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Keeping up with Hawks - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Howard Hawks
Style, Fall, 1998 by Lea Jacobs
The symbolic gestures can only be explained as an illustration of the character's mental state or of the words being spoken. But many of the catalytic and phatic gestures perform symbolic functions as well.(5) Thus as he sits down at the table, Grant leans over, putting his head close to Russell's to suggest the intimacy between them on the line "I've still got the dimple. And in the same place." Russell opens her compact and stares at herself in the mirror, applying lipstick, to indicate her distance from Walter's problems and his outrage over the supposed defection of Sweeny. Grant pursues Russell around the table and she physically pushes him away, as he puts the pressure on her to come back to take Sweeny's place on the paper and she refuses. The reliance on catalytic gesture helps to naturalize what would otherwise be an obviously stylized use of gesture to "match" the meaning of the words. This naturalization of gesture is what distinguishes the acting style deployed here from that codified by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rhetorics of gesture referred to above.
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Gestures of whatever sort can function rhythmically and need to be understood in relation to the complex rhythmic structure of this scene. It begins with a five-second pause following Louis and Duffy's exit. In this first section, which lasts for just under a minute including the pause, the rate of delivery is quite slow, 2 w/s. Grant sits on his desk chair, and Russell moves to sit on the table behind him. Gestures alternate with lines of dialogue. Russell asks for a cigarette, Grant throws one to her. She catches it and taps it down on the table. A slight pause, then Grant lights his cigarette. Russell asks for a match, and so on.
When Grant moves over to stand, and eventually sit, beside Russell on the table, the rate of delivery increases to 4.2 w/s and is maintained there for 1:46. The actors make small gestures, usually involving the hands holding the cigarettes. Grant is more active than Russell, turning his body to look toward camera and then back to look towards her several times, and at one point pacing in front of her. There are fewer and smaller gestures in the conversation after he sits next to her on the table, which concludes this section.
The third section, with a duration of 40 seconds, continues the acceleration begun in the second. It begins with Grant and Russell both rising from the table, their argument getting more heated and the delivery rate going from 4.2 to 4.7 w/s. A great deal of the dialogue :is overlapped, and they interrupt one another frequently. Russell walks off right in disgust and stares in horror at the suggestion that they might get married again after she returns to the paper. She moves back to Grant's position in front of the table, they face off in profile, and the segment ends with short clipped lines of overlapped dialogue and an almost physical bout between them.
(Grant and Russell standing in front of table. He puts both hands on her arms.)
