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Keeping up with Hawks - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Howard Hawks
Style, Fall, 1998 by Lea Jacobs
WALTER. Ah ah.
HILDY. . . sending me twenty telegrams . . .
WALTER. I write a beautiful telegram, don't I? Everybody says so.
HILDY. Are you going to listen to what I have to say?
WALTER. Look, look. What's the use of fighting, Hildy. I tell you what you do - you come back to work on the paper, if we find we can't get along in a friendly fashion, we'll get married again.
HILDY. What?
WALTER. Certainly. I haven't any hard feelings.
HILDY. Oh, Walter, you're wonderful in a loathsome sort of way. Now will you please be quiet just long enough for me to tell you what I came up here to say?
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WALTER. Come and have some lunch and you can tell me everything.
More will be said below about the tempo of this scene. The point here is that the way the dialogue is written helps to motivate the use of overlapping dialogue and the elimination of pauses between lines, to contribute to the speed of delivery.
No film can be fast all of the time, and a fast tempo appears faster when contrasted with a slow one; to understand pacing we need to look at how Hawks achieves variation in tempo. One option, which Hawks seems to have experimented with extensively throughout his career, is to have a voluble fast-talking character pitched against a slower, more laconic one. In Scarface (1932), this contrast is played out between Osgood Perkins's Johnny Lovo and Paul Muni's Tony Camonte. It is particularly evident in the last scene between them, in which Muni says very little, pausing frequently, while Lovo pleads desperately for his life. (Unfortunately most of Muni's lines here and elsewhere in the film are too short to get an accurate count of words per second,(2) although a longer speech, from the first scene in the police station and seeming to me about the same speed, clocks in at 2.5 w/s while Lovo's longest speech, just prior to his murder and beginning"No, no I didn't do it," has a speed reminiscent of His Girl Friday, 4.8 w/s.) The same rhythmic contrast is evident in all of their scenes together with the exception of the scene in which Camonte, glorying in his new-found possession of a machine gun, openly defies Johnny and plans to attack the North Side. Muni talks much faster here, it seems to me finally matching Lovo's speed, the fast staccato rhythm of his words leading to the line "Look out Johnny, I'm going to spit," and the equally fast staccato of the gun going off. A similar bifurcation between fast and slow talkers can be found in Ball of Fire where the brisk slang spoken by Barbara Stanwyck's Sugarpuss O'Shea, assorted gangsters, and working stiffs goes up against the cultivated language spoken by Gary Cooper's Professor Bertram Potts and his colleagues (for examples, listen to the scene where Potts tries to interview Sugarpuss backstage in her dressing room, or the scene in which the professors are amazed by the discursive style of the garbageman). This opposition is also evident in the scene from Rio Bravo between Wayne and Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez (playing Carlos) cited above, and in all of the scenes between Wayne and Angie Dickinson.
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