Though associated with a score of Tinseltown’s
best-loved, timeless classics, Hawks made little impression on critics for a
long time. Holding neither the interests nor the talents of a specialist, he
made it difficult to identify what constituted “A Howard Hawks Film,” in the
way that some contemporaries made their marks with particular genres or
settings, such as Alfred Hitchcock (thrillers), John Ford (westerns, war films,
or cinema about Ireland), or Billy Wilder (fast-talking, cynical
comedy-dramas).
Instead, Hawks took it as a challenge to create
top-flight movies across genres: the gangster film (Scarface), screwball
comedies (Bringing Up Baby), biopics (Sergeant York), musicals (Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes), film noir (The Big Sleep), sci-fi (The Thing),
widescreen historical epics (Land of the Pharoahs), and westerns (Red
River, Rio Bravo). No wonder a 1967 TV summary of his career was entitled,
“Howard Hawks: The Great Professional.”
Remarkably, this versatile director was nominated for
a competitive Oscar only once in his career, for Sergeant York. (In one
of the Academy Awards’ embarrassed annual attempts to honor a film giant before
it’s too late, he was awarded an honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievement in
1974, only three years before his death.)
Yet, in addition to the French “New Wave” critics-directors who began to reappraise his work as an “auteur” in the 1950s, Hawks also influenced such American filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Brian de Palma, John Carpenter, and Peter Bogdanovich (who signaled his great debt to Hawks in his first two major successes, The Last Picture Show and What's Up, Doc?).
Majoring in mechanical engineering in college, the
director was less interested in inventing entirely different methods of
moviemaking than in tinkering with a celluloid product until it moved faster
and more smoothly.
Even if faced with a script with only the wispiest of
plots, he’d sit down on the set, pull out a big yellow legal pad, and scribble
down dialogue that made audiences enjoy this scene and forget about the overall
lack of a substantial story, recalled Kirk Douglas about a turning point in
their 1952 western, The Big Sky.
An even more telling example of this is in the
sexually charged encounter between Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe and Dorothy
Malone’s Acme Bookshops proprietess in The Big Sleep. The plot of the film
is almost preposterously serpentine (even author Raymond Chandler had trouble
recalling the killer), but the fencing between the private eye and the
bespectacled but seductive bibliophile in this scene remains fondly recalled three-quarters
of a century later.
Hawks got his start in film at the technical end
during the silent era as a prop man, then parlayed some training in
architectural drawing at school to land a job building a set for a Douglas
Fairbanks film. Part of the reason why he commanded so much respect on a film
set was that he had performed so many functions before finally getting a chance
as a director: assistant director, casting director, script supervisor, screenwriter,
editor and producer.
While possessing his own ideas on how a scene would
work, Hawks was so self-assured that he allowed those he worked with to arrive
at the solution themselves. He encouraged actors to improvise (as demonstrated
vividly and brilliantly in “Self-Styled Siren” film blogger Farran Smith
Nehme’s analysis of Rosalind Russell’s performance in His Girl Friday).
Angie Dickinson, who worked with him on Rio Bravo, related
Hawks’ indirect approach in this interview for the Web site “Ain’t It Cool”:
“Hawks was tough, because he would not really tell you
what to do. He would just sort of get around to what he was after, because, and
I finally analyzed it, if he told you what to do it wouldn’t come from you, so
he had to make you, through osmosis, do what he had in mind, but not
specifically.”
Henry Adams’ terse description of Theodore Roosevelt
may be applied just as easily to Hawks: “he was pure act.” A racing car and
airplane aficionado, he reminded listeners that the essence of movies was motion
pictures. Unenthusiastic about sending messages through his work,
Adept at fashioning rapid dialogue, Hawks was a slow,
deliberate talker himself. It forced the listener to hang on his every word,
only reinforcing his reputation for gravitas.
John Ford, Hawks’ good friend, bestowed on him the nickname
“The Silver Fox,” in simultaneous tribute to his exalted reputation as a ladies’
man and his white hair. Though many of his films reflected his Hemingwayesque appreciation
for the skill and sang froid required by male professionals such as airplane
flyers, racing-car drivers, soldiers and hunters, they never wasted the
opportunity to highlight self-confident, wisecracking women too wise to
tolerate nonsense.
Three actresses were especially shaped under his
direction:
*Lauren Bacall attracted attention in her film
debut, To Have and Have Not, as Hawks reportedly based her cool, brassy,
athletic persona—even her onscreen nickname “Slim”—on his wife at the time, Nancy
Gross.
*Marilyn Monroe took a major step forward in
her career by moving from eye-candy adornment to sexy but vulnerable in Monkey
Business and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
*Angie Dickinson enjoyed a career-making performance, after only four years in the business, as the traveling card shark who holds her own against sheriff John Wayne through humor, flirtation, and a steely refusal to be wronged in Rio Bravo. (Do I even have to mention that the actress appears on the right, with the director and The Duke, in the image accompanying this post?)
Even after all his late-career attention, “Hawks
remained the least understood among the great American directors,” Bogdanovich
wrote in Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors. “But his films represent one of the most vivid, varied, yet
consistent, bodies of work in movies; ironically, too, perhaps the most
typically American. Which maybe explains
why his pictures don't date as so many do, even the best: he touched some parts
of the American psyche that are there forever.”
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