The only thing better than encountering great prose is encountering great prose unexpectedly. Last night I went to the movies and saw His Girl Friday, a 1940 comedy about a newspaperman preventing his coworker-cum-ex-wife from quitting her job and marrying an insurance salesman. The film’s writing is superb. I normally wouldn’t quote it here, since it’s all dialogue. Well, almost all dialogue.

In one scene, the newspaperman (Cary Grant, left in the picture above above) reads aloud a story-in-progress written by his ex-wife (Rosalind Russell, right). It concerns a murderer named Earl Williams and his confidant, Mollie Malloy:

And so, into this little tortured mind came the idea that that gun had been produced for use. And use it he did. But the state has a ‘production-for-use’ plan too. It has a gallows. And at seven a.m. unless a miracle occurs, that gallows will be used to separate the soul of Earl Williams from his body. And out of Mollie Malloy’s life will go the one kindly soul she ever knew.

This prose is the epitome of quick-witted journalism, the sort that perhaps can be composed only on a heavy typewriter while smoking unfiltered cigarettes in rapid succession. Each sentence kindles the next. Watch how produced for use in the first sentence lights up the next two sentences (use it he did, ‘production-for-use’ plan), which in turn provide the spark for the gallows, and then we get a sentence, lit in the middle, that burns both forwards and backwards (“that gallows will be used”), whose ends fortuitously meet at the end of the passage (“the one kindly soul she ever knew” is both the soul of Earl Williams and yes, a sort of miracle). These fissioning, dancing embers of prose, I must confess, left me with a pretty good secondhand buzz.

Further watching: His Girl Friday (written by Charles Lederer)