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This piece was originally written as a sample chapter of a
book I want to write on late style in film, to go along with a proposal I had written
up for potential publishers. However, shortly after I left the idealized realm
of individual thinking/writing and entered the practical side of the publishing
process, a complex confluence of artistic, economic, and practical
considerations led me to lose my interest in pursuing official publication, at
least for the time being. After a couple months of mulling things over, I’ve
decided for now to share my sample chapter on Howard Hawks—which I’m very excited
to be doing!—and continue putting in work on my book at whatever (likely slow)
pace life allows. As this wasn’t originally written as a completely stand-alone
piece, there are a few references to an introductory section on late style in general
that hasn’t yet been written, which you’ll just have to imagine. Also, as the
idea is still for this to take the form of a book, there won’t be any images
like are included in most of my previous works (except the nice one at the
top, which comes from the 1978 TV documentary Howard Hawks: A Hell of a Good Life, the last filmed interview Hawks ever did); I’ve also included
a bibliography of all the sources I quoted, if you’d like to continue your
Hawks studies on your own. Now, with all that said—enjoy!
Edit, January 2025: the abovementioned book is now officially happening, to be published by Sticking Place Books in the (hopefully) near future. Thanks for reading and sharing, as that's basically what lead to this opportunity landing in my lap. My pace of work will pick up accordingly, but in the meantime I'll leave this piece here to whet your appetite for the full book to come.
The Late Style of Howard Hawks
When the
56-year-old Howard Hawks landed in Europe for the first time in February 1953, he
had just gotten married for the third time, had directed an almost unbroken
string of hits going back a dozen years, and—unbeknownst to him—was being
proclaimed, by a small yet passionately vocal group of young film lovers in his
first destination of Paris, to be nothing less than a genius. It would be that
May, in the pages of the film journal Cahiers du cinéma, that a
25-year-old Jacques Rivette would open his article “The Genius of Howard Hawks”
with the polemical broadside that, “The evidence on the screen is the proof of
Howard Hawks’s genius: you only have to watch Monkey Business to know
that it is a brilliant film. Some people refuse to admit this, however; they
refuse to be satisfied by proof. There can’t be any other reason why they don’t
recognize it.” 1952’s Monkey Business, one of the only blips in Hawks’ recent
commercial success, had been received in America as no more noteworthy
than any other product being churned out by Hollywood; the boldness of
Rivette’s statement, therefore, could hardly have registered as particularly sane
to anyone outside of the initiated, which mostly included friends that also wrote
for Cahiers and gathered around their primary site of viewing, Henri
Langlois’s Cinémathèque française—friends such as Jean-Luc Godard, who had
already declared Hawks “the greatest American artist” in the middle of a September
1952 Cahiers article, as well as Éric Rohmer, who would soon write a
December 1953 piece that ended with a similarly bold proclamation, that “one
cannot really love any film if one does not really love the ones by Howard
Hawks.”
Despite the
radicality and newness of such proclamations, this love for the films of Howard
Hawks didn’t entirely come out of the blue. Indeed, a film as early as A
Girl in Every Port (1928) was a big hit in France and, according to
Langlois, was seen as a completely modern film by a Parisian culture beginning
to reject expressionism. But while there was precedent to Rivette & co.’s polemics,
in the early 1950s loving Hawks was still a controversial position even within the
Cahiers stable in a way that, for example, loving Hitchcock (the other masthead
of the “Hitchcocko-Hawksian” auteurist policy) was not. Hawks himself took a
mildly bemused attitude towards such adulation, content to play along even if
unable to see himself in their specific ideas, and always game for a chance to
talk about his films and the making of them; his first of several interviews
with Cahiers came in late 1955 soon after the release of his Egyptian
epic Land of the Pharaohs. Ironically, Hawks’ reputation amongst his
French admirers at this point rested mainly on his 1950s films—The Big Sky (1952),
Monkey Business, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and Pharaohs—none
of which Hawks harbored a particularly great liking for. But such was the
French ability to recognize art where Americans (even the films’ own makers) saw
only entertainment.
There was no parallel
auteurist accounting of Howard Hawks happening in American criticism yet;
contemporary reviews might mention his name alongside the films, but almost
never with any greater awareness of his body of work in mind, let alone the
idea that he might be a cinematic artist in the same way that, say, Hemingway
was a literary one. Hawks was viewed by most as little more than a competent
craftsman working mainly on assignment, rather than someone who organized his
own projects with conspicuous artistic intent like a number of other prominent
Hollywood directors. Critic James Agee was the exception that proved the rule
when he began his review of Red River (1948) this way: “When people
discuss the real artists in picture-making, they seldom get around to
mentioning Howard Hawks. Yet Hawks is one of the most individual and
independent directors in the business.” Given that Hawks had, and wanted to
have, nothing to do with projects of literary prestige, intellectualism, social
causes, or really anything with the veneer of artistic importance, it’s no
wonder that he wasn’t viewed as an artist—he himself would go on to repeatedly repudiate
the idea that he was one. Hawks was in the entertainment business, and his job
was to make movies, and make them good. He was a rugged individualist, an
intuitive, instinctive, straightforward American filmmaker who sculpted the
stuff of life into the stuff of movies to the best of his ability, not for
awards or accolades but for audiences. Hawks liked making comedies, or putting
comedy into his dramas (increasingly so as he went on), because those were the
kind of films whose success was easiest to measure: a laughing audience was an
immediate and incontrovertible sign of quality work. Hawks was a storyteller
first and foremost, the films somehow loose and taught at the same time, fast-moving
but with a willingness to linger, good-humored but unsentimental. Hawks prized
his independence above all else, refusing to work when a producer was on set, and
rarely ever offering his services to the same studio more than a few times in a
row (Scarface, made in 1930 but released in 1932, always remained a
favorite of Hawks’ because it was made in defiance of the studio system with
renegade producer Howard Hughes); he often went over-budget and over-schedule
because his way of squeezing the best possible film out of his material meant taking
the time to work out new and better ideas as they arose on set. Despite his
fierce independence and need to put his personal stamp on whatever he was
making, Hawks was also intensely collaborative, which ironically made his
personal stamp even more evident. He was like the leader of a jazz band, his
film sets jam sessions like the ones filmed so thrillingly in A Song Is Born
(1948)—everyone, from actors and writers down to the lowliest crew members,
were given free rein to suggest ideas, ideas which Hawks unpretentiously used if
they bettered a scene, constantly riffing on the (ever-reworded) scripts towards
something funnier, more dramatic, more honest, or more alive. The camera was mostly
kept at eye level, simply the way you look at a thing, nothing ostentatious or
“pretty.” Orson Welles would say that where John Ford was great poetry, Howard
Hawks was great prose—or in Rivette’s words, “each shot has a functional
beauty, like a neck or an ankle. The smooth, orderly succession of shots has a
rhythm like the pulsing of blood, and the whole film is like a beautiful body,
kept alive by deep, resilient breathing.” It is this anatomical, biological
metaphor that captures something of the mysterious pleasure of watching a Hawks
film unfold, of witnessing all its parts working together to perform a
seemingly simple but actually complex function; in other words, a Hawks film is
beautiful in the same way that a human being is beautiful.
Maybe no
Hawks film is as beautiful in just this way, then, as Rio Bravo, whose
beauty can be allegorically summed up by John Wayne, languid yet poised, walking
down the nocturnal street of the film’s Western town. Rio Bravo is a significant
pivot point in the career of Howard Hawks, and for our purposes an important
film in that it previews and in some way launches Hawks’ late period (as we shall
soon see). But as explained earlier, such demarcations are only as rigid as
they are useful, and any number of Hawks films participate in the idea of lateness,
to a greater or lesser degree, before we ever reach his late period proper as
we will define it: that is, the five films Hawks made after 1960. As I see it, Hawks’
career can be reasonably partitioned into six loosely defined eras: the first,
his silent films; then from his first sound film The Dawn Patrol (1930)
through Come and Get It (1936); then from Bringing Up Baby (1938)
to To Have and Have Not (1944); from The Big Sleep (1946) to The
Big Sky; Monkey Business to Rio Bravo; and finally Hatari!
(1962) to his last film, Rio Lobo (1970). I mark the full flowering
of Hawks’ lateness as beginning with Hatari!, but given Hawks’ penchant
for tackling similar subject matter throughout his career, even to the point of
direct remakes, a film like Ceiling Zero (1936), for example, can be
seen as late relative to a film like The Dawn Patrol, and a film like Only
Angels Have Wings (1939) as even more late relative to both. (Even The
Dawn Patrol could be seen as late relative to his lost silent film The
Air Circus [1928], but there’s no way to know for sure.) The same point
could be made using Hawks’ comedies. The remake, remix, variation—call it what
you may—is one of the identifying elements of Hawks’ cinema, and increasingly
so as Hawks’ career accumulated more and more films, to the point where the
question of originality, at least in genre and subject, barely arises when
looking at the five late films, so unconcerned are they with pretending to be
anything other than variations on situations that Hawks was intimately familiar
with from his previous work.
A smattering
of earlier Hawks films precipitate many of the defining features of the late
films. One important pivot point halfway through Hawks’ career comes in the
form of The Big Sleep, where Hawks the storyteller starts to become less
interested in plot and more interested in character, less interested in narrative
logic and more interested in scenes—moments given over to reveling in
the dynamics between actors and their characters, “to let them handle the plot,
rather than let the plot move them,” as Hawks would later say. The film had
been finished for a 1945 release but war-related release scheduling led it to
be pushed back, but not before producer Charles K. Feldman suggested reshoots
and recuts to add more scenes between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart to
capitalize on the chemistry that Hawks had first discovered in To Have and
Have Not and which their marriage (between shoots) had solidified. Hawks’
biographer Todd McCarthy notes that the film’s “first cut represents the
culmination of Hawks’s dedication to narrative, to classical storytelling
principles, to the kind of logic that depends upon the intricate interweaving
of dramatic threads. The revised, less linear cut sees him abandoning these
long-held virtues for the sake of ‘scenes,’ scenes of often electrifying
individual effect, but scenes that were weighted heavily in favor of character
over plot and dramatic complexity. When Hawks saw that he could get away with
this, it emboldened him to proceed further down this path through the remainder
of his career.”
A Song Is
Born saw Hawks remaking his own Ball of Fire (1941) with
new actors, in color (a first for him), and with a musical twist on the
encyclopedic concept. The only official remake of Hawks’ career, the
obviousness of its parallels with the earlier film makes its relative lateness
easy to notice, and spotting this lateness helps one to see it not as the less
interesting retread it has the reputation of being, but rather as a fascinating
statement of where the Hawks of 1948 was, stylistically and otherwise, compared
to the Hawks of 1941. The way the film gives itself over to the joy of simply
experiencing the musical performances of its cast is an example of Hawks reveling
in the non-narrative in a way that sets it apart from the earlier Ball of
Fire, as one comes to expect from the post-Big Sleep Hawks. It may
be pertinent to note that Hawks had recently passed the half-century mark in
his life, and A Song Is Born marked the second film hence after Red
River, itself a preview of the late Wayne-Hawks films in that the actor is
made up to look as old as he’d actually be in those films years later. The Cary
Grant reteam I Was a Male War Bride (1949) can’t help but call back to Bringing
Up Baby and His Girl Friday (1940), although Dan Sallitt remarks
that “the confident foregrounding of the Hawksian ethos in Male War
Bride is in some ways closer to the ambient pleasures of late films
like Hatari! and Man's Favorite Sport? [1964] than
to Hawks' earlier comedies and action films.” The Big Sky also continued
to further Hawks’ loose attitude towards narrative, often feeling less like a straight
story and more like a compendium of scenes stacked end-to-end, letting the
characters rule the day over strict plot—that nearly 20 minutes were cut from
Hawks’ preferred 140-minute version hints at the rambling, roaming nature of the
kind of art Hawks was drifting towards.
Given the
previously discussed relation between auteurism and late style in cinema, it's
apt that Monkey Business was the subject of Rivette’s tide-turning essay
that helped lead to the consolidation of Howard Hawks’ reputation as one of
Hollywood’s premier artists. The film represents Hawks’ first direct, conscious
engagement with the idea of lateness itself, a Cary Grant comedy (his fourth
and last for Hawks) that by virtue of being a Hawks-Grant comedy in 1952 couldn’t
help but be a film implicitly about aging—a theme that Hawks then made an
explicit subject of the film (as he would with John Wayne in his final two
westerns). This was not, and could not be, another Bringing Up Baby. It
was 1952, not 1938, and Hawks and Grant were different, older people, and their
art was going to reflect that whether or not they complied—although in Monkey
Business, they do. Gerald Mast compares the way the film returns to the
issues of Bringing Up Baby fourteen years later—“in a wiser, older,
softer, more wintery way”—to the way that “Shakespeare’s late romances, written
some dozen or fourteen years after his youthful comedies, return more soberly
to the world and issues of those earlier plays.” Hawks watches the new manner
in which his partner in crime moves through his film’s world: “Grant, his voice
far slower and lower than in Bringing Up Baby, his glasses even thicker,
his movement more enervated, less staccato, more vacant, more languid, becomes
the film’s physical image of middle-aging in deliberate contrast to the
exuberant Grant we remember in films like Bringing Up Baby.” Monkey
Business almost acts as a critique of Bringing Up Baby; whenever a
character in the former takes the youth-formula, they revert to a spastic immaturity
that resembles nothing so much as the way characters act in the latter. The
film speeds up and slows down in accordance with the taking of the formula, and
when the characters are their sober selves the film is slower, more at ease than
any other Hawks comedy save his last, Man’s Favorite Sport?; the opening
meta-gag with Grant first opening the door too soon, then forgetting to be on
the outside when closing it, is a perfect encapsulation of the patience and increasing
simplicity of Hawks’ comedy at this stage of his career. The Hawks of Monkey
Business seems to assert that the youthful zaniness of Bringing Up Baby’s
characters is all a bit foolish, and that the wisdom of age isn’t worth trading
in for it. The film ends with one of the most conventionally mature moments in
all of Hawks, the reaffirmation of Grant and Ginger Roger’s marital love as the
pleasure that no dreams of youth can tarnish or outdo. “I’m beginning to wonder
if being young is all it’s cracked up to be,” Grant’s character says at one
point in the film. “We dream of youth, we remember it as a time of nightingales
and valentines. And what are the facts: maladjustment, near idiocy, and a
series of low comedy disasters. That’s what youth is. I don’t see how anyone
survives it.” In many ways this will be the working thesis, or one of them, of
Hawks’ late films.
Late Hawks will
be a continuous search—serious but not without humor—for a definition of
maturity, for a way of being in the world that achieves the integrity proper to
one’s station in life; the proper actions and attitudes for a man or woman to
have in their relation to themselves and others. Rio Bravo is perhaps
the richest, densest, most beautiful articulation of this theme. Hawks claimed
the film as a riposte to Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), a film he
saw as being about a sheriff too scared to do his job and therefore not
receiving the help he asks for; Rio Bravo, then, would be a film about a
sheriff calmly doing his job and therefore receiving help without asking for
it. Hawks, the consummate professional, loved nothing more than a man doing his
job and doing it well; Luc Moullet would write that, in Hawks, “a man is a
sheriff the same way he’s a laborer or a subway contractor.” Rio Bravo wouldn’t
simply present a story, or even characters, but nothing less than a way of
being: the way of being a sheriff, the way of being a woman, the way of being a
friend. The stance that one takes towards the world. John Wayne’s signature
contrapposto pose, relaxed yet poised, is a standing allegory for the film
itself: self-assured, calm, collected, ready. Wayne’s unspoken gestures of love
for Dean Martin’s recovering drunk speak profound volumes about what the
actions of a man towards his fellow man should look like. The way Hawks shifts
the burden of meaning from plot to character, from story to being, is
representative of the attitude towards entertainment and art—i.e., the entire
complex business of movies and their meaning—that the late films will demonstrate,
and which Rio Bravo so deftly previews.
Especially
formally, structurally; Hawks had determined that little in the way of plot was
needed any longer—simply “more characterization and the fun of just telling a
story.” The vast majority of Rio Bravo is essentially downtime, the patiently
observed interstices of an already minimalist plot set in motion by a moment of
inciting violence for which motivation is sparse and the victim unidentified;
it’s much more an excuse for what the film becomes than a moment of dramatic
meaning in and of itself. There’s no rush to get anywhere; the film seems like
it could go on forever, and its characters/actors are such relaxed and
sympathetic company that you wouldn’t mind if it did. Many people will rightly
remember the duet of “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” that Dean Martin and Ricky
Nelson sing in full while they whittle away time holed up in the jail, but it’s
sometimes forgotten that Hawks then allows a second song—a variation on the
folk song “Cindy” in which Walter Brennan joins in—to also play in full in
immediate succession. The simple joy of good company is a staple pleasure of
Hawks’ cinema, but the late films will often raise it to a level of near non-narrative
bliss. Manny Farber later went so far as to note the film’s resemblance to one
of the most radical modernist films, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23
quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975): “There’s no action.... Rio
Bravo is a film of interiors, people speaking, very little action.
Surfaces.”
Hawks’
increasing plotlessness around this time can be historicized by retracing his steps
in the years between Land of the Pharaohs and Rio
Bravo, the longest gap between films in his career. Despite his claims that
he had quit the film business for a while to reassess what kind of films he
wanted to make after what he saw as the disappointment of Pharaohs—a
reassessing that admittedly did happen to some degree—McCarthy reveals that
Hawks in fact “aggressively, even desperately tried to get films made all
through this period.” Nevertheless, Hawks had a small revelation when he
returned to the states from Europe in late 1956 and belatedly discovered the
burgeoning medium of television. With a barrage of series and episodes now being
beamed into American homes on a daily basis, Hawks saw in this an
oversaturation of plots; audiences knew all of the possible plots, and were
therefore tired of all of the plots. Hawks intuitively recognized that the best
way to keep the interest of these modern audiences was to keep them from
knowing the plot, instead stringing them along via character work that would
drive the story. The example of television made such an impression on Hawks
that he would even experiment in Rio Bravo by using a wordless, opening
pre-titles sequence, an allusion to the pre-commercial “teaser” that commonly
began television episodes. But while drawing inspiration from the small screen,
Rio Bravo was also the ultimate big screen coup, a glorious and
beautiful last-gasp of Hollywood classicism at the end of the evolutionary 1950s
and right before the revolutionary 1960s. “If I were asked to choose a film
that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be Rio Bravo,”
wrote Robin Wood, and with reason. The film would be a commercial success after
a shaky decade box office-wise for Hawks, setting his mind at ease that his new,
reassessed trajectory—of returning to well-trod scenarios and situations while further
loosening the narrative reins—was indeed the right path for him, as a craftsman
and business-minded entertainer, to be taking.
But the feel and
flow of Rio Bravo leads one to regard it as something of a
self-contained offering from Hawks—something that both summarized the nature of
his work up to that point and prophesied the nature of his work after it. Hence
why I separate it from the final five late films in my accounting of Hawks’
career. Fernando Villaverde writes that “everything seems to gravitate around Rio
Bravo: the natural evolution of his career leads to this film, and once he
achieved this degree of precision and formal rigour, he had nothing left to do
but to break with it.” Still, neat organizations like this can’t capture the
messiness of an artistic life lived, especially in a place like Hollywood; the
idea for Hawks’ next film, Hatari!, had come a few years before Rio
Bravo but had fallen apart then only to be resuscitated now. Hawks had
first come up with the basic idea for an African film about catching animals while
on the continent making Land of the Pharoahs, and deals were brokered towards
that goal with Hawks’ old friend Gary Cooper in mind to star. Cooper agreed
pending approval of a script, but eventually decided he wasn’t interested in it;
backers Warner Bros. pulled out of the deal as a result, which led Hawks to sue
the company in May 1956 for reneging on their deal, a deal they believed to be
dependent on Cooper’s involvement. When the film finally went into production
in 1960, it was as a cash-in on Hawks’ post-Rio Bravo bargaining power
with the studios, and had evolved into a passion project for him that was to
take precedence in his mind over any other film ideas. Hawks was to privately tell
Elsa Martinelli, his leading lady on Hatari!, “This is a film I wanted
to make for years and I wanted to make it like it was a vacation.”
And make it
like a vacation he would. The experiment of Rio Bravo a success, Hawks
doubled down on plotlessness, characterization, and the fun of hanging out with
a group—letting them be the story, rather than having them merely be in
one. Go-to screenwriter Leigh Brackett attested to Hawks’ total disinterest in conventional
stories at the time: “That was the year that Howard was not buying any
story.... He didn’t want plot, he just wanted scenes.” The story, as much as it
existed, was to go through a number of reinventions in the years leading up to
the actual shoot. In an early incarnation the film’s tone was rather heavy and
melodramatic, recalling Only Angels Have Wings in both mood and situation,
with the idea of casualties of the dangerous job being replaced as time went
along à la earlier films like Angels, The Dawn Patrol and The Road to
Glory (1936). Another scrapped idea was to have Wayne star opposite Clark
Gable in a scenario recalling A Girl in Every Port, with one an alcoholic
being taken care of by the other and both after the same girl. (Hawks was very
attached to this idea in his late period, as it reappears variously in the
Wayne/Robert Mitchum set-up of El Dorado [1966] and in a major unmade
1970s screenplay.) The studio wouldn’t pay the salaries for two stars of such
magnitude, so Hawks changed the story again—essentially splitting Gable’s
character into two younger actors, Gérard Blain and Hardy Kruger. Gable himself
would die around the time shooting began on Hatari!, but not before
starring in his last film (Marilyn Monroe’s as well), John Huston’s The
Misfits (1961), which contains similar animal-capturing elements to Hatari!
but set in the modern American west; a comparison of the two films—each
great in very different ways—would be instructive in showing just how
uninterested Hawks was in making any kind of social statement with his films,
especially one like Hatari! that he viewed as a vacation as much as a
job.
Although he
had never seen a script that he couldn’t improve during the actual shooting of
it, in his later years Hawks increasingly worked from scripts that were
unfinished, fragmentary, or mere jumping-off points—to many they seemed not to exist
at all. On Hatari!, Gérard Blain claimed that during the seven months of
the shoot, he never read Leigh Brackett’s script and Hawks never used it,
constantly improvising instead; as can be gleaned from a later documentary
capturing some of the filming of Rio Lobo, Hawks would carry a yellow
notepad around with him on set for jotting down ideas and dialogue. Hawks’ indifference
towards scripts in his later years, or at least toward letting anyone see them,
stemmed from not just his increasing willingness to discover situations and
dialogue on set with his collaborators, but also a slight paranoia that leaks
would result in his best material making its way onto television before his own
films ever made it into theatres; he would go so far as to have two
scripts prepared before filming—“one that I let people read, without a lot of
the best stuff in it, and the other I keep for myself.” A Howard Hawks set was
an enclave in which actors, writers, and crew members gathered to do a job
while shutting out the exterior world, and in the process creating their own; naturally,
just like Hawks’ no-producers-on-set rule, a script wandering out of this enclave
didn’t fit that tight-knit picture, and things like improvising scenes the
day-of, reworking dialogue together, or temporarily abandoning work for play
when the situation allowed one to, very much did. It is easy to see that Hatari!
is also a documentary of its own making, an allegory for itself: on
location in Africa, Hawks & co. would wake up any given day without knowing
what they were going to be shooting, waiting for word on where animals could be
found, and then driving out to the spot of reported sightings with their
custom-built trucks rigged with cameras to capture the actual actors capturing
the actual animals—just like John Wayne & co.’s outfit in the film. François
Truffaut wasn’t shy about considering the film to be disguisedly about
filmmaking, claiming it as an influence on his own meta-fictional film about
filmmaking, 1973’s Day for Night; Jean Douchet would call the film a
“documentary... on [Hawks’] profession as film director. In it, he reveals the
secret of his aesthetic and his morality, the determination to get as close as
possible to reality, to capture it with the lasso of his camera like a daring
sportsman attempting a difficult exploit.” Outside of the animal-capturing
scenes, dialogue scenes filmed on location were kept to functional, contextless
material so that Hawks had as much freedom as possible when the filming of
interiors commenced back in Hollywood.
Safari-themed
films were common in early 1950s Hollywood, but the genre was past its heyday
when Hawks joined in on the fun—none such picture had finished in the top
twenty grossers since 1953 until Hatari! finished 8th almost a decade
later. Among other reasons, this may have been a result of Hawks solving one of
the main issues of the subgenre: the interlacing of documentary and
non-documentary footage in the film’s narrative. With the demand for realism in
films growing, Hatari!’s ability to tear down this divide not only
satisfied a public who were no longer “naïve” enough to accept the obvious
effects-work of safari pictures of old, but also opened up bigger doors of
realism—that of the interweaving of the non-dramatic with the dramatic—that Hawks
was eager to step through. The film is structured simply: high intensity animal-capturing
sequences, followed by low intensity moments of downtime. Hawks was enamored
enough with this structure to use variations of it in both of his next two
films; Man’s Favorite Sport? and Red Line 7000 (1965) both
follow up sporting sequences, of fishing and racing respectively, with downtime
filled by drinking, conversation, and romantic hijinks at or around some
central hub of socialization. Hawks would defend Hatari!’s construction
by simply saying that “the form of the picture is a hunting season, from
beginning to end. It’s what happens when you get a bunch of fellows together to
hunt.” Although the film is predicated on the realism of its dramatic moments
with the animals, it’s the second, non-dramatic realism that Hawks is most
interested in—the “what happens when...” of his statement. In the home base
which houses all of Hatari!’s main cast Hawks observes what
happens when...: what happens when a crew member is injured and a
replacement is brought in, what happens when two young men vie for the heart of
the same woman, what happens when that woman is in love with a different man than
either, what happens when a female outsider infiltrates the group, what happens
when that female falls for the leader of that group, etc. But all of these would-be
sub-plots are treated with equal importance to anything else in the film,
causing them to rise to the level of plot, the “what happens” that makes up a
narrative feature film.
Hawks doesn’t
skimp on his observations; at two hours and thirty-nine minutes long, Hatari!
is Hawks’ longest film by far (and he claimed to have enough footage for
another hour.) To take just one example, a scene between Dallas (Elsa
Martinelli) and Pockets (Red Buttons) early in the film is over five minutes of
pure conversation, where the characters literally sit down and ask each other
“What should we talk about?” and then proceed to talk about it. Nothing
visually spectacular happens; they just sit in chairs next to each other. But
one’s attention is held fast—not just here, but throughout the entire lengthy
film—because it’s this character stuff that Hawks is so entranced with,
and therefore we are too. Characters and their relationships. Hawks learned
early on to trust his instincts in that if he liked a character, the audience
would too, and that when that rapport is established they’ll follow them
anywhere, doing anything. Hatari! is full of such characters. The
melding of actor with character and character with actor is so casual and
complete (the lack of stand-ins for the dangerous hunting scenes contribute to
this) that the audience participates in the pleasure that Hawks and his actors
must have had in making it; Dan Sallitt writes that Hawks’ late films, Hatari!
most daringly so in its discarding of narrative, “liberate performance from
story to a large extent, and wind up feeling like documentaries of actors
hanging out on sets.” Hatari! is a movie that really makes you believe
Hawks when he says that art is the furthest thing from his mind, which
paradoxically makes his artistry all the clearer; the low-stakes fun of the
film’s hangout scenes, particularly when juxtaposed against the high-stakes danger
of the animal-capturing ones, casually begins to take on a profundity that it
couldn’t have had were it to be deliberately sought after. Ultimately, Hawks is
an artist because he isn’t one. He doesn’t think in those terms—he sees movies
as delivery systems for character, story, action, fun, entertainment; films
aren’t art objects for him, but rather holistic things that morph from the script
to the set to the edit towards the creation of a living, breathing motion
picture designed to go over with a paying audience.
That didn’t
stop French actor Gérard Blain from accepting Hawks’ invitation to be in the
film without reading a single word of a screenplay for the reason that a film
by Hawks was sure to be better than anything being made in France, a decision
“not prompted by commerce but by art.” This coming from an actor dubbed “the
first face of the New Wave” for his prominent role in early French nouvelle vague
films, one of which—Claude Chabrol’s Les cousins (1959)—being the
film Hawks discovered him in, watched strictly for the purpose of looking for
attractive new faces—Hawks turned the film off before finishing in order to request
a voice test by the actor in English right away. Blain would
later compare Hawks’ improvisatory filming methods to those of Godard, a
comparison that helps break down preconceptions in the way classic Hollywood
filmmaking is thought about contra the international new waves of “art” films that
exploded in the 1960s; Godard for one was still a passionate Hawks partisan when
making his early 1960s films, placing Hatari! in first place on his 1962
top ten list for Cahiers du cinéma, deliberately fashioning his debut Breathless
(1960) as a kind of remake of Scarface, as well as creating a
protagonist in his Contempt (1963) meant to be “a character from Last
Year at Marienbad [1961] who wants to play the role of a character in Rio
Bravo.” The film world-set Contempt also prominently features a
poster of Hatari! as part of its scenery.
A closer look
shows that Hatari! —and as we will see, other late Hawks films as well—represents
an experimentation with the classical logic of time and space on screen to a
degree not so far removed from the more conspicuously radical films of the 1960s
and ‘70s that co-participate in that great era of film history’s generational crossover.
Hawks plays with time, and what he chooses to fill it with, in a way that reflects
the langorous nature of Hawks himself as a person, a nature that seeps into the
very fabric of the late films. Although known for the quick-talking, fast-paced
films from earlier in his career—Hawks’ early trick to perk up a flat scene was
simply to have it done 25% faster—Hawks as a person was in fact an extremely
slow talker and always moved at a deliberately relaxed pace. Actor Leo McKern,
who met Hawks when being considered for a role in Hatari!, stated that
he had “never met anyone who spoke or moved slower.... Not that there was any
sense of weakness conveyed; on the contrary. I believe that it was simply that
he had long ago decided that if anyone was going to come down with an ulcer, it
was not H. H.” The late films tend to take on this slowness, and in doing so reveal
that Hawks’ strength never lied in the pace of his films per se but
rather what that pace entailed in terms of the rhythms of character dynamics; the
elder Hawks (65-years-old at the time of Hatari!’s premiere, for those keeping
track) courted a different pace than the younger Hawks, one that prized less
the snappiness of a humorous or romantic or dramatic interaction and more the
materiality of it, the way it hung in the air and then settled on the ground,
the way it forever bottled a specific word or gesture from a specific actor,
the way it told in real time of an interaction between people that had value in
and of itself as an interaction before it ever became, if indeed it ever
did, a point along a plot. So when Hawks has his cast partake in a group
singalong of “Whiskey, Leave Me Alone” over their vehicle intercoms—the second
time the song had appeared in a Hawks film, after Kirk Douglas and Dewey
Martin’s rowdy saloon singalong in The Big Sky a decade before—he has no
higher intentions for the moment other than to be a moment, a moment which
simultaneously has no bearing on the story but also means everything in
establishing the camaraderie of the group, and by extension establishing the
camaraderie of the audience with that group; but even before that, it is simply
pure human pleasure. The same idea applies, in a different tone, to the animal-capturing
scenes. When Hawks follows the group in real time chasing one animal, capturing
it, losing it, chasing it again, and finally capturing it again, he is showing the
material reality of the job, the physical and emotional struggle it entails, in
documentary detail. No less than Jean-Marie Straub, when asked a question about
his own “austere, documentary” formal structure, answered that he is really no different
than a Howard Hawks who, whether making a film about Al Capone or fliers or
people catching animals, “is forced to know exactly how people can catch
animals, that’s all.” Like many great and diverse filmmakers, Straub among
them, Hawks is interested in the matter of life, the stuff that makes up
the world and our interactions with it. In Hatari! this includes capturing
animals, navigating love, playing with elephants, or simply the beauty of the majestic
African landscape—Hawks considered the film one of his Westerns; German actor
Hardy Kruger even fell in love with the area so much that he bought the farm the
film is set at after filming was over.
At the heart
of this film full to the brim with Hawksian pleasures: John Wayne, whose mere
way of being is one of the Hawksian pleasures par excellence. His presence in
the Hawks Westerns is axiomatic in the same way that Cary Grant’s presence in
the Hawks comedies is, and is a perfect companion for late Hawks in that the
category of “late Wayne” begins around the same time. Late Hawks’ laidback pace
accentuates Wayne’s gentle side in a way that his other common collaborators
didn’t always do. He’s the ultimate representation of “man” for the older Hawks,
the good-humored, hard-working, uncomplaining leader but also the stubborn, unperceptive,
often romantically incompetent social creature, yet above all the man of
constant, composed, and unwavering integrity, which bubbles out of him silently
and invisibly, and at times even antagonistically, in the form of love for his
fellow compatriots. Despite the utmost respect and high regard he holds for
Wayne in the late films, Hawks is always also having fun at his expense, most
embarrassingly so in the romantic plots he sends his way. Wayne is never a
womanizer in Hawks, but because of his integrity and offbeat charm (and Hawks’ own
personal and directorial preference for how he liked women to act, it should be
said) he becomes the one being wooed, chased after by a woman who, despite
seeing his flaws clearer than anyone, still can’t manage to resist him. This
courtship reversal is directly established early on when Dallas is told
straight off by Pockets that the only way her goal is going to be achieved is
if she herself makes it happen. Hawks had begun this woman-chasing-Wayne trope
in Rio Bravo with Angie Dickinson on his trail, and the same concept
would be the meat of the plot in his next film with Paula Prentiss chasing Rock
Hudson around in Man’s Favorite Sport?; of course, this is a deeply
Hawksian trope that goes back much further than the late films—Bringing Up
Baby is the 100 miles-per-hour ne plus ultra of it—but late Hawks treasures
it in a way that demonstrates the essentially comic nature of his last
handful of films.
In the early
1970s, Hawks noted that “especially in the last ten or twelve years, every time
I can get some comedy into a scene, I’ll do it.” Although Hawks had always had
a humorous streak, the days of heavier-toned films like The Dawn Patrol, The
Road to Glory, or Only Angels Have Wings was mostly long gone—even Red
Line 7000, the main exception to such a statement, has a poppier,
self-ironic register that ultimately becomes something more complex than a
straight designation of drama can contain. All of the later films share in this
complexity, however, and despite each appearing more comic or more dramatic
than their neighboring films—even their neighboring scenes, so wildly and
easily can Hawks veer from one to the other within the same film—are not easily
classified as either comedy or drama. But the same thing could be said of life.
Robin Wood, writing about Rio Bravo but applicable to most of Hawks, said
that “there is a continual sense of the contrapuntal interaction of the various
levels of seriousness and humor, so that great complexity of tone often
results.” Tone is one of those things that often gets late films in trouble with
critics who expect or want a film to adhere to one easily digestible register,
and the more tonally complex a film is the less critics know what to do with it—the
kneejerk reaction then is often to dismiss it. It especially doesn’t help when
the tone is primarily comedic, which to many viewers immediately frames a film
as silly rather than serious, and before it’s even given a chance they’ve
decided to look for mere laughs rather than any kind of profundity; and if the
film doesn’t conventionally deliver on those—as late comedies often dissonantly
don’t—such a viewer will receive as empty a film that is in fact full, just in
a different, unconventionally complex way. Man’s Favorite Sport? has
been one of the many victims of such a mode of perception, a comedy of great
tonal complexity that’s filled with Hawks’ movie-intuitive sense of humor, a
sense, alas, that was formed and matured in a very different era than the 1964
of the film’s release. Hence, dissonance and anachronism ensue. “I don’t
know why a thing is funny,” Hawks would say. “It just happens to be funny, but
the poor damn critic has to write about it. But, actually, very few critics, in
my opinion, know what the hell it’s all about.”
Just who
those few critics were we don’t know, but Hawks certainly had a growing
contingent of critics and fans who were following in the footsteps of his 1950s
devotees into the 1960s in taking his work seriously. News of Hawks’ passionate
embrace by the French was slowly trickling into American film culture, largely
by the efforts of critics Eugene Archer and Andrew Sarris who—with the help of
their younger friend Peter Bogdanovich—convinced the New Yorker Theater to hold
a program called “The Forgotten Film” in January of 1961, a series of films over
a third of which were ones by Howard Hawks. Many of the films hadn’t been shown
in years, and many were hits with new audiences. Bogdanovich kept the ball
rolling by engineering a near-complete retrospective of Hawks’ films (27 of the
then 35) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York the next summer, which curator
Richard Griffith agreed to host only if Bogdanovich could convince Paramount
(the studio behind Hatari!) to pay for it; as their promotional campaign
for Hatari! was the studio’s largest ever to that point, they agreed.
Bogdanovich travelled to Hollywood to interview Hawks for the series’
accompanying monograph he was to pen. Writing on Hawks’ films—much of it from
the auteurist perspective adopted from critical forebears in France—picked up
aplenty, and the Hawks bug travelled to England as well; Movie magazine’s
December 1962 issue, dedicated to a whole slew of writings on Hawks and with an
image from Hatari! on the cover, helped further the cause by translating
Rivette’s 1953 “Genius” article into English for the first time.
But Hawks
showed little sign that this newfound adulation had any effect on him or the
kind of films he was making, reacting only with mild bemusement. For the
December 1963/January 1964 double issue on American cinema being done by Cahiers
du cinéma, the magazine sent a survey out to a plethora of directors working
in America—including Hawks—the answers to which were to be published in the
issue. Six questions were given, with subjects ranging from current projects,
conditions of production and distribution, to how Hollywood had changed in the
last decade; Hawks responded by sending back a single still from the upcoming Man’s
Favorite Sport? of Rock Hudson up to his neck in a lake, with nothing
written except his signature. On the one hand it’s a supremely Hawksian joke,
but on the other it’s also an honest testament to Hawks’ unpretentiousness when
it came to his own status as a filmmaker. George Kirgo, one of the writers on Red
Line 7000, would recall that whenever somebody sent Hawks a copy of Cahiers,
he would laugh and say “I just aim the camera at the actors... and they
make up all these things about me.” To keep perspective, however, it must also be
mentioned that Kirgo thought this a pose and, despite his love for Hawks, found
him to be “the most self-involved, self-obsessed man I’ve ever met.” Another
person who claimed to see through Hawks’ unpretentious-craftsman image was
François Truffaut, who in the 1970s wished a book-length interview with Hawks
could be done similar to his own with Alfred Hitchcock; “he is one of the most
intellectual filmmakers in America,” Truffaut would write towards the end of
Hawks’ life. “He often speaks in terms of film concepts. He has many general
theories. He doesn’t belong to the school of instinctive filmmakers. He thinks
of everything he does, everything is thought out. So somebody ought to tell him
one day that despite himself he is an intellectual and that he has to accept
that.” Truffaut may have had a point, that behind Hawks’ veneer of anti-intellectualism
was a thinker deeply invested in solving the problems of his chosen craft, and simply
adopted for convenience the general viewpoint that that craft, Hollywood
filmmaking, couldn’t possibly be worth calling an art.
Man’s
Favorite Sport?, however, certainly wouldn’t convert anyone to the “Hawks the
intellectual artist” camp who wasn’t already a member. A romantic comedy about a
ridiculously persistent woman chasing around a befuddled man who’s engaged to
another woman, the unavoidable “Bringing Up Baby 25 years later” label
immediately brings to mind not just the obvious similarities between the two
films but perhaps moreso the distance separating them—for many critics, the
distance separating the over-the-hill fatiguedness of Man’s Favorite Sport? from
Bringing Up Baby’s lightning-in-a-bottle vigor. But to say that Bringing
Up Baby is “better” than Man’s Favorite Sport? is to slip back into an
unedifying consumerist mindset that has nothing to do with late style’s perspective
of meeting the artist where they are rather than where they once were, or where
we would like them to be. Hawks is still Hawks—the unashamed reworking of Bringing
Up Baby and his common woman-chasing-man plot makes that obvious—but the
Hawks of 1964 is not the same Hawks of 1938; and, obvious though it may be,
1964 itself is not 1938. Hollywood is different. The world is different. For a
simple example, when Hawks repeats the same ripped-dress gag from the earlier
film we see the woman’s bare back rather than one clothed with undergarments.
Rock Hudson is not Cary Grant (Hawks’ first choice for the role, but who turned
it down on the basis of his unwillingness to play the romantic lead with such
young women)—this much is obvious. But despite the similarity of the role to
Grant-led Hawks comedies of yore, it does no good to pay attention to the
non-Grant-ness of the role rather than the Rock Hudson-ness of it. Hudson isn’t
Grant, and he doesn’t need to be—the bumbling charm hidden under his suave
front makes the role Hudson’s own, as it did in the actor’s comedic
performances in a handful of other films. The same could be said for Paula
Prentiss in the Katharine Hepburn role; she need only be herself, molded by
Hawks’ universe, to become a perfectly suitable Hawksian character—someone who recalls
other Hawks characters while still being entirely themselves. In the same way, Man’s
Favorite Sport? recalls other Hawks films while still being entirely itself.
Which just so happens to be the foundational fact behind not just the idea of
cinematic authorship that goes by auteurism but that of late style in
cinema as well, whose investigation-beginning question pertains to the exact
nature of the “entirely itself” of that equation.
The pleasures
are different: for example, where Baby is fast, Sport is slow. Where
in Baby they talked a mile a minute and a new gag was introduced
seemingly every few seconds, Sport luxuriates in its jokes and bits and
gags, letting them play out in all their banal, out-of-time, “unfunny” glory. “Unfunny”
because it’s the same 1930s stuff but in a modern 1960s setting: “mostly old
stuff—trouble with the tent, the foot in the bucket, etc.” as Donald Willis put
it. The anachronistic content of the gags, however, is re-imagined in the form
of 1960s Hawks, a form more willing to let a thing play out in real, untampered
time; similar to more modern comic performers like Jerry Lewis or Jacques
Tati, Hawks stretches out a gag almost to its breaking point, to the edge of
being funny, sometimes even over the edge, which ironically makes it even more
funny while also letting a hint of poignancy creep in to each gag that a more
rapid-fire style wouldn’t necessarily have room for. So rather than Bringing
Up Baby, the Hawks film Sport most resembles is Hatari!; it almost
plays like Hawks plucked the main romantic comedy element out of that film and stretched
it to its own feature-length variation, with the same day’s work / evening
social play structure, the danger of the hunt traded in for the comedy of the
fishing interludes, and then an enclosed social environment in which the film completely
and languorously becomes about little more than relationships between
characters. Hawks’ plans for Sport’s runtime were also similarly
ambitious. The film went into its first preview at a 145-minute runtime, which
Hawks reported to be a smashing success; the studio, however, wished it cut
down to fit in more daily showtimes, which when done and previewed got less
successful results; panicking, instead of restoring it they decided to cut it down
even further to its current two-hour runtime. Hawks claimed this sabotaged the
film—essentially eliminating all of the contextual “plant” scenes which were
needed to make the remaining scenes funny—and led to his dissatisfaction with
the ultimate result. But even without the excised time, Sport is still Hawks’
slowest-paced comedy by far. Fernando Villaverde notes that the comedy doesn’t
follow a classical model, but rather that its “drawing out” of its gags for
comedic effect was “something palpable that occurs within the scene, where
repetition and failure produce a certain discomfort in the spectator, which is
cranked up until it is finally released with laughter. This produces a much
more physical relationship with time.” As such, Sport continues the
modernist play with time of Hatari! rather than retreating to the
classical manner of its more ostensible precursor Bringing Up Baby, and
does it specifically in the realm of comedy. “In slowing down the tempo,” Erich
Kuersten even claims that “Hawks ushers the film onto a postmodern pedestal,
turning it this way and that until the tired old gags become positively
Brechtian in their museum-light luster.”
Despite
appearances, Man’s Favorite Sport? is no staid studio comedy past its
sell-by date. In addition to its experimentation with the gag, it can also
easily be called Hawks’ most surrealist film. Despite their incredulity—a natural
screwball staple—Hawks’ early comedies never quite leave the realm of
possibility, and only the science fiction elements of Monkey Business and
The Thing (1951) show Hawks venturing into the realm of the truly unreal,
although even there the unreality is remarkably integrated with the otherwise functional
realism of the proceedings. Sport offers a few things that are too
outlandish or cartoonish to easily fit with Hawks’ usual level of realism, such
as a bear that Hudson encounters while riding his motorbike—after crashing,
Hudson sees the bear take over his place on the bike and casually ride away like
it was a normal occurrence—or the extra-filmic visual punctuations of trains
crashing together inserted after Hudson and Prentiss kiss (a surprising device because
used nowhere else in Hawks), or the simple fact that Hawks’ sets have gotten
phonier, more cardboard, more obviously studio backlots. The entire general
feeling of the film is one of quaint ridiculousness, where anybody can be
anybody and anyone can do anything for no other reason than the fact that they
exist inside a screwball comedy, which nobody realizes hasn’t been a popular type
of comedy since the 1930s and ‘40s. Miscommunication and misunderstanding
proliferate to the point of absurdity. This gives Hawks the chance to throw his
characters together in situations and conversations which exist only to further
the characters’ relations with each other and also with the audience, the
screwball variation on Hatari!’s downtime scenes. The actual words and
actions matter little as the actors perform a dance around an emotion or a confession
that we know must eventually be said but that no one wants to say. David
Thompson has written of the “dazzling battles of word, innuendo, glance, and
gesture” between Hawks couples, including Hudson and Prentiss, that “are
Utopian procrastinations to avert the paraphernalia of released love that can
only expend itself. In other words, Hawks is at his best in moments when
nothing happens beyond people arguing about what might happen or has happened.”
One gets the sense that nothing would ever happen in a Hawks film if there
wasn’t a girl around to finally get the ball rolling, a theme prevalent in the
last two Hawks films as well as the raison d’etre more or less for both Sport
and the first full articulation of the theme in Bringing Up Baby. Both
contain parallel quotes about how the love impulse in man shows itself in
conflict, stating the theme of these twin films out loud. But the outrageous
difficulty of actually getting anywhere via that impulse, as shown to the hilt
in Baby, is simplified a bit in the late Sport, where, as in Hatari!,
the trick is simply for the girl to go up to the guy and casually ask him
to kiss.
There is
never any great reason behind the romantic impulse in Hawks, it’s simply there,
popping up organically in a character almost against their will. Prentiss can’t
explain to her friend why she’s in love with Hudson and later Hudson can’t
explain, despite everything, why he nonetheless finds her “strangely
attractive,” almost liking her at times. Similar intuitive, illogical reasoning
rears its head throughout Hawks, and not just in romantic situations: when
asked why they fly despite all the danger it entails, the veteran pilots in Only
Angels Have Wings search themselves and find no good answer—they just fly. There
is never any reason short of divine intervention or sheer dumb luck why Rock
Hudson is able to catch any fish at all in Man’s Favorite Sport?, let
alone win the tournament he’s been entered in, and Hawks draws out such fishing
sequences, twisting them into hilarious knots, to emphasize the absurdity of
such an achievement. But the mysterious will animating Hudson’s winning of the tournament
could be said to be the same one drawing him towards Prentiss against his own
better judgement. As such, one half of the film offers a metaphor for the
other: like catching a fish with your back turned, falling in love happens when
you least expect it—without even realizing it, without knowing why it is
happening, without any control over the situation. Or as a character in Red
Line 7000—perhaps Hawks’ ultimate statement on the illogicality and
irrationality of love—says, “if love makes sense, then it isn’t love.” The eventually
discarded fiancées in both Baby and Sport live in an ordered,
logical world and therefore demand explanations for their betrothed’s behavior;
the succeeding lovers don’t—they simply feel the way they do, without being
able to help themselves, and accept it on faith that therefore it is meant to
be. Such a worldview is playful, childish, naïve, but in another sense awfully mature:
Hawks respects life, and therefore respects the mystery.
This goes
along with a Hawksian maturity that Sport, perhaps more than any other
Hawks film, reveals: that the oft-spoken-of “Hawksian professionalism” he
prizes in his characters is not, in fact, an end in and of itself; but rather
that behind this trait is a deeper virtue that one might call honesty of
being—a matching of external and internal being, an absence of hypocrisy, an
integrity and wholeness of one’s person. Despite being unimpeachably good at
his job, it’s clear that Rock Hudson’s fishing gear salesman doesn’t share in
the Hawksian virtue that the professionalism of so many of his other characters
causes them to possess. Hudson is a phony; he can’t actually fish, and his expertise
is entirely second-hand. By itself this is no crime. His advice to his
customers is uniformly excellent. But his phoniness is still presented as a
character flaw because his external self doesn’t conform to his internal one,
which for Hawks trumps a professionalism for professionalism’s sake. The
solution to this problem will eventually be Hudson’s confession of ineptitude—importantly
from his own willing mouth, rather than revealed by a poor tournament
performance (the film goes to the length of miracles to not allow him to get
off that easily)—which ironically causes him to get back the very job he had
resigned from in shame. But he’s still a fishing expert who can’t fish! This is
no longer a problem, however, because his honesty fixes his external/internal
discrepancy and gives him a Hawksian wholeness and integrity of character; his
professionalism becomes an extension of his specific, unique being rather than
a front of fakery. Along with Monkey Business, then, Sport has a
seriousness underlying its comedy that is more visible in late Hawks than early.
This goes along with the patient, amiable, durational elements of late Hawks, which
Sport’s at-times uniquely contemplative moods couldn’t quite exist
without; whereas there’s too much business constantly going on in Bringing
Up Baby for any real moments of silence, in Sport both Hudson and
Prentiss get full moments to mope or think or just be.
There are
pleasures and profundities galore in early Hawks, but the late films display a quiet
maturity that is an integral result of their unhurried, casual, unzeitgeisty temperaments.
This is true even of a film that on its surface appears the loudest and most
“hip” of the final Hawks films. Red Line 7000 is ostensibly a thrilling picture
about the lives and loves of modern racecar drivers, yet the majority of the
film consists of remarkably hushed conversations in intimate spaces—quiet moments
between friends or lovers in a bed, a car, an office, an empty courtyard, a
hospital room, etc. Hawks takes a cast of young, fresh faces in a 1960s environment
of hopping bars and roaring racetracks and somehow ends up making one of his most
muted, mature, minor key films. It’s also the most pertinent example of the way
the classicalist, traditionalist side of Hawks productively clashes with his
modernist impulses, or as Peter John Dyer put it, “it is the constant
cross-graining of cliché and inventive detail which produces the shock of
pleasure his best work provides.” The late-career Red Line has a
built-in early-career reference in The Crowd Roars (1932), Hawks’
previous racing picture, but one of the important ideas behind the film goes
all the way back to 1921, from Hawks’ earliest days in the motion picture
business. His friend Marshall Neilan had directed a film called Bits of Life
which was an anthology of four different short stories. Over the years Hawks
kept the idea of making a film out of multiple stories and finally tested it with
Red Line, which would weave together three storylines set within the
same world. No script existed yet when Hawks sent out his second unit director
to collect footage from NASCAR races, and when he sat down with his hired
writers he didn’t have much in the way of a story, just a few character ideas;
they listened to him describe racetrack incidents from his past and scenes from
some of his old movies. The structure that finally resulted from this dissatisfied
Hawks—he found that dropping one storyline for another just when the audience
was getting interested ultimately made for a poor picture. But Hawks overstates
the degree to which the storylines are truly separate, as the main
characters—three guys and three girls—overlap into each other’s stories enough to
give the impression that it’s ultimately one canvas we’re looking at, not
three. I use the word canvas intentionally, as what’s created from the three
converging semi-plots is the closest thing to an Art Object that Hawks ever made.
Hawks didn’t make Art Objects—he told stories on film. But the structure of Red
Line allows the film to slip away from him a bit in that regard. The film,
like an album of music or a triptych in painting, is an accumulation. Its
wholeness isn’t created by following the story of one group but by interlacing multiple
stories, stacking scenes on top of scenes, weaving together a web of characters
and relationships, plots and perspectives, that finally congeal to what the
film ultimately is, in toto. So what Hawks saw as a classical weakness
is actually a modernist strength; the experimental structure allows for
multiple subjectivities to create a dialectical whole via Hawks’ own relaxed take
on cinematic montage.
Hawks had grown
old enough to live in an era where the techniques of his youth could be
mistaken for, or simply become, modernist gestures. In a time that was coming
to expect increased realism, Hawks films the racing sequences with techniques
not very far removed from those used on The Crowd Roars a generation or
two earlier: mostly a combination of second-unit documentary and stock footage
with shots of the actors done in-studio using rear-projection. The
artificiality is clear and unhidden. However, “Such moments,” suggests Joe
McElhaney, “bring the film more in line with the deliberately artificial car
rides of sixties art cinema, epitomised by Federico Fellini’s ‘Toby Dammit’
episode from... Spirits of the Dead [1968].” Or note, as Villaverde
would have us, the shot of a flaming car that begins the film, “exactly the
same as the one Godard would later use in Weekend (1967) to represent
society’s collapse.” Red Line’s representation of the specificities of
its contemporary setting tipped over, for some critics of the time, into an
ugly commercialism, their ire targeted largely at the use of product placement
in the film. Most noticeable in an outdoor scene between James Caan and
Marianna Hill where the two talk over bottles of Pepsi retrieved from a vending
machine, at closer inspection the scene is too charged and intimate for the
obviousness of the Pepsi label on their drinks to register as anything but an
ironic signifier of modernity—to prove the point, the Pepsi corporation wasn’t
happy with how the scene essentially eroticized its product. McElhaney clocks
the use of advertising imagery as something closer to what Michelangelo
Antonioni would do in Zabriskie Point (1970) with advertising
billboards—“elevating them to the level of graphic abstraction and rendering
irrelevant what is being sold”—or to Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, “with its frequent
use of commercial logos multiplied and refracted in numerous ways, elevating
this commercial raw material to the mythic and the ironic.”
Red Line doesn’t just
have parallels in the world of art cinema, but according to Richard Thompson also
deliberately clashes with the kinds of racing pictures commercial Hollywood was
making around the same time. He points out that, à la Hawks making Rio Bravo
in response to High Noon, so too Red Line offers a counter to
such Hollywood racing films: “Hawks, who has never strayed from his commitment
to casual (and as we’ll see, causal) hipness, would hardly consider doing a
picture about the high-brow Grand Prix world when its American-/Hawksian
counterpart exists in stock car racing; but on the other hand, lacking the
social and political orientation manifested in [Tom] Wolfe and Thunder Road
[1958], and being more a documentarist than a legend maker for youth-rebellion
heroes, Hawks must make it his own way. He chooses to make a practical,
somewhat disillusioning statement of how it is in stock car racing without that
legend stuff.” As always, no matter the ostensible subject or genre, Hawks can
do nothing but make a Hawks movie—that is, a movie which will be about
characters and character relations before it is about anything else. But Red
Line will be about this in a unique way because, unlike Hawks’ other films,
none of the actors are stars; they don’t bring metaphysical baggage into their
performances, and, therefore, are free to be something like Hawksian models, to
borrow a concept from Robert Bresson. (Some of which weren’t thrilled at being
molded in this way.) The six main characters—all played by young, conventionally
attractive 1960s actors—wander around the bar/restaurant or motel sets falling
in and out of love with each other in often disarmingly upfront sequences of
emotional vulnerability; I’m hard pressed to think of a movie that contains
more instances of “I’m in love with you” or variations thereof directly spoken
in its dialogue. It may all seem a bit silly if you’re not willing to be
emotionally keyed in at the same serious tone of the film you’re watching, a
film with so many tears it may seem a soap opera rather than the melodrama it
is (while it doesn’t abandon comedy completely, it is the heaviest late Hawks
by far), a melodrama in the same vein as something like Only Angels Have
Wings, which along with other early Hawks films is the precursor for Red
Line’s dramatic stakes of men courting death in order to do their jobs. And
to the potential heartbreak of a woman—Jean Arthur in Wings is the ‘30s prototype
for the three ‘60s women of Red Line who argue with themselves over whether
its worth being in love when the possibility of that love being snatched away is
inches away every time their man steps into his speeding machine. Even Arthur’s
climatic yell of “Heyyyy!!” upon belatedly realizing Cary Grant has asked her
to stay is updated here to a hospital scene between Laura Devon and John Robert
Crawford, who has lost his hand in a crash; amidst his emasculated unwillingness
to voice his desire for her, she gets up to walk out of the room in order to
force him—he finally asks her to stay, and then she turns and embraces him in a
fit of tears. (A casual, wonderfully Hawksian cut swiftly puts Crawford back in
a racecar, a hook for a hand.)
Hawks begins
the film the same way he often does to establish the dramatic stakes: with death
or injury as a result of the profession we are about to watch an entire film of
people doing. Red Line 7000 is the ultimate expression of Hawks’
foundational dramatic impulse, which he himself succinctly summarized in an
interview: “There is no action when there is no danger.
It follows that if you achieve real action, there must be danger. To live or to
die! What drama is greater?” Life or death stakes are emblazoned all over Red
Line; the tension created by the possibility of death seeps into every
moment of downtime—the roar and excitement from the racetrack echoing into all
those hushed, intimate scenes—in a way that it doesn’t in another late film
like Hatari!, where even though danger lurks it is never as much of a
constant, explicit fear as it is in Red Line. It creates a thrillingly
complex, and modern, mood and atmosphere. The film follows the same A-B-A-B...
structure of activity / downtime as the previous two late films, but the downtime
is haunted by the nearness of death. Every race presents not only the
possibility of death for one of the men, but the possibility that one of the
women will have to grieve said death. The woman played by Gail Hire embodies this to the extreme, as her character is given the
burden of believing, because of past events in her history, that her falling in
love with a driver is literally akin to a death sentence for him. She and the
other women have plenty of logical reasons not to get involved with these men, to
refuse the relationships, but—as in the other late Hawks films that respect the
mystery of this film’s “it’s not love if it makes sense” line—love trumps
logic, and chooses to stare death in the eye rather than abandon such love. Just
as in Sport, the sport the men go off to do by themselves serves as a
metaphor for the love games that happen when they return to home base. Hawks
loves both dangerous situations and communal spaces, and their juxtaposition is
the engine behind the films’ drama: the masculine urge to go off and do
something potentially dangerous that makes you feel alive, and then to return
home to the bar, restaurant, club, whatever—the site of drinks, conversation, and,
most importantly, the female. The latter things are a release from the former
things, yes, but they also present a different kind of danger—that of
relationships, where despite appearances you have just as little control over what
happens as out in the field of danger: you could be victorious, but you could
also get burned. Things are just going to happen how they’re going to happen. In
this, Red Line is an incredibly adult picture; true to love and
heartbreak, life and death, and more.
The issue of
the curse felt by Hire’s character comes to a head in a scene between her and
Charlene Holt, a slightly older, maternal figure in the film. “I always thought
it was God who decided who lived or died,” she says sharply to Hire. “And you
don’t look a bit like God to me.” This brief religious interjection comes as a
surprise in the midst of a filmography largely absent religious sentiment. But this
also gives it a power, and a brief pondering of the statement quickly reveals it
as an explanation of almost all of Hawks, the unspoken reason why his
characters are able to accept death and move on the way they do. It’s relevant to
note that the only other such explicitly religious statement in Hawks—in Red
River, when Wayne reads over the grave of a departed member of his cattle
drive—is identical in meaning as the one spoken in Red Line: “We brought
nothing into this world, and it’s certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord
gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Amen.” Even
though this kind of moment is rare in Hawks (who himself, though raised
Protestant, was not particularly religious), it attests to a religious feeling
that’s buried deep in the films but usually only comes out via implication,
mired in the stuff of life, in how the acceptance of things and their
mysteries—of love, of death—is necessary in order to survive. Hawks’ characters
accept, or learn to accept, their not-God status. From the “Who’s Joe?” coping
mechanism routine early in Only Angels Have Wings, to Harry Carey Jr.’s burial
in Red River, to Red Line’s opening funeral—attended casually,
like it’s just another part of the job—Hawksian
professionalism always contains an undertone of submission to a divine will. One
wonders how much this theme emerges accidental to the overall Hawksian attitude,
or whether it arises more, if not intentionally, then subconsciously from Hawks
himself: one can recall that Hawks lost his younger brother Kenneth early in
his own directorial career to an aviation stunt accident.
Red Line 7000
clips along at a patient yet breezy pace, shot with a
Hawksian, unemphasized straightforwardness that captures the charged,
tense energy of its individual scenes rather than needing to create it; these
scenes then casually dissolve one into the next, and by the end of the film we’ve
already reached the beginning of a new racing season—contrary to Hawks’ usual
condensed timelines, he has made Red Line into one of his rare
elliptical movies, like Red River or Land of the Pharaohs (albeit
in miniature), without us even noticing. Hawks ends with a moment of beautiful
female solidarity: the three women at the racetrack watching, hoping, loving,
seated together as they watch their men embark on another year of courting
death—as we are reminded in an abrupt and shocking final shot of a car crashing
out of a race, a return to the film’s beginning. This rare moment of feminine
camaraderie in Hawks comes as an assertion of what could be called his late
period’s newfound openness to the feminine perspective—the late films
consistently have more prominent female roles: two in Hatari!, Sport, and
El Dorado, three in Rio Lobo, and four in Red Line compared
to the usual one in earlier Hawks films—as well as additional evidence for feminist
readings of Hawks that sprung up in the 1960s and ‘70s. It also anticipates Rio
Lobo’s use of its female cast members as important pillars of its peripatetic
plot. Hawks’ casting choices with his young actors has taken a fair share of criticism—having
prided himself on being a kind of unofficial talent scout since the beginning
of his career, his failure to launch any new female talent with his late films
is used as evidence of his failing powers—but what these fresh faces lacked in conventional
old-Hollywood talent they made up for in sheer Hawksian presence, modern figures
molded into statues of classical beauty with whom Hawks could populate his stories-written-on-cinema.
Their unique energies also charged Hawks’ images in a way older, more familiar,
more classically trained presences couldn’t. James Caan (the only new actor discovered
in late Hawks who went on to a traditionally successful career) in Red Line
7000 is the supreme example of this, a ferociously modern performance
trapped in Hawks’ classical frames, a barrel of pent-up energy eked out in
mumbles and whispers, a gamut of emotions from melancholy acceptance to full-on
rage all coiled up inside this short, curt man. He epitomizes the modernism of Red
Line at the same time as he makes visible the classical parameters Hawks still
functioned in. In this we see one of the many paradoxes that define Hawks’ late
style.
Robin Wood
wrote that Red Line 7000 “is perhaps, in Britain at least, the most
underestimated film of the sixties.” In it he saw an experimental modernism
that completely belied Hawks’ stated disappointment with the film; some other
(mostly auteurist) critics agreed. But this was not the majority opinion
whatsoever. Nonetheless, the case for the genius of Howard Hawks continued to
be pushed by a small contingent in the 1960s and ‘70s as Hawks winded down his
career, and if critics were able to do so it was often on account of their
ability to adopt Hawks to their own modernist purposes. Thus a magazine like Cahiers
du cinéma could stick with Hawks into the 1960s despite editorial shakeups and
changing emphases within the magazine; Hawks could be claimed by both the
classical vein of ‘50s Cahiers and the more modernist one of the ‘60s.
Late Hawks appealed to auteurists across the globe of the 1960s and ‘70s in
a similar way as artists like Beethoven appealed to Theodor Adorno and Edward
Said in their writings on late style. Such artists could be seen as possessing
an unconscious modernism despite working under a classical guise; their works were
ripe for adoption into the cause of artistic modernism because they operated
“against the grain” of their mediums’ contemporaneous conventions. No matter
that such adoption was itself anachronistic, quite literally in Beethoven’s
case and in Hawks’s, given he was unlikely to have had any aspirations to modernist
art, clearly a case of going beyond artist intention. Which there’s nothing
wrong with—in both cases perceptive thinkers sought to relate such artists to
the now, which it is possible to do with all great art, and especially
so with great late art, because it represents a clash between past and present that
pushes it into the realm of the timeless and ever-relevant.
As Hawks was
still alive and working, his increasing reputation as a hidden great of
Hollywood cinema coincided with the releases of the final films of his career. So
while writing continued to pour forth from both French and English language sources—a
January 1963 issue of Cahiers dedicated entirely to Hawks, an interview
conducted by the young duo of Serge Daney and Louis Skorecki in 1964, two
French monographs published in 1966 and 1971, as well as the twin 1968
publications of Robin Wood’s monograph and Andrew Sarris’s The American
Cinema (in which Hawks was designated a “pantheon” filmmaker), to name just
a few things—Hawks was also a living figure that cinema-crazed people could rub
shoulders with. French publicist and general man-about-cinema Pierre Rissient befriended
Hawks and shot screen tests for him in Europe and introduced him to many
actresses; Peter Bogdanovich became something of a mentee to Hawks,
interviewing him often, visiting his film sets to watch him work, and even
teaching a class on his films at UCLA in 1969. Young filmmakers of the next
generation like Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese would excerpt Hawks films diegetically
into their own early work—The Criminal Code (1931) in Targets (1968),
Red River in The Last Picture Show (1971), Rio Bravo in Who’s
That Knocking at My Door (1967)—synchronously with the release of Hawks’ own,
final films.
But the unspoken
question in the air amidst all this homage and rediscovery was whether this was
all a case of nostalgia for the great Hawks films of ages past or whether the
contemporary Hawks was still making films worthy of such attention. Or to
return to the original proclamation given by Rivette (who had launched his own
career as a filmmaker by this point): is the evidence on the screen still proof
of Howard Hawks’s genius? It’s no secret that many then, and many now, would
answer in the negative. But someone looking through the eyes of late style
might answer differently. Rivette’s dictum that you only have to watch Monkey
Business to know that it is a brilliant film was always a kind of tautology
that spoke past certain viewers, which raises the question of just what kind of
viewer he was talking about. Most likely it was those in the early
auteurist camp, whose sensibilities opened them up to receiving more from a
film like Monkey Business than other viewers, with less radical or
mystical approaches to cinema, were able to. The concept of late style performs
a similar, parallel task to the concept of auteurism: nothing less than the
total reorientation of the viewer, so that they are able to notice more from and
feel more of a work vis-à-vis the artist who made it. How you see a film
will affect what you see; perception is reality. And the perception that
maximizes edification should trump any other—this is the logic of late style. So
a late stylist is just as capable of saying, or at least meaning something
similar to, a sentence like “you only have to watch Red Line 7000 to
know that it is a brilliant film.”
Suffice it to
say, however, that the only perceptions Hawks really concerned himself with
were his own and his (commercial) audience’s; and films like Man’s Favorite
Sport? and Red Line 7000 satisfied neither. Hawks had a mind to beat
a retreat to a more dependable, more comfortable kind of film for both himself
to make and for an audience to enjoy: a Western. With El Dorado and Rio
Lobo, Hawks would close the lid on his career with a double dose of the
same potion that had resulted in Rio Bravo, one of his most artistically
and commercially successful recent films. And given that he had the formula that
had worked for that film, why not use it again? Hawks had always unashamedly
borrowed and pilfered ideas from his own past films, but besides the literal
remake of A Song Is Born, the two late Westerns would be Hawks’ most
explicit “remakes” of his career. When asked by interviewers about repeating
himself, Hawks would often (repeatedly) turn to sporting analogies. “If a
quarterback throws a touchdown pass, he should quit now because he’s already
done it? If it was good once, it can be good again.” Or “if a man, a good
boxer, hits somebody with a left hook, he doesn’t stop left-hooking in the rest
of his fights. And anybody who is any good—any writer—is always going to repeat
himself, so that you’re going to know who wrote the thing.” Hawks even liked it
when someone said he repeated himself— “Because if they can remember that long,
the scene must be pretty good.” Hawks had a sense of humor about these things; repetition,
unlike some other aspects of his artistry, could not be totally confused for a subconscious
impulse—it was intentional. Bogdanovich relates a story from the set of Rio
Lobo when Hawks made a rare announcement to the entire cast: “Now, if
there’s anyone here today... who recognizes certain lines or situations. Anyone
who finds some of these things familiar...”—Hawks paused, hands still on hips,
and subtly looked Bogdanovich straight in the eye— “... He can just damn well
shut up about it!” Wayne, who knew Bogdanovich, laughed at the joke as he knew
Hawks was also ribbing himself when he said it.
But that
said, Hawks didn’t view El Dorado and Rio Lobo as remakes. He
even cited his friend Ernest Hemingway in artistic defense of stealing from
himself, while saying that although the two later Westerns share similarities
of style with Rio Bravo, they shouldn’t be confused for being the same
story. This is true in some ways and not true in others. (A flip of Hawks’ take
would be closer to the truth: though the later Westerns share similarities of
plot with Rio Bravo, they shouldn’t be confused for having the same
style.) El Dorado’s whole first hour of plot is without parallel in Rio
Bravo, and Rio Lobo takes even longer to settle down into something
resembling its predecessors. Yes, the character set-ups are similar—Wayne as
the head of a group of four men in a situation involving a jail and
prisoner exchanges—but the way Hawks involves women in each is significantly
different, character attributes get mirrored (Nelson’s sharpshooting into
Caan’s incompetent gunmanship) or shaken up (the sheriff becomes the drunk), and
most importantly each film represents a shift in style. Those who insist
on El Dorado and Rio Lobo as unoriginal copies of Rio Bravo
reveal themselves as viewers who focus on plot at the expense of form; while anyone
could study the three films’ stories and make a list of similarities and
differences, it’s when viewing the films as films that their essential
originalities come to light. And yet the fact that they are all indeed
variations on the same general subject remains important, for this allows a
greater understanding of both Hawks’ approach to originality—he variates enough
to challenge himself but not enough to become uncomfortable—as well as where he
is an artist at any given moment in time. Greg Ford compares Hawks’ run of
related Westerns to artists such as Henri Matisse, who “painted his odalisque
figure in the same reclining position throughout his life, but from
ever-changing angles and with varying degrees of formal abstraction”; or
William Faulkner, who “recapitulated his tale of Jack Houston’s murder a total
of three times, and on each occasion emphasized new aspects of the killing,
highlighted new areas of concern”; or Wallace Stevens, who wrote a series of
rhymes called “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”—why can’t Hawks, asks Ford,
do a series of Westerns “which, taken together, might easily be designated ‘3
Ways of Looking at a Male Friendship’?” Hawks always fed off his previous work
and thrilled at the chance of recontextualizing it in the mode of the present,
and the last two Westerns attest to that in their very being; Jean-Pierre
Coursodon labels Hawks’ late period as “one of self-exploitation, with Hawks
distorting and degrading his own formulas in his effort to revitalize them.” Like
a chef experimenting with his own recipes, Hawks was after new tastes but with the
same dish.
If repeatedly
remixing his own hits with an aging John Wayne wasn’t unfashionable enough,
Hawks was also making Westerns in a world where the Western itself had
fundamentally changed. As the 1960s inched closer to the 1970s, the Western’s
status as a staple genre of classical Hollywood was beginning to decline and many
new Westerns reflected that in a dying-of-the-West metatextuality. John Ford’s The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), which looked ambiguously on the
myths of the West that were implicitly believed in by most of the classical
Westerns from the decades before, was just one of many films that seemed to act
as an elegy for the entirety of the genre. Meanwhile, the genre underwent a
diversification in the form of Spaghetti Westerns, Euro-Westerns, and Exploitation
Westerns—as well as Hollywood entries less beholden to (increasingly slackening)
censorship—where amidst cross-cultural experimentation things generally got dirtier,
grimier, and bloodier. Hawks, however, showed little sign of being influenced by
any evolutions in the genre outside of the ones he himself was undergoing. The
most that can be said is that the gradual elimination of the production code
led to a slight rise in the viscerality of his violence, but even that was nothing
compared to a film like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), which Hawks
wasn’t shy about disliking. Rather, Hawks’ late Westerns, in their adherence to
the classical makeup of the Western at a time when it was disappearing, brought
to the fore the fakeness inherent to the classical genre: the fake punches, fake
shooting, and fake sets (Sallitt: “in the eight years between [Rio Bravo and
El Dorado], Hawks had become less interested in disguising his sets as
anything but a set, and his actors as anything but friends”) were all more
obvious in the increasingly realist paradigm that was coming to reign in the
1970s. In this, Hawks’ westerns participate more generally in the “lateness” inherent
to the Western genre itself in the 1960s, ‘70s, and beyond. El Dorado opened
in the U.S. in the summer of 1967 soon after For a Few Dollars More (1965),
the second film in Sergio Leone’s trilogy of Italian Westerns; Rio Lobo opened
in December 1970 the same week as Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970), a
film that plays up the ridiculousness of the West from a socially conscious
angle. Neither comparison could have made Hawks’ Westerns seem very modern or
exciting in the context of late 1960s and early 1970s cinema. Hawks, who at
this point in his life preferred watching TV and reading magazines, rarely
visited the cinema, and it’s no surprise that his finger had slipped off the
pulse of the American moviegoing public. But the dissonance created therein now
makes Hawks’ films of the era in many ways more fascinating than other films
that seemed newer or more exciting at the time.
Hawks didn’t
set out to make any elegies or grand statements about the West when making his
final Westerns—he was too unsentimental for all that—but if the films still
offer a meta-textual resonance, it’s largely because of the aging,
end-of-an-era status of both Hawks and, more immediately, John Wayne. In the
years between Hatari! and El Dorado Wayne had been diagnosed with
lung cancer, resulting in the removal of one of his lungs; it slowed him down, and
with Hawks getting into his seventies himself (and having suffered two leg
injuries while shooting Rio Lobo, one while shooting a train set piece
and one while biking off-set), their final two collaborations reflect a
physically wearier (yet no less spiritually buoyant) temperament that turned
down the dial on the more “athletic” films of Hatari!, Man’s Favorite
Sport?, and Red Line 7000. Age became not just a physical concern,
but very much a thematic one as well. As it happens, the Hawks-Wayne
partnership had begun twenty years earlier with Wayne acting old in Red
River—“just watch me,” was the then-50-years-old Hawks’ advice to Wayne on
how to play it. Now he didn’t have to act. But as Luc Moullet has written, old
age “was to become the principle motif of Wayne’s art;” despite mostly ignoring
it in his own personal productions, he allowed his two closest collaborators in
Hawks and Ford to give shape to this rich thematic vein. After Red River—supposedly
the film that made Ford realize Wayne could really act—Ford immediately made
him up even older in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). Wayne’s taste of
Oscar gold finally came in True Grit (1969), a film explicitly playing up
the old man angle to a near-stereotyped degree, and he would don the eye-patch
again in Rooster Cogburn (1975) for another go at the character, this
time alongside Katharine Hepburn. Wayne gave in completely to the metatextual
nature of the theme in his final film, Don Siegel’s The Shootist (1976),
playing an aging gunslinger dying of cancer—significantly, a film whose backstory-setting
opening credits sequence includes black-and-white excerpts of Wayne from Red
River, Rio Bravo, and El Dorado. Hawks himself was no stranger to
the age theme, as it wasn’t something exclusive to his late films: Thomas
Mitchell’s “Kid” in Only Angels Have Wings losing his sight and
therefore losing his wings, James Robertson Justice’s Vashtar in Land of the
Pharaohs going blind while building the pyramid to free his people, Red
River’s generational drama with Wayne in search of an heir, and of course the
central issue of Monkey Business all revolve around the body/spirit
contrasts arising from the effects of time. But El Dorado and Rio
Lobo approach the same theme from a lighter, more comfortable point of view—age
brings not sadness, but serenity. Hawks later said that “I’m not very
interested in making pictures about old men.” Despite this, or because of it,
Hawks’ vision of age is neither sentimental or cynical. Rather, as with any of
his other films about any other age demographic, his last Westerns find a
profundity in people acting in correspondence to their station in life,
accepting their lot and getting on with it. Wayne’s diminishing agility and
unsuitability for any kind of womanizing by the time of Rio Lobo finds
Hawks compensating by endowing him “with greater apparent dignity and
self-respect,” according to Greg Ford. His status at this late juncture is near
mythic: “Here Wayne seems to be some apotheosized
exaggeration of a Hawks-hero, possessing the size and noble air of an
earth-bound Olympian.” One dissatisfaction Hawks felt with both Hatari! and
Rio Lobo was that, without a Robert Mitchum or a similarly statured
figure to play alongside him, Wayne’s presence blew everyone off the screen. But
part of the pleasure of such films is seeing the cross-generational camaraderie
kicked up between Wayne and his younger co-stars. A film like Red Line 7000 focused
on youth, and El Dorado more on the older folks (besides James Caan,
who’s banter with Wayne is a great source of fun, particularly as, per Hawks, Caan
didn’t know he was playing a comic character); but a film like Rio Lobo (or
earlier Rio Bravo and Hatari!) mixes them, creating a
juxtaposition that allows Hawks a more holistic look at, and embrasure of, the
differing phases and roles of a man’s (and woman’s) life.
The late Westerns continue, therefore, Hawks’ interest in
characters, despite locating them in more traditionally plotted material
relative to his more experimental work in the previous few films. “As usual,”
Bogdanovich writes about El Dorado, “the story is simply an excuse to
look at some characters that interest Hawks, and to play some evocative
variations on themes he has been elaborating and deepening for more than forty
years.” El Dorado was originally based on a novel that attempted a Western
riff on ancient Greek literature; Leigh Brackett’s adaptation was too grim and
downbeat for Hawks’ current tastes, the story too full of “losers,” as Hawks
termed them, so besides keeping an inciting incident (Wayne’s shooting of the
boy) they started from scratch and soon enough essentially went, Hey—why not do
Rio Bravo again, but different? “When I finish a script,” said Hawks, “I
deliberately go over it to see how it would work if it was done the opposite
way.” Hawks had also kept notes while doing Rio Bravo and had stockpiled
enough good unused material for a whole nother film; so with a little remixing
and mirroring, they made it. One intentional variation relevant to age being
that, where in Rio Bravo none of the good guys get hurt, in El Dorado
Hawks has them damaged a bit. But it takes El Dorado until
halfway through the film before it repeats Bravo’s inciting incident
which eventually gets them into the jail; in Rio Lobo it takes even
longer, only initiating the jail-centered set-up toward the end of the picture.
Rio Lobo, like El Dorado, wasn’t originally initiated as a Rio
Bravo riff; Hawks had envisioned it rather as a Western variation on the
set-up of A Girl in Every Port, a film that Hawks had optioned the
rights to in 1965 and was a story idea that he’d continue to play around with for
the rest of his life—El Dorado itself partakes in the set-up by having
Mitchum and Wayne play old buddies that have a history with the same girl, and Rio
Lobo was originally set to follow in its footsteps until the studio
couldn’t pay for Mitchum, causing Hawks to throw out the story and whip
up a new one. The result bears the markings of a story created via a hodgepodge
of Hawksian ideas sketched out and strung together—an opening civil war
section, with a train heist set piece based on Hawks’ remembrance of how planes
were landed on the first flattop aircraft carriers (by a hook attached
underneath the incoming plane picking up ropes with sandbags on each end to
slow it down); the introduction of a girl in trouble, who shoots her pursuers
through a table with a hidden gun like Bogart in To Have and Have Not; a
change of scene to the titular town of Rio Lobo, where villainous bullies are causing
land ownership troubles like in El Dorado; and finally some business
with holing up in a jail, a proposed prisoner exchange, and a climatic shootout
that wraps things up on a variation of Rio Bravo. As Dan Sallitt has
noted, “Hawks’ penchant for recycling familiar dialogue and situations from his
previous films starts to take on a ritualized, automatic quality at this point
in his career. And the careful interweaving of events that was so impressive
in Rio Bravo has given way... to the most naked, barely
motivated setups, as if Hawks no longer cared a whit about hiding behind the
curtain or pretending that events are motivated by forces within the film
universe.”
Hawks’ last
stories are instinctive, almost unconscious creations—which was part
preference, part necessity, as Hawks’ scripts continued to be more working
outlines than strict reference guides; McCarthy relates that Hawks only had
eighteen pages of material when cast and crew first arrived on location for Rio
Lobo, and that actor Ed Faulkner said it wasn’t a script but a “fragment.” Robert
Donner, a regular actor in late Hawks (and husband of William Wellman’s
daughter Cissy, a good friend of Hawks), attested to a similar situation on El
Dorado’s set, saying that “the script was written in sand.” But none of
this stressed Hawks, who had become accustomed to his methods and reveled in
the fun and play of it all, remaining as relaxed as ever on set. To Hawks, making
a Western with John Wayne was near impossible to mess up, and he referred to
them as “wheelchair jobs”—so easy to direct that you could do it as an invalid.
Hawks’ penchant for rewriting dialogue on location forced actors to memorize
pages of dialogue on the spur of the moment, something that Wayne especially
had an innate ability to easily do. But his actors still regularly showed up on
the Western sets not just without a script but with no idea what the story was even
going to be. Bogdanovich relates a great anecdote about Hawks calling up Robert
Mitchum to ask him to be in El Dorado, who when agreeing asked what the
story was going to be, causing Hawks to answer “quickly and sharply, with a
touch of bored irritation: ‘Ohh—no story, Bob...’.” By the time of Rio
Lobo, for Wayne it was simply a matter of setting his schedule to match
with Hawks’ and then showing up; he greeted Hawks on location with the question,
“Do I get to play the drunk this time?” Wayne’s authority was second only to
Hawks; Bogdanovich relates that he would sometimes direct the other actors
himself to the acknowledged approval of Hawks (“Isn’t that right, Mr. Hawks?;”
“Sure, Duke.”). Actor Johnny Crawford recalled the pace on the El Dorado shoot
as “totally relaxed and ponderous;” it was an environment of fun and friends;
John Ford even visited the set, fresh off shooting his final film 7 Women (1966). The
atmosphere of a Hawks set was open and inviting and playful all while remaining
perfectly professional—except the time that Hawks failed to show up on set one
Monday morning, causing the company to scour the set and anyplace they could
think to locate him; they found him lounging poolside at his hotel, having lost
track of time and believing it a Sunday. Another Monday found the whole cast
and crew—horses included—sporting celebratory eye-patches upon Wayne’s return
from winning the Best Actor Oscar for True Grit. Despite money issues causing
him to not be in the film as planned, Robert Mitchum took the time to visit the
set and his son Chris—"the less expensive Mitchum” that Hawks had gotten
instead. Hawks even opened the set to journalist and media personality George
Plimpton, who made his visit to the set of Rio Lobo the subject of the television
special Plimpton! Shootout at Rio Lobo, one of a number of participatory
journalism specials he did that aired on network television. Hawks claimed that
the show “typifies the way we work more than anything else that’s been made,”
and indeed nowhere else does one get such a good idea of the relaxed mood of a
Hawks’ shoot. Plimpton steps in to plays the role of “4th Gunman,” and between insights
into the making of Westerns, the Eastern-bred Plimpton is party to playful
ribbings from Hawks and Wayne as they chat about this and that related to the
film. The punchline comes when Hawks, to everyone’s laughter and Plimpton’s good-natured
befuddlement, at the last minute rewords Plimpton’s sole line of gun-toting dialogue
that he’s been nervously practicing all day from “This here’s yer warrant,
mister” to “I got a warrant right here, sheriff.”
All this
casualness at work prevents either late Western from slipping into a
particularly elegiac mode, even though the greater context of the films and
their makers lends a twilight profundity to even the simplest things like someone
cocking a rifle, getting on a horse, or just opening a door. Each film begins
with an opening credits sequence that sets up a meditative, reflective tone—the
eponymous, Edgar Allan Poe-inspired theme song set against Western-themed
paintings by Olaf Wieghorst in El Dorado, the austere, moody close-ups of
a finger-picked guitar theme being played in Rio Lobo—only to mostly do
away with it once the proceedings begin, but not without leaving a lingering sense
that the entire film is meant to be read in the shadow of these overtures. The
films continue the interlacing of comedy and drama that Hawks had been
perfecting throughout his career. In El Dorado, a scene like the unintentional
shooting of a young boy and the deliverance of his body back to his family sits
next to scenes of antiquatedly cartoonish slapstick like Mitchum being bonked over
the head with a frying pan, or of a Rube Goldberg gag of a shotgun-wielding Caan
missing his target only to hit a sign that falls down to knock the man out (Hawks:
“That’s really going back to the Keystone days.”)—a disparate collection of
scenes that somehow get across without any apparent tonal inconsistency. One of
the most dramatic, spiritually stirring aspects of Rio Bravo—Dean
Martin’s alcoholism—gets reworked in El Dorado as a largely comedic,
physical affair with Robert Mitchum, yet it’s still able to retain the
underlining moral seriousness of the idea that Hawksian integrity requires a
man to be sober, even when he’s drunk. “In Rio Bravo,” writes Robin
Wood, “Hawks used Dude’s lack of physical control—his trembling hands,
etc.—consistently to express a spiritual condition; in El Dorado the
emphasis is far more on the outward signs of physical degeneration for their
own sake: Harrah’s unshaven and bleary face, the size of his paunch, his
stomach-clutching. The ‘cure’ is basically physical, too, not moral as in Rio
Bravo, where there is no equivalent for Mississippi’s horrific concoction of
gunpowder and mustard.” But both characters get a moment to turn the tables on the
laughing townsfolk in a manhunting saloon scene—Wayne: “I hope you’re good
enough”; Mitchum: “I hope I am too”—which becomes similarly spiritually
redeeming, a chance for a Hawksian character to stand up straight as a
Hawksian character.
Lest Hawks’ laidback
approach, his focus on character, or his reputation for functional craftsmanship
lead one to believe that he didn’t care about the visual side of things, just
witness the beauty of El Dorado’s largely evening-set lighting scheme,
of the yellow amber light pouring out of doors and seeping through windows into
the Western night. Hawks had instructed cameraman Harold Rosson—younger brother
of Richard and Arthur (both Hawks collaborators of yore) who came out of
retirement to shoot the film—to study the nocturnal paintings of Frederic
Remington to see how light slashed onto the street out of saloon doors. The
warmth of the cinematography matches the relational intimacy of the film as
well as tinting the proceedings with a venerable glow. Partially as a result of
Hawks’ slowing production rate in the back half of his career, partially
because of his distaste for earlier color processes, he only made nine films in
color, which only accounts for about one quarter of his career. But Hawks
adapted quickly and with originality, making eye-popping, energetic use of
color in A Song Is Born and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and experimenting
with its abilities in CinemaScope, before settling in to the rich autumnal
palette of Rio Bravo that would define the earthy, bold colorings of the
late films. Hawks was a sensitive visual stylist in his black-and-white days,
too, but his light and shade and mise-en-scène work really pops in the color
films in a way it inherently couldn’t before, especially in his patented indoor
scenes. Any number of moments come to mind: Martinelli towards the end of Hatari!
holed up in her room with the lights off, silhouetted against the window
slats and evening night; Hudson and girls early in Man’s Favorite Sport? talking
in a piano museum framed against colorful stained-glass windows when the lights
go off; or the intimate scene between Caan and Hill in Red Line 7000 inside
a little cross-slatted shade spot in a motel courtyard, where Hawks does
magnificent work with shadows, rare close-ups, and two bottles of Pepsi. But for
Hawks his images are never posed towards ostentatious artistic effect, using them
rather to create moods and define relationships, to highlight character
moments, character gestures, looks, postures, the way someone stands in a room,
the way someone looks at someone else, the way someone simply exists. Hawks—the
sturdy craftsman of unpretentious external action—is secretly one of the most incisive
inner-life artists; and it’s because of exactly that unpretentiousness. There’s
no affected pausing on actors emoting; he reaches emotions in a different, more
invisible way, almost without you noticing he’s doing it, so organic is his way
of harmonizing his character’s external actions with their internal feelings.
Even with an
influx of new, young actors (few of which he much liked, thus perhaps why the
“hangout” vibes of Rio Lobo are noticeably lower than the other late
films), Hawks had a way of immediately adopting them with his camera into his world
of internal/external cohesion, new elements in an old paradigm. Even amidst his
preference for the familiar, late Hawks still showed his willingness to give
the new a try—in Rio Lobo, a score from Jerry Goldsmith as
adventurous and distinct as any in Hawks outside of Henry Mancini’s stringless,
exotic one for Hatari!, as well as the introduction of zooms to his
formal tool bag, short shots of a quickly advancing or receding viewpoint to dynamically
establish new scenes or moments; and in El Dorado, a more noticeably direct
approach to violence, a film made just before the already-weakened Production
Code was abandoned for good. Despite deploring Sam Peckinpah’s gory,
slow-motion theatrics, Hawks’ late violence can at times explode onto the
screen in a similar way—just less gory, and in real time, short and curt and
over and done with, a shotgun blast and a slumped figure undwelled upon. El
Dorado participates in a lineage of movie violence at a pivotal moment in
film history: just two months after its U.S. release in the summer of 1967, Bonnie
and Clyde arrived on the scene. “The American spectator,” Fernando
Villaverde writes, “could practically have heard Mississippi’s shotgun firing
almost simultaneously with the shots that killed Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) and
Clyde (Warren Beatty), thereby keeping the echoes of violence resounding in
movie theatres.” An echo which could be traced all the way back to another
Hawks movie, Scarface, which had been a hot point for the censorship of
movie violence in the early 1930s as well as a specific reference point for Bonnie
and Clyde’s infamously bullet-ridden ending (via Jean-Luc Godard, whose stylish
Breathless was a connecting point between Hawks’ radical entertainment and
Arthur Penn’s New Hollywood big bang.)
Another,
straighter line can be drawn from Scarface to Hawks’ final film, Rio
Lobo, in the form of the literal scarred face that travels across 40 years of
film history from Paul Muni to the cheek of Sherry Lansing, received at the
hand of the film’s male villains as punishment for giving shelter to Wayne &
co. upon their arrival in town. Susana Dosamontes’s character is beaten for
helping as well; Jennifer O’Neill’s has to defend herself from a murderous
posse come to fetch her before she can report their crimes. Roger Greenspun
writes that the women of Rio Lobo “carry a greater burden of pain than
in any other Hawks movie,” are “specifically victimized,” and “are therefore
more fully integrated into the conditions of their world, and the special
beauty of Rio Lobo... lies in its acceptance of women’s tears in the
catalogue of valuable human responses.” Along with Red Line 7000, no
other Hawks movie so directly involves multiple female characters in its emotional
stakes. In one scene, Hawks gives Jennifer O’Neill room to deliver a moving personal
monologue about how, having spent time working in a saloon after her husband
got himself shot, she’s tired of being pawed at by men. “Do you know what it’s
like to work in a saloon?... They never leave you alone. Never.” Even if
the kind of female empowerment Hawks’ displays in such scenes might be deemed too
clumsy, too awkward, or, well, too Hawksian—O’Neill ends up kissing Jorge
Rivero anyway (after having instigated her speech with his pawing); “Didn’t you
want me to do that?” “Of course I did, sure I did, but I am generally the one
who starts it.” “Well that’s why I started it, ‘cause now I know when it’ll
stop.”—it’s still moving to see Hawks allow such sentiments to be voiced, and
in a beautiful close up with Goldsmith’s stirring score quietly underscoring it.
Although Hawks’ women were always relatively autonomous compared to the rest of
Hollywood’s, the late films, especially Rio Lobo, display an awareness of
feminine suffering far beyond anything in earlier Hawks, perhaps revealing a small
evolution in Hawks’ aging perspective (that, for what it’s worth, just so happens
to coincide with the years of second wave feminism.) The shifting role of women
also parallels the shifting role of John Wayne, trackable throughout his last
four roles for Hawks, from romantic lead to sexless, “comfortable” old man. O’Neill,
chilled during a night under the open sky, goes to find warmth next to Wayne
rather than Rivero, because he’s older, therefore safer. Wayne, although predictably
embarrassed, mostly takes his newfound status as the comfortable old man in
stride, comically cognizant of it throughout the film but living without
bitterness. But less opening for romance means more for friendship—the kind of
relationship Hawks always prized more anyway. Thus Hawks’ final film ends with
a limping Wayne and a scarred Sherry Lansing walking off
together, leaning on each other in mutual support, two souls moving forward in
Hawksian fellowship.
El Dorado had ended in
mostly the same way, Wayne and Mitchum both hobbled but walking in stride down
the street together, a Hollywood film ended not on a romantic embrace but on the
rather more banal image of two old men attached at the hip via unspoken friendship.
This, ultimately, is Howard Hawks’ great theme: philia, the Greek word
for the kind of love we translate as friendship or affection, but which has an
invisible strength to it which only connotation can capture. “There’s probably
no stronger emotion than friendship between two men,” Hawks would boldly say in
an interview. The late films begin to extend this emotion to women as well, but
in the final Westerns Hawks asserts the primacy of friendship over romantic
relationships—even in romantic relationships. Charlene Holt in El
Dorado is clearly set up as Wayne’s love interest, but it’s the mutual
understanding between them, their bond of affection—rather than any great romantic
sentiment—that defines the relationship. Hawksian relationships are “based on a
balance of equality between free men,” writes Robin Wood. “There are those who
can see no more to this theme of close friendship between men in Hawks’s films
than the endorsement of a hearty, superficial matiness: nothing could be
further from the truth. These relationships in Hawks almost invariably embody
something strong, positive, and fruitful: at the least (The Thing) a
warmth of mutual response; at the most (Rio Bravo) the veritable
salvation of a human being.” Contrary to Rio Bravo, where relationships are
either long-time givens or have time to simmer and grow, in the last Westerns one
notices the intuitive, almost comical ease with which such bonds are
established. In Rio Lobo, Wayne strikes up a quick friendship with Jorge
Rivero and Chris Mitchum despite having been fighting on opposite sides of the
Civil War just days prior; Rivero and Sherry Lansing’s casual rapport is
established from the second he barges into her home, despite them being
strangers and her without a shirt on; in just their second scene after meeting,
Wayne and Jack Elam are bantering like they’ve known each other for thirty
years. In El Dorado, Hawks shows that sometimes friendships exist even
where one has never been established, simply by the mutual webbing of people and
goals: Mitchum doesn’t even know who Caan is until he asks it for the third or fourth
time well after they’ve begun working as part of the same group. Hawks’
characters always remain individuals even when part of a group—often with a
defining accessory, like all the different hats given to the supporting cowhands
of Red River—but in Hawks that individuality is never complete until it’s
found its place in the ecosystem of a community, be it two men or a whole town.
The strong camaraderie that organically springs up between people in Hawks
suggests that though friendship can be built on as little as a shared feeling
or goal, in the end it can have inestimably large or veritably life-saving
power. Or to put it another way, in pointed words from Ernest Hemingway’s novel
To Have and Have Not: “a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.” Yet
late Hawks’ casual storytelling—especially his endings, which organically wrap
things up without seeming to dwell on any profundities—doesn’t go out of its
way to inspire grand thematic pronouncements or extolment as high art. And
maybe that’s just as well. Writing about Hawks in 1969, Manny Farber suggested
that “rating these close camaraderie films, teeming with picturesque
fliers-punks-pundits and a boys’ book noble humanism, in the Pantheon division
of Art and giving them cosmic conceptions is to overweight them needlessly.” Indeed,
the pleasures of late Hawks are too tied up in the genial nature of the films,
their characters, and their stories to stubbornly insist on any solemn reading
that would cause anyone to lose out on participating in that.
Despite never
making another picture, Hawks still very much considered himself an active
filmmaker in the 1970s. He would often view his stops at film festivals, either
as part of juries or as an attendee of retrospective showings of his work, as
promotional stops where he could get new projects off the ground. Once, serving
as jury president at the San Sebastian Film Festival in 1972, Hawks put in a
word to get a Russian film a special award and was subsequently approached to
make a film there (Leonid Brezhnev loved Westerns), but it didn’t pan out. Nevertheless,
Hawks still exercised his storytelling muscles by becoming an eager and willing
interview subject for anyone who was interested in talking to him (as many were
with his increasing critical reputation), leaving behind a veritable oral
history of his career. Just like in his films, Hawks liked to repeat himself, telling
many stories again and again, sharpening them as time went by. (He liked a good
story so much that on occasion they weren’t even true.) Hawks dabbled with a
number of prospective ideas for films—among them a Don Quixote with Cary
Grant, a film about the WWII friendship between Ernest Hemingway and
photographer Robert Capa, a Vietnam film, and a couple of ideas for a
Western—but the film he spent the most time on (over a decade) and came closest
to making was a remake of A Girl in Every Port known variously as When
It’s Hot, Play It Cool; Now, Mr. Gus; or just Mr. Gus. It was
to be a globe-hopping comedy following two oil riggers around the world getting
into scrapes and fighting over the same girls. At one point he eyed Clint
Eastwood and Steve McQueen for the roles, but “every time I think about some of
the scenes and how funny they are, and I think about those two guys in ‘em, I
get sick. Because neither of them is a bit funny.” Hawks wrote a full first
draft himself in 1976 and envisioned shooting interiors in Spain while sending
someone else off to do the location work, but he never did end up approaching anyone
to do it. Today we’re left merely with the tantalizing possibilities of the
project, as it promised to be another Hawksian treatise on male friendship, as
the final scene attests: the two men both accidentally falling into the same bed
back-to-back, both making a pact to kick out their imagined intruder, and then one
ending up thrown out on the floor— “Never mind,” the other one says, “you can
sleep with me.” Hawks lived in the present tense even when those around him saw
him as a thing of the past; he never thought to have his papers, gathering dust
in his garage, collected into an archive until someone from BYU came around
asking. Hawks became a mentor figure to a number of young filmmakers: Peter
Bogdanovich of course, who he tried to set up a deal producing films for which
fell through; William Freidkin, who was living with Hawks’ daughter Kitty in
the early ‘70s, and who Hawks claimed as the recipient of his advice to make
something with a good car chase in it (a tale Friedkin refutes); Clint
Eastwood, who early in his own directorial career approached Hawks to make a
picture with him so that he could study how he worked; Max Baer Jr., son of an
actor Hawks knew from the old days, who got Hawks to help him write, produce,
and even edit Richard Compton’s Macon County Line (1974); as well as
Leonard Schrader (brother of Paul), who approached Hawks for advice on a story
that eventually became Shinji Sômai’s P.P. Rider (1983). Hawks hung out
with old friends as well, spending time with John Ford in his last days in 1973
swapping stories about all the picture ideas they stole from each other. Time
had finally made Hawks respectable enough for the Motion Picture Academy, who gave
Hawks an honorary Oscar (along with Jean Renoir, who didn’t attend) at their
1975 ceremony—never mind that Hawks had stopped voting and being an active
member of the Academy for a decade already, reportedly because of their poor
track record of actually choosing the best picture. John Wayne presented the
award, and started going off the stage in the wrong direction after Hawks had
made his speech; it wasn’t a flub—Hawks had told him to do it beforehand, creating
one tiny last gag in his final piece of on-screen directing. Hawks would live
two and half more years, finally dying at the age of 81 on December 26, 1977, due
to complications from a fall he took tripping over his dog at home alone. In
one final, fitting irony, the long under-the-radar master filmmaker was
relegated to page two news: Charlie Chaplin had died the day before.
Notes
“The evidence on the
screen...”: Jacques Rivette, “The Genius of Howard Hawks,” Cahiers du Cinéma:
The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 126. Edited by Jim Hillier. Originally translated by Russell Campbell and Marvin Pister.
“the greatest American artist”: Jean-Luc Godard, Godard
on Godard (New York: De Capo Press, 1972), 29. Edited by Jean Narboni and
Tom Milne. Translation by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited.
“one cannot really love...”: Éric Rohmer, The Taste for
Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 131. Compiled by Jean
Narboni. Translated by Carol Volk.
“When people discuss...”: quoted in Michael Sragow, “Only
Angels Have Wings: Hawks’s Genius Takes Flight,” https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4005-only-angels-have-wings-hawks-s-genius-takes-flight,
12 April 2016.
“each shot has a...”: Rivette, “The Genius of Howard Hawks,”
128-129.
“to let them handle...”: quoted in Todd McCarthy, Howard
Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 381.
“first cut represents...”: McCarthy, Howard Hawks,
395.
“the confident foregrounding...”: Dan Sallitt, “I Was a Male
War Bride,” https://sallitt.blogspot.com/2010/07/i-was-male-war-bride.html, 29
July 2010.
“in a wiser...”: Gerlad Mast, Howard Hawks: Storyteller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1982), 134.
“Grant, his voice...”: Mast, Howard Hawks, 163.
“a man is a sheriff...”: quoted in Andy Rector, “Luc Moullet
part one...,” https://kinoslang.blogspot.com/2007/02/luc-moullet-part-one.html,
10 February 2007.
“more characterization...”: quoted in Peter Bogdanovich, Who
the Devil Made It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1997), 356.
“There’s no action...”: quoted in Bill Krohn, “My Budd by
Manny Farber,” http://www.rouge.com.au/12/farber_krohn.html, 2008.
“Insofar as Land of the Pharaohs...”: Bill Krohn, “Hawks
at Work: The Making of LAND OF THE PHARAOHS,”
https://kinoslang.blogspot.com/2009/03/hawks-at-work-making-of-land-of.html, 20
March 2009. Originally published in 1990.
“aggressively, even desperately...”: McCarthy, Howard
Hawks, 539.
“If I were asked...”: Robin Wood, Howard Hawks (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2006), 29. Originally published in 1968.
“everything seems to gravitate...”: Fernando Villaverde,
“Echoes of Violence: Howard Hawks and the End of the Production Code” (in L’Atalante,
issue 28, July-December 2019, 77-92),
80.
“This is a film...”: quoted in McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 580.
“That was the year...”: quoted in McCarthy, Howard Hawks,
572.
“one that I let...”: quoted in Joseph McBride, Hawks on
Hawks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 152.
“documentary... on [Hawks’]...”: Jean Douchet, “Hatari!,” Howard
Hawks: American Artist (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 82.
Translated by John Moore. Edited by Jim Hillier and Peter Wollen.
“the form of the picture...”: quoted in McCarthy, Howard
Hawks, 572.
“liberate performance from...”: Dan Sallitt, “Rio Bravo,” https://sallitt.blogspot.com/2013/05/rio-bravo.html,
21 May 2013.
“not prompted by...”: quoted in “Hatari!,” https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/19931.
“never met anyone...”: quoted in McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 574.
“is forced to know...”: quoted in “The Cinema of Jean-Marie
Straub and Daniele Huillet,” https://www.straub-huillet.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/brochure-cinema1.pdf,
6.
“especially in the last...”: Howard Hawks, Howard Hawks:
Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), edited by
Scott Breivold, 80.
“there is a continual...”: Robin Wood, Howard Hawks (London:
British Film Institute, 1981), 128, Originally published in 1968.
“I don’t know why...”: quoted in McBride, Hawks on
Hawks, 148.
“I just aim...”: quoted in McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 611.
“He is one of...”: quoted in McBride, Hawks on Hawks, 5.
“mostly old stuff...”: Donald Willis, The Films of Howard
Hawks (Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1975), 40.
“drawing out...”: Villaverde, “Echoes of Violence,” 80-81.
“In slowing down...”: Erich Kuersten, “Fear of Fishing:
Closets and Product Placement in Hawks’ Man’s Favorite Sport?,” https://brightlightsfilm.com/fear-fishing-closets-product-placement-hawks-mans-favorite-sport/,
1 May 2007.
“dazzling battles of...”: David Thompson, The New
Biographical Dictionary of Film (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), sixth
edition, 463.
“it is the constant...”: Peter John Dyer, “Swing the Lamps
Low,” Focus on Howard Hawks (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1972), edited by Joseph McBride, 81.
“Such moments...”: Joe McElhaney, “Red Line 7000: Fatal
Disharmonies,” Howard Hawks: New Perspectives (London: Palgrave, 2016),
edited by Ian Brookes, 196.
“exactly the same...”: Villaverde, “Echoes of Violence,” 81.
“elevating them to...”: McElhaney, “Fatal Disharmonies,”
197.
“Hawks, who has...”: Richard Thompson, “Hawks at Seventy,” Focus
on Howard Hawks, 142.
“There is no action...”: Hawks, Interviews, 7.
“is perhaps, in Britain...”: Wood, Howard Hawks (1981),
140.
“If a quarterback...”: quoted in William Wellman, Jr.,
“Howard Hawks: The Distance Runner,” Focus on Howard Hawks,11.
“if a man...”: quoted in Richard Schickel, The Men Who
Made the Movies (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 113.
“Now, if there’s anyone...”: quoted in Bogdanovich, Who
the Devil Made It, 253.
“painted his odalisque...”: Greg Ford, “Mostly on Rio
Lobo,” Focus on Howard Hawks, 151.
“one of self-exploitation...”: Jean-Pierre Coursodon, American
Directors: Volume 1 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1983), 165.
“in the eight years...”: Dan Sallit, “Golden Years,” https://movingimagesource.us/articles/golden-years-20080604,
4 June 2008.
“was to become...”: Luc Moullet, “John Wayne: Towards
Decrepitude,” https://theseventhart.info/2020/05/26/john-wayne-towards-decrepitude/,
26 May 2020. Originally from Politique des acteurs (Cahiers du cinéma,
1993). Translated by Srikanth Srinivasan.
“I’m not very interested...”: quoted in McBride, Hawks on
Hawks, 118.
“with greater apparent...”: Greg Ford, “Mostly on Rio
Lobo,” 153.
“As usual...”: Peter Bogdanovich, “El Dorado,” Focus on
Howard Hawks, 148.
“When I finish...”: quoted in Bruce F. Kawin, Selected
Film Essays and Interviews (London: Anthem Press, 2013), 114.
“Hawks’ penchant for...”: Dan Sallitt, “Hatari!,” https://sallitt.blogspot.com/2008/06/hatari.html,
10 June 2008.
“fragment”: quoted in McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 456.
“the script was...”: quoted in McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 621.
“wheelchair jobs”: quoted in “Howard Hawks Interview 1972
San Sebastian,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR7YSl3GSDo, uploaded 29 July
2015.
“quickly and sharply...”: Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made
It, 245.
“Isn’t that right...”: quoted in McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 638.
“totally relaxed...”: quoted in Scott Eyman, John Wayne:
The Life and Legend (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 423.
“the less expensive Mitchum”: Lee Server, Robert Mitchum:
“Baby, I Don’t Care” (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001), 436.
“typifies the way...”: quoted in McBride, Hawks on Hawks,
39.
“That’s really going back...”: quoted in Richard Schickel, The
Men Who Made the Movies, 112.
“In Rio Bravo...”: Wood, Howard Hawks (1981),
157.
“The American spectator...”: Villaverde, “Echoes of
Violence,” 89.
“carry a greater burden...”: Roger Greenspun, “Film: ‘Rio
Lobo’ Has Hawks’s Unmistakable Touch,” The New York Times, 11 February
1971.
“There’s probably no...”: quoted in McBride, Hawks on
Hawks, 139.
“based on a balance...”: Robin Wood, “Rio Bravo,” Focus
on Howard Hawks, 129.
“a man alone...”: Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not (New
York: Scribner, 1937), 225.
“rating these close...”: Manny Farber, Farber on Film:
The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (New York: Library of America,
2009), edited by Robert Polito, 656.
“every time I think...”: McBride, Hawks on Hawks, 155.
“Never mind...”: quoted in McCarthy, Howard Hawks, 653.
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