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Keeping up with Hawks - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Howard Hawks
Style, Fall, 1998 by Lea Jacobs
If the gestures thus seem to "keep up" with the words, it should be noted that all the decisive reconfigurations of the blocking can be correlated to shifts in tempo: Grant sitting on the desk chair and Russell on the table in section 1, Grant standing beside Russell, and then sitting next to her at the end of section 2, Grant and Russell both rising from the table as the tempo builds in section 3, Russell walking up to the desk to put out her cigarette as the pace slackens in 4 and then returning to Grant's side as the pace builds up again, Russell standing still and fussing with her make up while Grant paces off to the right in 5, the circling around the table that defines section 6, and, in the last section, a return to the desk and Grant pacing back and forth, and then, after the final deceleration, to a position in front of the door for the exit. Thus, unlike Milestone, who seems to want to establish some kind of equivalence between the rate at which characters move and the rate at which they speak, it is tempo changes that seem most important for Hawks's blocking. An actress does not need to stand still if she is speaking slowly, but a decrease in speaking tempo might well be accompanied by a movement away to an ashtray.
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The important distinction between His Girl Friday and The Front Page, then, is not that His Girl Friday is faster, but that the changes in speaking tempo are more finely calibrated and articulated with gesture and figure movement in another way. Hawks uses gesture to keep pace with dialogue, and often establishes rhythmic equivalencies between specific gestures, sounds and words. Gestures in The Front Page tend to be much slower and fewer and are not in general exploited for rhythmic purposes. Hawks tends to have changes in speaking tempo mirrored by changes in blocking, while Milestone aims to correlate figure movement much more directly with speech. This said, it must be noted that in many respects the films are quite similar to one another. As Barry Salt has observed, they are cut the same way in several passages, and my analysis has indicated elements of blocking and even gesture taken over by Hawks. The differences would seem to be minor: a re-arrangement of blocking and 30 seconds subtracted from the scene of Molly's leap from the window, some extra lines of dialogue and a minute added to the scene of Bruce, Hildy, and Walter in the pressroom. But I hope to have demonstrated that these small differences are the result of a more fundamental divergence in the way the two directors have handled the rhythmic articulation of the performance. Pacing, like genius, lies in the details.
Notes
I would like to thank Jane Greene for her help with the transcriptions of dialogue for this essay.
