action and, in the latter case, to increase suspense.
