His Girl Friday (1940)
Plays here · source: Internet Archive
A newspaper editor learns his star reporter and ex-wife is quitting to remarry, so he stalls the wedding with one last assignment: a jailbreak, a crooked mayor and a scoop too good to walk away from. Hawks overlaps every line of dialogue until the film moves faster than anyone in it can think.
The fastest comedy of the studio era: roughly 240 words a minute, most of them spoken over someone else’s.
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