His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)

Film Rhythm After Sound (University of California Press, 2015) analyzes the rhythmic dimensions of performance and sound in a diverse set of case studies: the Eisenstein-Prokofiev collaboration Ivan the Terrible, Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies and early Mickey Mouse cartoons, musicals by Ernst Lubitsch and Rouben Mamoulian, and the impeccably timed dialogue in Howard Hawks’s films. In the early years of the transition to sound, filmmakers experimented with different strategies for synchronizing speech, sound effects and action. Music often served as a blueprint for rhythm and pacing, as was the case in mickey-mousing, the close integration of music and movement in animation. However, by the mid-1930s, filmmakers had also gained enough control over dialogue recording and editing to utilize dialogue to pace scenes independently of the music track.

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Bibliography

From Clip 7 of Film Rhythm After Sound