Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Read online

  For his part, Hawks intended to be an engineer. He did read widely, but he was never drawn toward music, drama, creative writing, or newspaper work. The impulse toward artistic self-expression seemed not to be there. But when, in his own way, he stumbled into movies, when he began to see how vividly moving images could convey fantasies of action and accomplishment and distilled, idealized renditions of human behavior, he began to understand what he might be able to do. Hawks had always found that he could do most things better than most other people, so he rightly reasoned that it would be that way with movies as well. Only later would he see that everything he believed and everything that excited him could be conveyed through the stories he told in pictures.

  Hawks, then, was an intuitive, rather than an intentional, artist, in the sense that he did not set out to make statements about life, the condition of mankind, politics, war, history, or social conditions. Although he thought very highly of himself, Hawks—like Ford, Walsh, and a few other rugged pioneers who started in the silent cinema—always positioned himself as a craftsman. “All I’m doing is telling a story,” he invariably said. If you wanted to call him an artist, that was your privilege, but he was never going to be the one to do it. He steered clear of anything that smacked of the highbrow, the literary, or the intellectual. Although they are both often referred to as prototypical macho and cynical men of action, Hawks was, as a director, almost the diametrical opposite of John Huston. For all his personality, skill, and distinction, Huston spent much of his career adapting important works of literature for the screen and trying to be “faithful” to them. Nothing could have been further from Hawks’s intent in making a movie; he couldn’t be bothered to read Melville, Joyce, McCullers, O’Connor, Lowry, or, for that matter, Freud, much less make a film inspired by them. On the rare occasions—arguably, only three or four times—when Hawks tackled the work of a distinguished author, he made it a point to be as unfaithful and irreverent as possible, never more so than with To Have and Have Not. When Huston tackled an estimable preexisting work, there was usually, although not always, the impression of the original being pared, hammered, twisted, chopped, and remolded so it would fit into a cinematic box. When Hawks took on a property that had succeeded in a previous incarnation (notably Twentieth Century; The Front Page; To Have and Have Not, despite its minor reputation; The Big Sleep; The Big Sky; and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), the feeling was more that the original had been entirely dismantled, cleverly rethought, and meticulously reassembled in accordance with the logic of the cinema and the imperatives of Hawks’s own personality. And in all cases, despite the presence of diverse writers, it was Hawks who directed the re-thinking and the enormous changes that were made to each one, and he, not the original authors or subsequent scenarists, determined the films’ personalities.

  In the received literary sense, Hawks’s life of the mind was not that of an intellectual; he did not follow intellectual pursuits, and he displayed or feigned astonishment at many of the exalted qualities some critics found in his work. What, then, is one to make of François Truffaut’s observation that Hawks “is one of the most intellectual filmmakers in America”? Only that Hawks had an extremely well worked out set of theories, convictions, and principles about how to make movies and was articulate enough to express them in a simple, direct manner. Hawks thought long and hard about his profession, about what worked and what did not, just as he might have about engineering, architecture, design or construction of any kind. Hawks knew how to take apart and reassemble cars, motorcycles, and planes. He could expertly copy any piece of furniture. His innate taste told him how to dress himself, and his advice helped his second wife become the best-dressed woman in the United States. Perhaps it was not such a great a leap for him to be able to expertly construct, or reconstruct, a story for films, to design an inexperienced woman’s look, voice, and behavior to powerful effect on the screen, to know how a man should act in extremis. A great mystique has always surrounded film directing. Partly for that reason, Hawks aspired to the position early on, and he was incredibly fortunate to be able to achieve it and build the rest of his life around it. But he approached it as a job, even as it allowed him to express his poetic flair for dramatizing Hemingway’s “grace under pressure.”

  Hawks was concerned with men in action but he was not, per se, an action director. The scenes in his films of battles, flying, deep-sea fishing, logging, cattle driving, river boating, singing and dancing, pyramid building, animal chasing, auto racing, and train crashing were usually done by second-unit directors and were often noticeably divorced from the fabric of the picture. Rather, Hawks was a master of events played out within tight quarters among a handful of people in a limited period of time; despite his reputation as an outdoorsman, as a director he was most comfortable in a drawing room, an office, a home, or a hotel. These enclosed settings magnified the importance of every gesture and look, every remark, every decision, to the point where meaning, if you were looking for it, was densely packed into every moment.

  Although often conceived of as a naturalistic director because of his relatively plain, straightforward, eye-level visual approach and his affinity for Hemingway’s stripped-down narrative storytelling technique, Hawks was actually the most stylized Hollywood director this side of Josef von Sternberg, with whom he had more in common than anyone imagined at the time. At their best, Hawks’s films, like Sternberg’s, conveyed a beautifully wrought philosophy of life entirely through action, embodied in characters who enact certain behavioristic rituals in a remote setting artfully detached from the real world. Many critics have attempted to define this philosophy, which takes the form of a highly entertaining but nonetheless fatalistic variety of adolescent existentialism, one devoid of sentimentality, false hope, or religious reassurance. Man is the measure of all things in Hawks’s tough and sometimes bitter universe, but there is compensation to be had in friendship, unity of the group, the assertion of intelligence over dumb brute force, and the rewards of a job well done. Perhaps the critic Molly Haskell put it best when she ventured, “In Hawks, the pioneer hubris, and rashness and naïveté, of the American converges with the austere, man-centered morality of ancient Greece.” In his work, she wrote, one sees “the picture of man poised, comically or heroically, against an antagonistic nature, a nothingness as devoid of meaning as Samuel Beckett’s, but determined nonetheless to act out his destiny, to assert mind against mindlessness.”

  That Hawks shunned deep analysis yet employed extensively developed theories in his work, that he was an outdoorsman of action and at the same time a filmmaker most at home in highly stylized interiors, that he was an autocratic elitist who nonetheless reveled in the classlessness of his characters’ group pursuits—these are just three of the paradoxes in Hawks’s character. Among the others: he was not an intellectual yet he was very intelligent (not so unusual); he possessed the wisdom of his years but remained an adolescent in his enthusiasms even in old age; he was innately conservative in his worldview yet daring and inclined to risk; he was the very definition of a modern twentieth-century man but stuck to tried-and-true formulas; he was embraced by many feminists in the 1970s for liberating his women characters from the home and placing them on the same field with men, yet he held an utterly conventional view of women’s role in his own life; he was stoic but reckless, reserved but excessive; he was celebrated but little known; he was a pragmatist but a poet; and he had the mind of an engineer but the subconscious of an artist.

  He was, above all, a modern artist. Of all the classical Hollywood directors, he is the one whose work has dated the least, for whom no excuses or explanations need be made. His visual style was straightforward, unmannered, unrooted in a specific era except for that of the classical Hollywood cinema in the most general sense. His lack of interest in topical matters, politics, social issues, and the like also serves to liberate him from the concerns of the times in which he worked, except, again, in the broadest sense of dealing with existing conditions
such as Prohibition and World War II. What decisively set Hawks apart from 98 percent of his contemporaneous filmmakers was his complete lack of sentimentality. At every opportunity, he cut against conventional expectations in emotional moments and had acute antennae for anything that could be considered soft, schmaltzy, cloying, or indulgent.

  Much of this difference stemmed from his female characters, who, in so many cases, talked back; were at least as smart as the men; refused to be condescended to; wore uniforms, smartly tailored outfits, or pants more often than dresses; were not used as ornaments or mere objects of men’s desires; and didn’t simply want to get married and have kids. Putting aside for the moment the ongoing debate over how truly liberated Hawks’s women were, it remains indisputable that they represent a uniquely vibrant, free-spirited, and intelligent group, not only in Hollywood terms but by any standard. The frankness with which male-female attraction was presented, the feeling of mutual respect and equality-as-ideal that is generated between the best of Hawks’s couples, represents the most moving thing in his work and would play as a model of contemporary sexual relations in any era. Although several of his best films conclude with a couple getting together after having hurdled many obstacles, Hawks always avoided the climactic romantic clinch, the typical happy ending. The last moments of Only Angels Have Wings and To Have and Have Not, for example, show the central couples embarking on a “happy” future, giving the films upbeat endings that provide great audience satisfaction. When one deeply considers the circumstances, however, it is hard to imagine a prolonged, satisfying future even for these beautiful couples, much less for many of the others in Hawks’s films; the other factors working upon their lives would seem to stack the cards against them for anything but the short term. And surely in the work of no other significant Hollywood director of the Production Code era have family and children played so marginal a role. In only one of his sound films, Monkey Business, are the central characters married throughout the picture. Edward G. Robinson and Zita Johann marry, unhappily, partway through Tiger Shark; Edward Arnold is encumbered in a passionless match in the second half of Come and Get It; Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell were formerly wed in His Girl Friday; Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan’s wedding precipitates all the ensuing frustrations and complications of I Was a Male War Bride; Dewey Martin unwittingly finds himself wed to Indian girl Elizabeth Threatt toward the end of The Big Sky, and Jack Hawkins’s Pharaoh seals his own fate when he takes Joan Collins for a second wife in Land of the Pharaohs. In stark opposition to Hollywood convention, mothers appear with the utmost infrequency in Hawks’s work—briefly in Scarface, Sergeant York, and Land of the Pharaohs, marginally in Come and Get It. The only remotely normal and appealing kids in Hawks’s films—and their screen time is momentary—are the young Matthew Garth in Red River and Pharaoh’s son; the others, the little boys in The Ransom of Red Chief, Monkey Business, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, are grotesques. Otherwise, all of Hawks’s main characters are basically unattached, single men and women free to pursue their interests and goals in life, as well as each other. For his wily way with women, Hawks was tagged with the nickname “the godamned grey fox of Brentwood,” by his friend John Ford.

  Throughout his career, Hawks was well known as a star maker, a shrewd spotter of new talent, male and female. He can fairly be said to have discovered, or used effectively for the first time on the screen, Paul Muni, George Raft, Carole Lombard, Frances Farmer, Rita Hayworth, Jane Russell, Lauren Bacall, Dorothy Malone, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru, Angie Dickinson, James Caan, and Jennifer O’Neill. He worked repeatedly with five of the greatest male stars in the business—James Cagney, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne; used Edward G. Robinson, Richard Barthelmess, and Joel McCrea twice; and relied upon such regular supporting players as Walter Brennan, Vince Barnett, Charles Coburn, and Arthur Hunnicutt. On only two occasions, however, did he use a leading lady a second time, with Ann Dvorak and Lauren Bacall; unlike Sternberg, his Svengali instinct was generally used up after one go-round with a given actress.

  Hawks left a legacy not only directly through his own work and the people he brought into the business but through his influence on a surprising number of contemporary filmmakers. Hawks’s modernity can be read in large measure through the extent to which his work remains a keystone and an inspiration for directors around the world; aside from Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, both of whom had styles that were much bolder and immediately impressive and imitable, it is arguable that no director has been more widely cited as a positive and instructive influence than Hawks. Jean-Luc Godard and Bernardo Bertolucci each referred explicitly to Hawks in early features. Martin Scorsese had the leading characters in his first film go see Rio Bravo, which they then discussed at length, and he may have based Sharon Stone’s character in Casino on Joan Collins’s in Land of the Pharaohs. Peter Bogdanovich excerpted The Criminal Code in his first film and Red River in his second, and lifted bodily from Bringing Up Baby for his third. John Carpenter twice remade Hawks films, the first time unofficially, the second time with credit. Brian De Palma, in between Hitchcock homages, remade Scarface. Walter Hill, John Milius, and, less obviously, Robert Benton owe a great deal to Hawks. François Truffaut considered Hatari! to be a disguised film about the filmmaking process and a model for his own Day for Night. Quentin Tarantino attended an entire Hawks retrospective while writing Pulp Fiction. There are, and no doubt will be, more, for the reason that Hawks’s films live in the present more vitally than those of most filmmakers from any country or any era.

  In a related way, Hawks has also inspired some of the most lucid and impressive writing from the relatively large number of critics who have written about him; just as Hawks collaborated with the best writers, he has brought out the best in those who respond to his work. Hawks’s films have been assessed, analyzed, defended, and canonized in unusually eloquent and expressive fashion, first by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics and Manny Farber, then by Peter Bogdanovich and Andrew Sarris, and more recently by Robin Wood, Gerald Mast, Joseph McBride, Molly Haskell, Peter Wollen, John Belton, Gerald Peary, Richard Thompson, Jean-Pierre Coursodon, William Paul, Bruce Kawin, Gilbert Adair, and David Thomson, who went so far as to state that if he had the usual ten films to take to a deserted island, they would all be by Hawks. Wood’s book stands as a model of insightful, persuasively argued critical analysis, while only a handful of directors ever produced a body of work that could inspire and actually support the sort of exhaustive explication Mast conducted in his scrupulously scholarly study of Hawks. Very few negative assessments of the director have appeared in the past twenty years, the only notable one having been Raymond Durgnat’s conspicuously unconvincing article Hawks Isn’t Good Enough. Hawks’s career even inspired one of the most astonishingly esoteric critical books ever published, Clark Branson’s Howard Hawks: A Jungian Study. What remains impressive is how Hawks’s body of work provokes and sustains such a considerable volume and diversity of study and analysis, generally at a very high level of appreciation and intelligence, and how the work easily accommodates this multitude of interpretations. This, one can only insist, further attests to the great life and relevance Hawks’s films still possess.

  The overriding reason for writing a biography of Howard Hawks, of course, lies in the extraordinary films he made. In all the books, interviews, and articles about him, what has never been explained is how he succeeded in controlling his career to the remarkable extent he did, why the films turned out the way they did, and how he was able to use the Hollywood system to his own end for four decades. Any lingering notions that just because he didn’t impose his name on the screenplays to his films he was not the “author” of them will be eliminated in short order. But it is also very much to the point that he could never have done it alone. Without his collaborators, Howard Hawks probably would have designed planes or automobiles for a living. The way he selected, and then used, those he worked with was an intrinsic part of Hawks’s a
rtistic process. For this reason, a considerable emphasis has been placed on the characters and talents of his important writers and actors, as well as on his process of working with them. In terms of his working method, Hawks stood with such contemporaries as Leo McCarey and Gregory La Cava, two directors he greatly admired, and in the opposite camp from Hitchcock, whom he also liked. When he was working in the manner he preferred, any Hawks picture was the result of a continual process of experimentation, adjustment, and discovery based on the personalities and talents of those involved, all channeled through the rigorous prism of Hawks’s taste and selectivity. A film director is best compared not to a solitary artist such as a novelist, poet, painter, or sculptor but to an orchestra conductor or a chef, someone who puts an indelible personal stamp on a work by organizing, choosing, interpreting, and synthesizing a certain set of materials.

  Unfortunately, the vast majority of Hawks’s most important collaborators, especially the writers, died years ago, making direct questioning impossible. Jules Furthman, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Seton Miller, Dudley Nichols, Charles Lederer, Nunnally Johnson, Harry Kurnitz—it would be difficult to offer a more impressive list of literary collaborators, but they are all long gone, having left behind little or, in most cases, nothing in the way of detailed notations on their work with Hawks. Also departed without ever having been questioned extensively or at all about Hawks, or having written about him in memoirs, were such important actors as Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Paul Muni, Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, Fredric March, Walter Brennan, Montgomery Clift, Danny Kaye, Ann Sheridan, Marilyn Monroe, and Rock Hudson; all the studio heads, from Warner, Mayer, and Zanuck to Cohn, Goldwyn, and Hughes; most of his producers and cameramen; his closest friends through much of his life, Victor Fleming and Charles K. Feldman; and all of his brothers and sisters. For reasons of their own, his three wives all declined to share their memories: the first, Athole, due to mental fragility that would have been unduly disturbed, her daughter said, by resurrecting troubling events from decades before; the second, Slim, because she was working on her own memoirs, which were published posthumously; and the third, Dee, who said that she is saving everything for a book she plans to write, revealing things only she knows about Hawks and her late brother-in-law, Groucho Marx. We shall see.