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Keeping up with Hawks - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Howard Hawks
Style, Fall, 1998 by Lea Jacobs
In its beginning and middle phases, largely because of the subplot involving Bruce, His Girl Friday sets more of the action outside the newsroom than does The Front Page. The film starts with a temporally continuous scene that moves through adjacent spaces in the offices of the Morning Post, followed by the lunch room scene with Walter, Bruce and Hildy. Thereafter the action returns to the pressroom but moves outside it for longer intervals than does The Front Page. The scene in which Hildy greets her fellow reporters in the pressroom is followed by one between Walter and Bruce in the Morning Post office, and then by a scene in the jail between Hildy and Earl. Subsequent action in the pressroom is broken up by Hildy's trip to rescue Bruce after his first arrest, a very short scene in the Sheriff s office preceding Earl's prison break (unlike Milestone, Hawks cuts to this location only once but like Milestone he shows Hildy outside the newsroom after the escape, in this case tackling her source), and a scene in the Sheriff's office when the Mayor bribes Pettibone. Once Earl is put in the desk, however, the film never leaves the newsroom and the action is continuous. The dissolves indicating temporal gaps that separate all of the major sequences in the film up to the point of Earl's capture are abandoned in favor of straight cuts between scenes. The absence of dissolves would thus seem to stress the temporal continuity of the action in the last third of the film.
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Even though more of the action is set outside the newsroom in His Girl Friday than in The Front Page, by far the largest portion of the opening of Hawks's film is devoted to two rather long, one might say "theatrical," scenes that do not admit of temporal elision. Thus the opening of His Girl Friday is slow relative to The Front Page, for the latter uses a larger number of shorter scenes and sequences and opts for a relatively elliptical exposition (the Hawks is also longer in terms of screen time, twenty-three versus sixteen minutes). Moreover, from the beginning of the scene in which Earl enters the newsroom to the end of the story, which is forty-three minutes in the case of Milestone and thirty-two minutes in the case of Hawks, only the most minimal temporal manipulations are possible, and Hawks does not even attempt them. Both filmmakers are thus confronted by a narrative with an inherently "slow" time scheme that provides few opportunities for changes in tempo. In particular, they must deal with the problem of how to maintain suspense over the unbroken stretch of action that leads to the dramatic climax and conclusion. The question of which film is "faster" is therefore not just a matter of professional rivalry between two accomplished directors. Speed at the level of performance is necessary if the film is not to drag, and especially in the last third. From the moment Earl is shut in the desk the performance, like Madeleine's Miss Clavel, must move fast and faster to the scene of the disaster.
