Introduced by David Thomson To Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's cynical portrait of tabloid journalism, Howard Hawks added doubly cynical romance, transforming The Front Page's Hildy Johnson into a gal and thus drawing Walter Burns' Machiavellian machinations into the sexual arena. Cary Grant as the cocky newsroom editor and Rosalind Russell as the crime reporter who gets 'em in the classified ads every time are well met in a field where, as Andrew Sarris and Tom Allen wrote, "a scoop is worth more than a corpse"-or, presumably, a warm body. Actors like Grant and Russell could talk faster than actors today can think; in the hands of Hawks, who had a sense of sound as movement, the lines come at breakneck speed, dialogue overlapping constantly. One experiences not a string of one-liners but a jazz-like sound quality: dense, rhythmic, layered, in motion. "The modern man-that's Hawks, completely." (Henri Langlois) David Thomson is the author of A Biographical Dictionary of Film, Suspects, and Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes.