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Howard Hawks: A man for all genres
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The French auteur theory expostulates that the director is the sole author of a film, and that the great director is he who leaves his distinct imprint and personality on a film, regardless of the subject matter.
Of all the great directors of Hollywood’s golden era, none provides a finer exhibit of that theory than Howard Hawks, a man who made every type of film his own, and in many cases created the definitive film of a given genre.
Hawks’ first truly great film was 1932’s Scarface, the best of the early gangster movies. Hawks would later refer to it as the favorite of his films, perhaps because of the pre-Code freedom he had working for maverick producer Howard Hughes. The film is remarkable in its ability to combine humor with dispassionate violence, without cheapening or diluting either. It also proved that talking pictures could use sound to their advantage without compromising the artistic poeticism of silent cinema.
The following clip provides an example of the early, more poetic Hawks style:
Two years later Hawks made Twentieth Century, the first “screwball” comedy and the best of both the great theatrical actor John Barrymore and comedienne Carole Lombard’s screen appearances, followed by Bringing Up Baby in 1938. A notorious flop at the time which nearly bankrupted Katherine Hepburn’s career, Bringing Up Baby has since become the most treasured of ‘30s comedies.
His Girl Friday, the best newspaper movie ever made, featured rapid fire overlapping dialogue a full year before Citizen Kane revolutionized the way pictures talked. Anyone just beginning to learn English as a second language would be best to avoid this film, lest they immediately give up all hope.
Between 1943 and 1953 Hawks made pioneering works in no less than five separate genres. Air Force is a muscular and hard-nosed war film of the patriotic variety only possible during WWII. The Big Sleep, a film noir starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, is the best adaptation of a Raymond Chandler book. Red River, which ushered in the era of the “adult” Western, made possible the 1950s masterpieces of John Ford, Anthony Mann, and Budd Boetticher. The sci-fi classic The Thing from Another World, although only officially produced by Hawks with director credit given to his frequent editor Christian Nyby, is unmistakably a Hawks film in its study of the camaraderie of men in groups. And Hawks even tackled the musical with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a film that objectifies men and women with equal opportunity and provided Marilyn Monroe with her first great comedic role.
But the core of the Hawksian ethos can be found in three films made over the span of twenty years: Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, and Rio Bravo. The first, an adventure movie starring Cary Grant and Jean Arthur, is set in the fatalistic world of air mail pilots in South America. It has all the elements of the Hawksian universe: a group of men who judge their worth solely on the basis of professionalism, a tough woman who inserts herself into that masculine world and wins the respect and love of the seemingly impenetrable hero, and a harshly realistic view of life and death – to die in the line of duty means you simply “weren’t good enough,” nothing more, nothing less.
The classical Hawks style is fully apparent in Only Angels Have Wings: eye-level shooting, three-cushioned dialogue, and an impeccable ability to “cut in the camera.” No director in the history of the cinema could cut on movement with the skill of Hawks, creating a completely seamless, unobtrusive style that never came between audience and story.
To Have and Have Not is the film that presents the purest expression of the Bogart screen persona, much more so than the immortal Casablanca. In both The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca Bogart was still a bit uncomfortable with his new leading man sex symbol status, but in To Have and Have Not he is completely at ease. You can see Bogie and Bacall literally falling in love on screen, and Hawks lets their sexual electricity play out in the context of the story, taking one of Ernest Hemingway’s worst novels and turning it into a uniquely personal movie.
Rio Bravo, made in 1959, is Hawks’ masterpiece. It is the work of a mature artist still in the prime of his creativity with three decades of experience under his belt. It contains John Wayne’s most well-rounded performance and Dean Martin’s revelatory turn as a washed-out drunk, for my money the most realistic portrayal of an alcoholic in film history.
The plot is as bare bones as it can get. A sheriff (Wayne) must hold a murderer in the town jail until the county marshal arrives, while his cattle baron brother attempts to break him out. All of which is just a pretext to articulate the personal angst of three men with uniquely male problems.
Wayne is the bravest man in town who is a coward when it comes to personal relationships, stubbornly rejecting all help from other townsfolk and refusing to acknowledge his need for womanly companionship. It takes the tough-minded Angie Dickinson to break him out of his shell, a remarkably honest performance that she unfortunately was never able to duplicate.
Martin is the town drunk, a former top gun deputy who hit the booze after being jilted by a dame who rode into town on a stagecoach. He once drank to forget, but now drinks to drink, a wounded shell of a man who must go cold turkey to shake the sauce that has reduced him to getting on his knees to retrieve a silver dollar from a spittoon.
And the great Walter Brennan plays Stumpy, a crippled old man who minds the jail for the sheriff, a man who lives in mortal fear of becoming too old to be relevant, the universal plight of the elderly who would rather die than be dependent on their children or relegated to an old people’s home. It’s a brilliant performance, bordering on the parodic, but redeemed by Brennan’s impeccable comedic timing and effortless pathos.
The following scene provides a crystallization of the Hawks method. I defy anyone to conceive a better shot sequence:
The great French New Wave director and Cahiers du Cinéma critic Jean-Luc Godard encapsulated the Hawks mystique best, in this comment on Rio Bravo:
The best filmmakers always tie themselves down by complying with the rules of the game. I have not done so because I am just a minor filmmaker. Take, for example, the films of Howard Hawks, and in particular Rio Bravo. That is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and perception, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western like all others. Hawks is the greater because he has succeeded in fitting all that he holds most dear into a well-worn subject.
Howard Hawks, as quintessentially American as Ernest Hemingway or George M. Cohen, made films that he would have liked to have seen. Tough, masculine, unabashedly rugged, he made movies like he lived life: on the edge, passionately, and without compromises.
A Howard Hawks retrospective airs on Turner Classic Movies on June 14. The complete schedule is as follows (all times Eastern):
6:00 AM – A Song Is Born (1948)
8:00 AM – Tiger Shark (1932)
9:30 AM – Sergeant York (1941)
12:00 PM – Bringing Up Baby (1938)
2:00 PM – Twentieth Century (1934)
4:00 PM – His Girl Friday (1940)
6:00 PM – Ball of Fire (1941)
8:00 PM – To Have and Have Not (1944)
10:00 PM – The Big Sleep (1946)
12:00 AM – Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
2:15 AM – Air Force (1943)
4:30 AM – The Crowd Roars (1932)
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