3. His Girl Friday
Howard Hawks made many screwball comedies in his lifetime and some of them are considered the best that the genre has to offer. I could have went with Bringing Up Baby or Monkey Business for this spot but I've always found His Girl Friday to be Hawks' best work with dialogue construction and most outright hilarious film. The story is paper thin, in that it concerns a man who works in a newsroom trying to persuade a woman he works with to not get married and continue in the newsroom. Hawks takes the loose plot that he is given here and uses it to make one ridiculously funny scene after the other. What is most striking about the narrative is how fast everything moves. There is never a moment when something isn't going on and there is often copious amounts of overlapping dialogue. The speech is faster than even Tarantino at his best which makes the jokes fly one after the other. You'll find yourself having trouble with laughter because you won't be done laughing at the scenario that just happened before Hawks throws something even funnier at you.