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Keeping up with Hawks - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Howard Hawks

Style, Fall, 1998 by Lea Jacobs

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Hawks's cinema really does begin with the word. The absence of music in His Girl Friday with the exception of the final scene (and the relative dearth of non-diegetic music in Hawks's films when compared with those of most other directors in the classical period) contributes to the use of language as the predominant sonic rhythm. As will be discussed in greater detail below, the rhythm of the actors' movements and gestures is also dictated by the way they speak their lines, so that when describing blocking it is more important to have a complete record of the dialogue than a shot breakdown (given Hawks's predilection for action matching, gestures often overlap a cut, but they can always be specified according to the lines that initiate them). Hawks's editing, often said to be "functional," can be considered so because it is intimately tied to dialogue and gesture, as opposed to imposing an autonomous rhythm on a scene. The first scene in the office between Walter and Hildy, for example, has very little shot-reverse-shot cutting (out of a total of twenty-six shots there are three, shots 4-6)Most of the time, the two interlocutors are shown together in the frame, and scene dissection is for the purpose of preparing for or following the movement of the actors in frame (for example, the change in angle from 18 to 19, which anticipates the movement of the actors around the table) or cut-ins which clarify nuances of delivery and gesture (as for example three cut-ins to Cary Grant: shot 12, for his line "Oh, Walter!" in imitation of Hildy; shot 23, for his cynical facial expression and ejaculation "Hmm" in response to Hildy's warm praise of Bruce; and shot 33, for his line, "This other fellow, well, sorry I didn't get a chance to see him. I'm more or less particular about who my wife marries. Where is he?" in which details of gesture and intonation suggest the double dealing in which Walter is engaged). The final scene between Hildy, Walter, and Bruce in the pressroom is cut much faster than the scene in the office, but here, too, the frequent cut-ins to Walter follow from the need to bring out certain lines of dialogue, spoken to Duffy over the phone, while Hildy and Bruce continue to argue in the background. One has the sense, then, that the scenes are built around the lines and the way the actors perform those lines, and that stylistic decisions about editing follow from this priority accorded to performance.

The sonic rhythm that drives most of the scenes is, of course, extremely fast in His Girl Friday, but at the limit only marginally faster than The Front Page. The slowest scene in His Girl Friday, the scene in which Hildy interviews Earl Williams in jail, clocks in at 2.9 words per second; the slowest in The Front Page, between Molly and Earl, is 2.4 w/s. One of the fastest scenes in both films, the one after the capture of Earl in which Walter convinces Hildy to stay and write the story, clocks in at 5.2 w/s in His Girl Friday and 4.8 in The Front Page.(1) The biggest difference between the two films is that there are more fast scenes in the Hawks. There is a second scene that exceeds 5.0 w/s, the scene in which Molly leaps from the pressroom window, and there are many more scenes over 4.0 w/s. For example, for the twelve roughly equivalent scenes (defined by character entrances and exits) that I have measured following Hildy's capture of Earl Williams, the tempos break down as follows:

Keeping up with Hawks - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Howard Hawks

Style, Fall, 1998 by Lea Jacobs

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