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Keeping up with Hawks - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Howard Hawks
Style, Fall, 1998 by Lea Jacobs
WALTER. Well, I can see right away my wife picked out the right husband for herself. How do you do, sir?
DAVIS. Must be some mistake. I'm already married.
WALTER. Already married? Tsk, tsk, tsk. Oh Hildy, you should have told me.
BRUCE. Mr. Burns . . .
WALTER. Well, congratulations again, Mr. Baldwin.
BRUCE. Mr. Burns . . .
DAVIS. Oh no, my name is . . .
WALTER. Excuse me will you, I'm terribly busy. Just leave your card with the boy. What did you say Mr. Baldwin?
DAVIS. My name is . . .
BRUCE. Mr. Burns? Mr. Burns?
WALTER. Some other time, I'm busy with Mr. Bruce Baldwin here. I didn't hear what you said, Mr. Baldwin.
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BRUCE. But you see, there's some sort of confusion, Mr. Burns, you see.
DAVIS. I was going to say that my name . . .
WALTER. Now what it is it with you? Can't you see that . . .
BRUCE. I'm Bruce Baldwin.
This device is used similarly in the first scene between the Mayor and Pettibone, with the Mayor cutting off almost every one of Pettibone's lines as the messenger finds objections to the Mayor's attempt to bribe him. The same structure of interruptions can be found in the play, but not in the Milestone version, for it crosscuts between Hildy and Woodenshoes in the pressroom and the corrupt government officials in the Sheriff's office and thereby eliminates most of the dialogue concerning the bribe.
The verbal predominance of one fast-talking character is a device that may have originated with Hecht and MacArthur, but Hawks certainly makes it his own, and continues to use it throughout his later career. One finds it almost to the point of parody in Rio Bravo as John T. Chance finds it difficult to get a word in edgewise during verbal jousts with the voluble Feathers, with Stumpy, and, in this paradigmatic example, with Carlos:
CARLOS. Please, please senor. Do not talk. I tell you. It . . . It is better if I tell you.
CHANCE. All right go ahead.
CARLOS. You told me to put the lady on the stage.
CHANCE. Right.
CARLOS. The stage, she is waiting, but she don't come down.
CHANCE. What?
CARLOS. I yell at her, "Come down !" She said she ain't coming. I go up and get her. She say she don't go.
CHANCE. Well did she go?
CARLOS. Please! I tell her, you say go. I tell her I am responsible. She say no, she's responsible. And I say, that may be. And I pick her up. Then Consuela say, what are you doing with that woman? And I say, I take her to the stage. The woman, she said she don't want to go on the stage.
CHANCE. Well, did she go on the stage?
CARLOS. Please! Consuela tell me put her down. I say, I am responsible. Consuela, she thinks that means something else. So she gives me this eye.
CHANCE. What did you do?
CARLOS. Do? What can I do? My arms is full of the lady. I can do nothing. I drop her on the floor. She yells and she says I tried to kill her.
CHANCE. Carlos! Did the girl get on the stage?
CARLOS. No, she did not go. Jay say he couldn't wait.
Verbal jousting does not have to work solely to one character's advantage, however. The two interlocutors can interrupt each other, a structure which lends their interchange tremendous forward momentum. This is the structure of one of the fastest scenes in His Girl Friday as well as the fastest in The Front Page cited above, the scene in which, after having ordered Louis to kidnap Mrs. Grant, Walter nonetheless convinces Hildy to stay and write the story of the paper's capture of Earl Williams. Walter has the preponderance of dialogue, as one would expect since he needs to talk Hildy into something. But unlike the scene with Bruce cited above, Hildy does not simply roll over; she manages to claim the floor, although usually for much briefer wisecracks. Sometimes a character will interrupt another in mid-sentence, but most of the speeches in this scene are in complete sentences. The force of the interruption comes from the overlapping of words and also from the fact that the response of the second character turns the conversation in a radically new direction:
