Director: Howard Hawks

Howard Hawks worked in every genre and made a first-rate film in most of them: Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Red River and Rio Bravo. What connects them is a group of competent people doing a difficult job while talking over each other.

The overlapping dialogue was a deliberate technique. His Girl Friday runs at a pace that no one had attempted, with lines landing on top of each other, and it works because the information the audience needs is repeated in different mouths.

His women are unusually direct for the period, arguing on equal footing with the men, and the Hawksian woman became a recognised type. John Carpenter has cited him more often than any other influence.