Barbary Coast

Howard Hawks - 1935
Hawks' dialgoue scenes are really a joy. When you have a great actor like Edward G. Robinson, the two-shots really come to life. Depth is used here, and with some complex framings. They aren't obviously entirely in focus, but it is a good example of how depth staging was really in the air even before Toland and Welles. The sets we are in here are nice and dark, nearly expressionist in their simplicity (the good old ship).
I am not sure if it's a general feature, or specific to Hawks, but there always seem to be quite close to 4 spaces across the screen for the amount of human we have. Four heads for closer shots, four bodies for (often high angle) long shots. Hawks' long shots give colourful, but always distinctive (each is different, but part of a whole) portraits of groups.
A few more comments on Hawks; we have the woman (plus the lead of 'Scarface') as poerful, but finally overreaching and coming up short, needing the man. We also have a habit, in the long scene, of not so much leading up to big events as throwing all at once (there is one exception here, the poet regains money in two stages, but generally the rule holds). Things can happen, across the long scenes, very quickly.
The ending here is quite remarkable and frankly rather bizarre. The idea of law and order set up by vigilante justice, the 'good guys' holding a kangaroo court and a lynching... Hawks comes across as a conservative, but that is extreme. Abd then Edward G. Robinson's change of heart; in the face of the vigilantes, the criminals nearly seem like, for all their flaws, not so much 'bad guys' at all. This reminded me of 'Mabuse'; the villain as at the same time tragic, sympathetic, compared to the supposed 'lawgivers'.