> the sheer pace of the dialogue meant I had to watch this film
> in 10 minute doses - it was wearing me out!
I think that you may have done yourself a disservice by breaking the movie up.
First of all, the dialog has a rhythm to it, a pretty consistent rhythm, and the viewer does tend to get into rhythm with the movie after a little bit. By breaking it up, you were keeping yourself constantly in the "trying to get acclimated" phase.
Secondly, you *might* have created issues for yourself in terms of the gaps in watching making it harder for you remember exactly who was who (by name when referred to). Once they get going, you really want to be able to just know (without having to think at all) who is being referenced. If the gaps in watching create even a split second of your mind going "Let's see, that was ....", then you're going to fall behind the dialog.
Edit to add:
Now, if English is not your native language or if you're hard of hearing, then I can easily understand where you're coming from. That was a bit like my reaction to 8 1/2. A ton of overlapping dialog and a lot of it delivered very quickly; keeping up with the subtitles started to feel like work after a while, and by the end of the movie I was really tired. It's a shame, 8 1/2 looked like a movie that I probably would have loved if I were fluant in Italian (or if it had been made in English). As it is, though, it wasn't all that much *fun* for me to watch (in large part because there were long stretches of it that I felt like I never got "watch" at all, just continuously focus on reading the subtitles).
> for the rest of the film why couldn't they talk like normal human beings?
Two things with regard your apparent opinion that the pacing is unrealistic:
First, there are some people who routinely talk "a mile a minute", and some of those are people who picked up that habit as way of bulldozing other people and getting their own way. That's Walter Burns, at least as portrayed in this version, and we see the effect of him using that technique to bulldoze through people who don't know him very well a couple times in the movie. That's why the people who do know him well (such as those who have worked with him for years and his [now ex-] wife) have learned that if they don't want to get run over by him constantly then they have to learn to go at that pace and be just as willing to interupt him as he is to interupt them.
Secondly, when there are several conversations (due to different people doing different things) in close proximity to each other, the total net effect when taken together *is* that kind hundreds of words per minute flying by. It's just that when you're one of the people doing it you tend to just listen to the one piece of conversation that you're directly in and mentally filter out the background noise of the other 3 conversations going on around you. Newsrooms are a prime location for that kind of interaction where multiple conversations are going on at once.
> lots of pople must have thought "there's a good story here,
> let's try and make a version of it where our actors won't
> collapse from exaustion!"
I've seen 3 of the 4 movie versions that I'm aware of off the top of my head (not having seen the first one, which predated His Girl Friday). This is clearly the best of them in my mind.
With the Lemon-Mathau version, it's a little difficult to separate the impacts of the pacing and the gender switch of the Hildy character. I love Lemon and Mathau, both separately and as a team, but in this particular case they get trumped by Grant - Russell. I will say that Carol Burnett gives the best of Earl-Williams-girlfriend portrayals. With her ability to perform at a frantically frenetic pace, she would have fit into HGF admirably.
The Burt Reynolds / Kathleen Turner version (which updates newpapers into cable TV news channels) isn't horrible, but really does not come close to standing up to HGF (and, in my view, is also a notch below Lemon/Mathau). Even though the "lovable rogue" side of the Walter Burns character is pretty much in the "sweet spot" of Reynolds' particular talents, he just isn't Grant. And as good as Turner has been in some things, the more frentic newsroom pacing does not seem to be playing to her strengths. Christopher Reeve makes a very good overwhelmed fiance (playing closer to Clark Kent than to Superman), but Bellamy also stands up very well in that role.
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