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Keeping up with Hawks - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Howard Hawks
Style, Fall, 1998 by Lea Jacobs
BRUCE. Hildy. Hildy, I'm taking the nine o'clock train.
WALTER. (to Duffy) Well, what's the matter[inaudible] that?
HILDY. (to Bruce) Sure, Sure.
BRUCE. Did you hear what I said? I said, I'm taking the nine o'clock train.
HILDY. (the first four words in unison with Bruce) . . . the nine o'clock train. Oh, Bruce! I put it in here!
In addressing Duffy, Walter also comments on Bruce's remarks, his words doing duty in two conversations at once:
BRUCE. You don't want to come with me, do you?
HILDY. (to Walter, who has taken the sheet of paper she is typing from) I need that! WALTER. (to Hildy) Well, come on!
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BRUCE. Answer me! You don't, do you?
WALTER. (to Duffy, but Ralph Bellamy does a double take as if it is addressed to Bruce)No! Take all those Miss America pictures off page six.
Or again, with a cut into a medium shot of Walter alone on the last line, to stress the point of his address:
HILDY. Give me just a second. Can't you see this is the biggest thing in my life?
BRUCE. I see! I'll keep. I'm like something in the ice box, aren't I?
WALTER.(still on the phone but this time obviously to Bruce) Yeah!
The cutting elsewhere in this scene works to pit one conversation against another. There is a cut into the medium shot of Walter when Bruce mentions his money and wallet and Walter checks to make sure the money is counterfeit, and again to bring out his hostile remarks to Bruce, and once again to underscore his complaint that he can not concentrate and to focus attention on Hecht and MacArthur's great line (Walter having eliminated all mention of war and earthquake from the front page): "No, no, leave the rooster story alone - that's human interest."
Finally Hildy brings all the conversations to a halt, banging on the table to get both men's attention. The overlapping of dialogue common in the rest of the scene is reduced here, and pauses are introduced between lines, to further call attention to her words.
HILDY. Hey! Wait, just a minute!
WALTER. What?
HILDY. There's only question I want to know.
BRUCE. What ?
HILDY. Walter?
WALTER. What?
HILDY. The mayor's first wife - what was her name?
WALTER. You mean the one with the wart on her?
HILDY. Right!
WALTER. Fanny! What did you say, Duffy?
What seems to distinguish Hawks's use of this device, then, is the way he manipulates the structure of the dialogue and the film's editing to play the shards of conversation off one another. Further, the scene has a coherent shape, for the polyphonic texture and rhythm change for the brief moment in which all three characters function on the same conversational plane to highlight an irrelevant detail that caps the scene by indicating Hildy's complete obsession with her work.
Another device for handling dialogue is to have characters interrupt each other, with the floor going to the "winner." One way Hawks likes to use this device is to have one character run roughshod over another - or even two others, as in Walter's first encounter with Bruce:
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