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

                                     Hawks           Milestone

Equals or above 5 w/s                  2                 0
Equals or above 4 w/s                  7                 2
Equals or above 3 w/s                  3                 5
Equals or above 2 w/s                  0                 5

The average speed of delivery in these scenes is thus 3.2 w/s for The Front Page and 4.3 w/s for His Girl Friday.

The most obvious perceptible difference in the delivery in the two films is the elimination of pauses between different characters' speech in His Girl Friday. At the limit this is the result of overlapping lines of dialogue as Hawks describes above, but more often it is achieved simply by eliminating pauses between the end of one character's speech and the beginning of another's. (But for an example of Hawks deliberately introducing pauses between speeches to slow down a scene, see the sultry dialogue between Bacall and Bogart into Have and Have Not; the scene between them the morning after his rescue of Beaucaire clocks in at 1.6 w/s in comparison with the next scene which is 3.8 w/s.) If we look at the timing of a single lengthy speech, therefore, without pauses in each case, the two films approach each other in terms of speed. Thus, the duologue after the capture of Earl Williams, in which Hildy talks into two phones at once, to both Walter and his/her fiance(e), is 4.5 w/s in the case of His Girl Friday and 4.2 w/s in the case of The Front Page, a difference small enough to be negligible in a speech this short (given the margin of error introduced by how precisely I can start and stop the stopwatch) and which, in any case, may not be perceptible.

An example of how the pauses present in the Milestone version can slow down the pace of delivery is the first scene between Molly and the reporters in the pressroom. Hawks's version of this scene is at 3.8 w/s (excluding the pause at the end, which I will return to later) while Milestone's is at 2.9 w/s. In part this difference occurs because Mae Clark as Molly enunciates more slowly than does Helen Mack in the Hawks version. But it is also because Clark pauses after almost each sentence she speaks. Many of these pauses are too short to time accurately, but one is long enough to be measured. After Molly hears the gallows in operation, she runs to the window looks out and says, "What's that?" to which one of the reporters replies, "They are fixing up a pain in the neck for your boyfriend." Molly gasps in response to this. In the case of the Milestone film, there is a pronounced pause before the next line, "Shame on you," while the actress sobs, bending her head down to hip level and putting her hand on her forehead. The time from the line "What's that?" to "Shame on you" is thus thirteen seconds. In the case of the Hawks film, the pause after "what's that?" is only four seconds,just the time it takes for the reporter to reply and for Mack to turn and gasp.

Hawks also has the reporters make more interjections in Molly's dialogue. In the Milestone version the following speech by Molly is delivered without interruptions and with slight pauses between each phrase: