The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (183 page)

Hathaway’s sort of naïve enthusiasm is out of fashion now, but is real nonetheless, as much in
Lives of a Bengal Lancer
and
Spawn of the North
as in the tightly organized
Seven Thieves
, the slapstick boisterousness of
North to Alaska
, or the small-scale suspense of
Rawhide
. In search of pattern, one notices a zest for physical destruction and a recurring use of the journey motif. But, artistically, it is a career without consistency or growth. Thus within one year, 1945, he moved without demur from the turgid period reconstruction of
Nob Hill
to Fox’s modish venture into urban realism with
The House on 92nd Street
.

Jack Hawkins
(1910–73), b. London
Hawkins’s trembling stiff upper lip—a grotesque struggle between emotionalism and rigor mortis—is redolent of those British war films of the 1950s. Pictures like
Angels One Five
(51, George More O’Ferrall),
The Cruel Sea
(53, Charles Frend), and
The Malta Story
(53, Brian Desmond Hurst) established him as central to the British myth of ossified pluck in the face of war. Hawkins always struck me as a rather oppressive actor, more interesting when resentful or truculent. Indeed, he might have made a nasty heavy had anyone encouraged him. There are, however, a few films in which his hostility is quite impressive and frightening:
State Secret
(50, Sidney Gilliat);
The Prisoner
(55, Peter Glenville); and
Rampage
(63, Phil Karlson).

As a juvenile, he appeared on the English stage and by 1930 he was into films:
Birds of Prey
(30, Basil Dean);
The Lodger
(32, Maurice Elvey);
The Good Companions
(33, Victor Saville);
The Lost Chord
(33, Elvey);
The Jewel
(33, Reginald Denham);
A Shot in the Dark
(33, George Pearson);
Autumn Crocus
(34, Dean);
Death at Broadcasting House
(34, Denham);
Peg of Old Drury
(35, Herbert Wilcox);
The Frog
(37, Jack Raymond);
Beauty and the Barge
(38, Henry Edwards);
A Royal Divorce
(38, Raymond);
Murder Will Out
(39, Roy William Neill); and
Next of Kin
(42, Thorold Dickinson).

During the war, he served in India and was then made colonel in command of ENSA. He returned to the screen in peace and gradually hauled himself to the top:
The Fallen Idol
(48, Carol Reed);
Bonnie Prince Charlie
(48, Anthony Kimmins);
The Small Back Room
(48, Michael Powell); the Prince of Wales in
The Elusive Pimpernel
(50, Powell);
The Adventurers
(50, David MacDonald);
Home at Seven
(50, Ralph Richardson);
No Highway
(50, Henry Koster);
The Black Rose
(50, Henry Hathaway);
Mandy
(52, Alexander Mackendrick); and
The Planter’s Wife
(52, Ken Annakin). His employment in American films was not the least curious aspect of his success, and from 1955 onward he worked on both sides of the Atlantic:
The Intruder
(53, Guy Hamilton);
The Seekers
(54, Annakin); helplessly lost in
Land of the Pharaohs
(55, Howard Hawks);
The Long Arm
(56, Frend);
The Man in the Sky
(56, Charles Crichton);
Fortune Is a Woman
(57, Gilliat);
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(57, David Lean);
Gideon’s Day
(58, John Ford);
The Two-Headed Spy
(58, André de Toth);
Ben-Hur
(59, William Wyler);
The League of Gentlemen
(60, Basil Dearden);
Two Loves
(61, Charles Walters);
Five Finger Exercise
(62, Daniel Mann); as Allenby in
Lawrence of Arabia
(62, Lean);
Guns at Batasi
(64, John Guillermin);
Zulu
(64, Cy Endfield);
Masquerade
(64, Dearden);
Lord Jim
(65, Richard Brooks); and
Judith
(65, Mann).

In 1966, he was operated on for cancer of the throat with the result that his vocal cords were affected. After that he was dubbed or spoke with the somber, rasping voice of Alpha 60, thereby adding to the effect of misanthropy:
Great Catherine
(67, Gordon Flemyng);
Shalako
(68, Edward Dmytryk);
Monte Carlo or Bust
(69, Annakin);
Oh! What a Lovely War
(69, Richard Attenborough);
Waterloo
(70, Sergei Bondarchuk);
The Adventures of Gerard
(70, Jerzy Skolimowski);
Jane Eyre
(71, Delbert Mann);
Nicholas and Alexandra
(71, Franklin J. Schaffner);
Kidnapped
(71, Delbert Mann); and
Young Winston
(72, Attenborough).

Howard Hawks
(1896–1977), b. Goshen, Indiana
1926:
The Road to Glory; Fig Leaves
. 1927:
The Cradle Snatchers; Paid to Love
. 1928:
A Girl in Every Port; Fazil; The Air Circus
. 1929:
Trent’s Last Case
. 1930:
The Dawn Patrol
. 1931:
The Criminal Code
. 1932:
The Crowd Roars; Scarface, Shame of the Nation; Tiger Shark
. 1933:
Today We Live
. 1934:
Viva Villa!
(credited to Jack Conway, but codirected with Hawks);
Twentieth Century
. 1935:
Barbary Coast
. 1936:
Ceiling Zero; The Road to Glory; Come and Get It
(codirected with William Wyler). 1938:
Bringing Up Baby
. 1939:
Only Angels Have Wings
. 1940:
His Girl Friday; The Outlaw
(codirected with Howard Hughes, not released until 1946). 1941:
Sergeant York; Ball of Fire
. 1943:
Air Force
. 1944:
To Have and Have Not
. 1946:
The Big Sleep
. 1948:
Red River; A Song is Born
. 1949:
I Was a Male War Bride/You Can’t Sleep Here
. 1951:
The Thing
(credited to Christian Nyby, with Hawks as producer, but seeing is believing). 1952:
The Big Sky;
“The Ransom of Red Chief,” episode from
O. Henry’s Full House; Monkey Business
. 1953:
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. 1955:
Land of the Pharaohs
. 1959:
Rio Bravo
. 1962:
Hatari!
. 1964:
Man’s Favorite Sport
. 1965:
Red Line 7000
. 1967:
El Dorado
. 1970:
Rio Lobo
.

When critics play children’s games—such as selecting the ten best films of all time—the majority behave like dutiful understudies for a Platonic circle, opting for milestone movies, turning points in the art of film. But imagine yourself a Crusoe, as the ship goes down: a ship transporting the movie resources of the world, the S. S.
Langlois
. Put aside thoughts of urgency; there is time in this sort of dream for one Lang, one Ophuls, one Mizoguchi, one Rossellini, one Hitchcock, one Sternberg, one Murnau, one Renoir, one Buñuel, one Ozu, and one Hawks to while away the days on that island.

But a Crusoe needs to be honest with himself, just as Defoe’s hero foresaw that money would be out of place on the island but still could not bear to let it go down, knowing that rescue would vindicate his prudence. So, hold the raft while I lay my hands on
Twentieth Century, Bringing Up Baby, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Red River, I Was a Male War Bride, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, and
Rio Bravo
.

Too easy, too superficial a response to the total archive, you protest? Quite right. All the way to the island, paddling my raft, I shall be regretting
Man’s Favorite Sport
(full of useful aquatic hints) already underwater, quite broken up by the thought of
Monkey Business
left behind, and gnawed at by the loss of
Air Force, Ceiling Zero
, and
Scarface
.

Back in the civilized world there will be libraries crowded with works of cinema history that patronize Howard Hawks. The staffs of
Sight and Sound
may still wake in the night shuddering with the memory that they did not bother to review
Rio Bravo
. And those willing to compromise will concede that “Old Hawks certainly does make entertaining films …” with the hollow, wide-eyed charity of minds keen to search out the good in every man. But the reservations mount up: Hawks is old-fashioned, subject to the limitations of the entertainment film, prone to a romantic view of men in action; in short, a moviemaker for boys never quite grown up.

The implication is that Hawks was an obedient, placid artisan within a narrow and corrupting framework. Hawks did nothing to deny that interpretation himself. Even the amusing and revealing interview that Peter Bogdanovich did with Hawks did not coax the laconic veteran further than the admission that he always liked to put as much fun and business into his pictures as possible. He disparaged plot and content and barely referred to camera effects. There was no attempt to conceal the stress on masculine values in his films. And no interest in going beyond the understatement shared by most of his characters or in elaborating on the implications and undertones of the recurring, ritualistic situations that obsess him. Like Monet forever painting lilies or Bonnard always recreating his wife in her bath, Hawks made only one artwork. It is the principle of that movie that men are more expressive rolling a cigarette than saving the world.

The point should be made that Hawks attends to such small things because he is the greatest optimist the cinema has produced. Try to think of the last optimistic film you saw and it may dawn on you that the achievement is not minor. Not that he fails to notice tragedy. The optimism comes out of a knowledge of failure and is based on the virtues and warmth in people that go hand-in-hand with their shortcomings. Death, rupture, and loss abound in Hawks’s world, even if they are observed calmly. The unadvertised sense of destruction in
Ceiling Zero
and
The Road to Glory
is the most breathtakingly frank view of depression in the 1930s American film.
Bringing Up Baby
—not for nothing photographed by Russell Metty—is a screwball comedy surrounded by darkness, forever on the brink of madness.
Sergeant York
is a barely admitted story of outraged conscience.
The Big Sleep
contains not only the General, unwarmed in his sweltering hot house, but Elisha Cook swallowing poison.
Red River
is a story of youth usurping age.
I Was a Male War Bride
only comes so close to sexual frustration by making it ridiculous.

The clue to Hawks’s greatness is that this somber lining is cut against the cloth of the genre in which he is operating. Far from the meek purveyor of Hollywood forms, he always chose to turn them upside down.
To Have and Have Not
and
The Big Sleep
, ostensibly an adventure and a thriller, are really love stories.
Rio Bravo
, apparently a Western—everyone wears a cowboy hat—is a comedy conversation piece. The ostensible comedies are shot through with exposed emotions, with the subtlest views of the sex war, and with a wry acknowledgment of the incompatibility of men and women. Men and women skirmish in Hawks’s films on the understanding that an embrace is only a prelude to withdrawal and disillusion. The dazzling battles of word, innuendo, glance, and gesture—between Grant and Hepburn, Grant and Jean Arthur, Grant and Rosalind Russell, John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, Bogart and Bacall, Wayne and Angie Dickinson, Rock Hudson and Paula Prentiss—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. Bogart and Bacall in
The Big Sleep
are not only characters tangled in a tortuous thriller but a constant audience to the film, commenting on its passage. The same is true of all those scenes in
Rio Bravo
when the tenuous basis of the plot is mulled over. That is why, at the end of
Red River
, Joanne Dru interrupts the fight between Wayne and Clift with, “Whoever thought either one of you would kill the other?”

The “style” of Hawks rests in this commenting astuteness; no other director so bridges the contrived plots of genre and the responses of a mature spectator. And because there is such emotional intelligence, such witty feeling, the camera is almost invisible. It is insufficient to say that Hawks put the camera in the most natural and least obtrusive place. The point is that his actors played to and with him, as he sat to one side of the camera that recorded them. His method involved the creation of a performance in rehearsal for which the script was merely an impetus. Whatever the script said, Hawks always twisted it into those abiding tableaux. It was a requirement of the method that he selected actors and actresses who responded to this sort of badgering companionship and whom the audience accepted as being grown up. No wonder then that Cary Grant is so central to Hawks’s work. But notice how far
Rio Bravo
shows us a Wayne and Dean Martin hardly recognized by other directors. And do not forget the list of people either discovered or brought to new life by Hawks: Louise Brooks (chosen by Pabst for
Pandora’s Box
after seeing
A Girl in Every Port);
Boris Karloff; Carole Lombard; Rita Hayworth; Richard Barthelmess; Jane Russell; Lauren Bacall; Dorothy Malone; Montgomery Clift; George Winslow; Angie Dickinson; and James Caan.