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Keeping up with Hawks - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Howard Hawks
Style, Fall, 1998 by Lea Jacobs
HILDY. I'm going after Mother and I'm going to get Bruce out of jail. Walter, why did you have to do this to me?
WALTER. Get Bruce out of jail? How can you worry about a man who's resting in a nice, quiet police station while this is going on? Hildy, this is war. You can't desert me now.
HILDY. (interrupting) Oh, Walter, will you get off that trapeze. You've got your story right over there in the desk. Go on, smear it all over the front page. "Earl Williams Captured by the Morning Post!" I covered your story for you, and I got in a fine mess doing it. Now I'm getting out!
WALTER. You drooling idiot. What do you mean you're getting out?
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HILDY. (interrupting) I . . . just what I said.
WALTER. There are three-hundred-and-sixty-five days in a year one can get married. How many times you got a murderer locked up in a desk? Once in a life time. Hildy, you've got the whole city by the seat of the pants.
HILDY. (interrupting) Sure. I know, I know, I . . .
WALTER. (interrupting) You know, you know. You've got the brain of a pancake. This isn't just a story you're covering, it's a revolution. This is the greatest yarn in journalism since Livingstone discovered Stanley.
HILDY.(interrupting) It's the other way around.
And from later in the same scene:
WALTER. Sure, they'll be naming streets after you. Hildy Johnson Street. There'll be statues, you'll be in the park, the movies will be after you, the radio, and by tomorrow morning, I'll bet you there's a Hildy Johnson cigar. I can see the billboards now that say, "Light up with Hildy Johnson! Light up with Hildy . . ."
HILDY. (interrupting) Oh, Walter, will you stop that acting.
WALTER. Huh?
HILDY. We've got a lot to do.
Milestone's version of this scene is shorter than Hawks, 1:45 versus 2:29, and Walter is given less dialogue. Thus, in The Front Page and the original play, the Johnson Street speech is simply "Why, they'll be naming streets after you. Johnson Street! You and I and the Governor are going to run this town," which not only tones down Walter's part in the duel but, paradoxically, also gives Hildy's intervention ("Yeah, but you can't keep Williams here") less force. Nevertheless, the opening of the scene in The Front Page (to the line "You've got the brain of a pancake") is virtually the same and has the same thrust-and-parry quality.
The point where Hawks carries this device well beyond anything in either the play or the first film version is the opening scene in Walter's office, which occurs solely in His Girl Friday. Not only Walter's conversation with Hildy, but also his interchanges with Duffy, marked by the repetition of Walter's line "I'm busy," are structured as a series of mutual interruptions. One of many possible examples will have to suffice:
WALTER. Deny it? I'm proud of it. We beat the whole country on that story.
HILDY. Well, suppose we did? That isn't what I got married for! Oh, what is the good. . . . Look now Walter, what I came up here to tell you is that you must stop phoning me a dozen times a day . . .
