The Instant Expert's Guide to Howard Hawks

With Cinema Paradiso offering so many thousands of films for rental, it's not always easy to know where to start. The Instant Expert series seeks to point users in the direction of some of the greatest directors in screen history and provide them with background information and a list of 10 unmissable titles. The focus here falls on Howard Hawks, a jack of all genres, who managed to make at least one standout contribution to each.

Howard Hawks didn't make many outright masterpieces. But he did make a number of fine films in a variety of genres that contributed towards an exceptional body of work. Hawks famously claimed that 'a good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes', while he also averred that a good director is 'someone who doesn't annoy you'. Perhaps that's why he hasn't been accorded the acclaim he deserves, with critic Leonard Maltin describing him as 'the greatest American director who is not a household name'.

This marginalisation also owes a fair amount to the fact that Hawks refused to play the Hollywood game. For much of his career, he operated as an independent who signed to studios to complete a single or limited number of projects. Indeed, by often acting as his own producer and by contributing anonymously to the majority of his screenplays, Hawks enjoyed a measure of autonomy that other directors must have envied. Moreover, he eschewed the traits that typified American cinema in the first half of the 20th century.

Rather than focus on the traditional family unit, Hawks preferred to study small groups of men getting the job done with a sense of professionalism and camaraderie that was distinctive for the inclusion of a strong female member of the boys' club (the so-called 'Hawksian woman'). He also steered clear of Christian sentimentality, nationalistic myth-making, political hubris and jingoistic flag-waving.

Maybe that's why he only received a single Oscar nomination for Best Director and that's why Sergeant York lost out to John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (both 1941). It's also perhaps why so disappointingly few Hawks films are available on disc in this country, as he didn't stay at one studio long enough for him to become an insider and, thus, be deemed worthy of having his films periodically revived by the cash-conscious conglomerates behind the major labels. He did receive an Honorary Academy Award two years before his death. But he was undervalued in his lifetime and barely merits a mention in A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995). There are those, however, who concur with Jean-Luc Godard's contention that Hawks was 'the greatest American artist'.

Born With a Silver Spoon

The first of five children, Howard Winchester Hawks was born in Goshen, Indiana on 30 May 1896. Father Frank was a prosperous paper manufacturer, while mother Helen was the daughter of a leading industrialist. In 1906, the family relocated to Pasadena, California, only to move to nearby Glendora six years later, where Hawks attended Citrus Union High School and took his first flying lessons with the local barnstorming troupe.

At the age of 17, Hawks was enrolled at the exclusive Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and became a regular theatregoer in Boston. On returning west, he won the United States Junior Tennis Championship in 1914, prior to taking up a place to read mechanical engineering at Cornell University, where he became something of a bibliophile. Moreover, during his second-year summer vacation, Hawks became interested in motor racing after his maternal grandfather bought him a sports car. During one track meet, Hawks crashed into Victor Fleming, a Hollywood cinematographer, who would go on to direct both The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind (1939).

Fleming arranged for Hawks to become a prop boy on the Douglas Fairbanks comedy, In Again, Out Again (1916), where his carpentry skills came in handy, as he was able to build a set needed at short notice. Hawks would also work on Cecil B. DeMille's The Little American and claimed that he got to direct Mary Pickford in a scene in The Little Princess (both 1917) when director Marshall Neilan was indisposed. However, duty called elsewhere, as Hawks volunteered for the US Army when the country declared war on the Kaiser's Germany in April 1917. Despite his eagerness to see action, however, Hawks spent the entire conflict as a flying instructor on various domestic bases and didn't even get to complete his studies, as his degree was awarded in absentia in 1918.

A Silent Apprenticeship

On being demobbed as a Second Lieutenant, Hawks returned Hollywood, brandishing Neilan and Pickford's endorsement for his work on Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley (1917). It helped enormously that he came from a monied background, as he was able to lend a sum to Jack L. Warner, who allowed Hawks to learn the ropes on a series of one-reel comedies starring the Italian clown, Monty Banks. He would eventually find his way to Britain, where he would direct Leslie Fuller in Why Sailors Leave Home (1930) and wife Gracie Fields in Queen of Hearts (1936) among others. Banks would also be played by Tom Hollander opposite Jane Horrocks in Brian Percival's BBC biopic, Gracie! (2009).

A great embroiderer of his own legend, Hawks insisted that he directed a clutch of the Banks shorts. But, whatever his actual involvement, they whetted his appetite and, in 1920, he joined forces with Neilan and emerging talents Allan Dwan and Allen Holubar to form Associated Producers, with the family once again providing him with the necessary capital. The company produced 14 features over the next three years, with Hawks contenting himself with assistant credits on several of them. But Dwan made a name for himself and he was hired to direct Douglas Fairbanks on Robin Hood (1922) and The Iron Mask (1929) before enjoying a long career into the 1960s.

Tiring of being a junior partner, Hawks joined his brother Kenneth in a rented house along with such aspiring film-makers as Victor Fleming, Jack Conway, A. Edward Sutherland and brothers Richard and Arthur Rosson. Also resident in this raucous establishment was the latter pair's cinematographer sibling, Harold, who would go on to marry Jean Harlow and photograph such timeless classics as Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's On the Town (1949) and Singin' in the Rain (1952). Moreover, among their acquaintances was Irving G. Thalberg, who had forged a reputation as a 'boy wonder' at Universal before becoming vice president in charge of production at MGM, where he would continue his feud with maverick actor-director Erich von Stroheim by cutting his 42-reel adaptation of Frank Norris's 1899 novel, McTeague, down to the 18-reel Greed (1924).

Aware of Hawks's love of books, Thalberg recommended him to Famous Players-Lasky as a production editor in the story department, where he worked on adaptations by authors as different as Joseph Conrad, Jack London and Zane Grey. He also received his first on-screen credit as the story editor on George Melford's Tiger Love (1924), while also picking up useful experience in the studio's editing suite. Despite being headhunted by Thalberg, Hawks felt hedged in at MGM and broke his contract to sign for the Fox Film Corporation, where producer Sol Wurtzel gave him the chance to make his directorial debut with The Road to Glory (1926), a now lost silent that Hawks would remake as a talkie in 1936. Fredric March, Warner Baxter and Lionel Barrymore headlined this account of life with a French unit on the Western Front, which is available to rent from Cinema Paradiso.

Quickly demonstrating his versatility, Hawks followed the 1926 comedy, Fig Leaves, with Paid to Love (1927), a mistaken identity saga that borrowed its camera movements and Expressionist lighting from FW Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924). Next came the largely forgotten duo of Cradle Snatchers (1927) and Fazil (1928), but Hawks was fast becoming frustrated by the Fox front office delaying the release of his films.

He had become Thalberg's brother-in-law after marrying his wife, Norma Shearer's younger sister, Athole, and felt he was entitled to a fairer crack of the whip. But he had to endure the indignity of Wurtzel telling him that A Girl in Every Port (1928) was 'the worst picture Fox has made in years'. In fact, this proved to be a pivotal outing, as it not only saw Hawks embark upon his habit of giving characters colourful nicknames - Spike and Salami were played by Victor McLaglen and Robert Armstrong - but it also made a star of Louise Brooks (who was married to Hawks's old housemate, Eddie Sutherland), who would be swept off to Germany by GW Pabst for Pandora's Box (1928) and Diary of a Lost Girl (1929).

However, Hawks had reached the end of his tether with Wurtzel, who insisted on adding dialogue passages to the now lost aviation silent, The Air Circus (1928), and then decided to reshoot Trent's Last Case (1929) as a silent, as he didn't like Raymond Griffith's distinctively croaky voice (which was the result of a wartime gas attack). Released only in Britain, this EC Bentley adaptation was believed to be lost by the time Herbert Wilcox starred Michael Wilding, Margaret Lockwood and Orson Welles in his 1952 remake. Indeed, Hawks was so embarrassed by it that he tried to have the only print destroyed when it was rediscovered in the early 1970s. But the experience taught him an invaluable lesson and he insisted on signing short-term contracts for the next four decades.

It's a Man's World

Determined to carve a niche as a freelance film-maker within the studio system, Hawks opted to stick to what he knew best by making an aviation adventure. As William Wellman's Wings (1927) had won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Picture, Hawks was confident that The Dawn Patrol (1930) would find an audience. However, his decision to poach pilots and technicians from Howard Hughes's long-delayed air epic, Hell's Angels (1930) - which provided the impetus for Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004) - led to the two Howards squaring up in court. Ironically, they emerged from the case as firm friends and Hawks was able to put on a brave face when John Monk Saunders alone won the Oscar for Best Story, as Hollywood guild rules prevented directors from taking writing credits.

The picture had been released through Warner Bros, but Hawks had resented being browbeaten by studio executive Hal B. Wallis and engineered a loan move to Columbia to make the prison drama, The Criminal Code (1931), with Walter Huston and Boris Karloff. The hardboiled material struck a chord with Hawks, who persuaded Hughes to co-produce Scarface (1932), a crime drama adapted from a 1929 novel by Armitage Trail that had been inspired by the exploits of Al Capone. Hawks and former crime reporter Ben Hecht made the dialogue rattle like a machine gun, as they presented Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) as a working man going about his business. By contrast, Brian De Palma turned Tony Montana (Al Pacino) into a psychotic Cuban refugee doing whatever it takes to achieve the American Dream in the blisteringly entertaining 1983 remake that was dedicated to Hawks and Hecht.

While Hughes argued with the Production Code Administration about the film's attitude to criminality and violence, Hawks returned to Warners to make The Crowd Roars and Tiger Shark (both 1932). Respectively starring James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, the stories centred on the Indianapolis 500 motor race and tuna fishing and reinforced Hawks's growing reputation for gritty studies of working stiffs and the bond they forge with their workmates. Dedication to the cause was also paramount in Today We Live (1933), an adaptation of the William Faulkner story, 'Turn About', which saw English heiress Joan Crawford's three suitors, Gary Cooper, Franchot Tone and Robert Young, do their bit in the Great War.

This was the first film made under Hawks's deal with MGM. But he didn't relish working for Thalberg and WS Van Dyke and Jack Conway respectively had to complete The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933) and Viva Villa! (1934) after Hawks walked. William Wyler would similarly have to take over the lumberjacking drama, Come and Get It (1936), after Hawks fell out with independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, for whom he had made Barbary Coast (1935), a deeply underrated tale of the California Gold Rush that was scripted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and starred Edward G. Robinson as the San Francisco saloon owner determined to beat Joel McCrea to both the treasure and roulette croupier Miriam Hopkins. Nicknamed 'The Swan', Mary Rutledge was the toughest Hawksian Woman to date, but more would follow after Hawks began to hit his straps after a reunion with James Cagney on the airmail adventure, Ceiling Zero (1936).

Dizzy Dames and Femmes Fatales

Although the spotlight has always shone brightest on Frank Capra's It Happened One Night - which became the first film to scoop the Big Five Academy Awards - it was Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century (both 1934) that set the template for what came to be known as 'screwball comedy'. There had been earlier battles of the sexes, most notably Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932), but they lacked the combative banter that characterised the exchanges between duelling thespians John Barrymore and Carole Lombard in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's feisty screenplay, which was among the first to employ scurrilous verbal wit to convey the sense of sexual tension that the was gradually being outlawed by the more stringently enforced Production Code.

Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde removed some of the sharper edges in the badinage that fizzed between Katharine Hepburn's scatty heiress and Cary Grant's milquetoast palaeontologist in Bringing Up Baby (1938), which was later remade by Peter Bogdanovich as What's Up, Doc? (1972). Just as Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal were almost had their thunder stolen by Madeline Kahn, as the latter's long-suffering fiancée, so Grant and Hepburn were almost upstaged by Skippy the Wire Fox Terrier, who had already memorably played Asta in WS Van Dyke's The Thin Man (1934) and Mr Smith in Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937), which both followed in the screwball tradition. As did Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940), which saw Charles Lederer rework Hecht and MacArthur's 1928 play, The Front Page, which was filmed by Lewis Milestone (1931) and Billy Wilder (1974). In this version, ace reporter Hildy Johnson was played by Rosalind Russell, who gave editor Cary Grant a run for his money in a manner one would expect of a Hawksian Woman.

Jean Arthur also proved herself to be one of the crew in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), a trademark study of male bonding in maintaining professional standards that saw Arthur's showgirl compete with old flame Rita Hayworth for the affections of Cary Grant, as he strives to provide a vital air-freight service across the Andes from the remote South American town of Barranca. Hawks returned to the skies in Air Force, which recalled the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, while he also helped out onetime roomie Richard Rosson on Corvette K-225 (both 1943), a tale of the war in the North Atlantic on which Hawks also served as producer.

Hawks also doubled up on Sergeant York which was the first of two collaborations in 1941 with Gary Cooper. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his patriotic performance as Alvin York (one of America's most decorated Great War heroes) before going on to demonstrate his underrated comic touch as the lexicographer who shelters fugitive showgirl Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire (1941), which Hawks would remake in Technicolor as A Song Is Born, with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo in 1948.

Another old pal to benefit from Hawks's expertise around this time was Howard Hughes, who had spent two years struggling to convince Production Code chief Joseph Breen to pass The Outlaw (1943) because of the emphasis on Jane Russell's bosom in a Western that was supposed to be about Billy the Kid (Jack Buetel), Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell) and Doc Holliday (Walter Huston). Hawks oversaw the initial shoot, but Hughes's insistence on adding new scenes and tweaking the edit prompted Hawks to have his name removed from the credits. Besides, he was far more interested in the burgeoning relationship between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, which blossomed on the set of To Have and Have Not (1944), a wartime drama set on French Martinique that Hawks made as the result of a bet with novelist buddy Ernest Hemingway that he could make a great film out of his worst book.

Hawks reunited Bogie and Bacall on The Big Sleep (1946), a twisting Philip Marlowe noir that was so complicated that screenwriters William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman had to contact hardboiled novelist Raymond Chandler to ask how chauffeur Owen Taylor (Dan Wallace) had died and he called back to admit that he had no idea. Such an incident might not have been out of place as Hawks returned to screwball comedy in the postwar period with I Was a Male War Bride (1949), an adaptation of the memoir by Belgian soldier Henri Rochard that cast Cary Grant as the French officer who has to don a woman's uniform in order to gain access to the United States with his army chauffeur wife, Ann Sheridan.

Having directed Fred Allen and Oscar Levant in 'The Ransom of Red Chief' episode in the comic anthology, O. Henry's Full House, Hawks collaborated with Grant for the final time on Monkey Business (both 1952), in which an absent-minded chemist and his wife imbibe an elixir of youth. Ginger Rogers amusingly turns into a pranking schoolgirl who delights in making Grant's life unbearable, but Hawks was so struck by the performance of starlet Marilyn Monroe as the Oxly secretary that he promptly cast her opposite Jane Russell in his 1953 version of Anita Loos's 1949 stage adaptation of her own bestselling novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Jack of All Trades

By 1955, Hawks clearly felt he had nothing left to prove to anyone in Hollywood and started to slow down and enjoy some extended leisure time between projects. Despite being nicknamed 'The Grey Fox' because of his prematurely silvering hair, he was physically active and raced fast cars and motorbikes. He also played tennis, golf and enjoyed a flutter at the horse track. Moreover, he often went skiing and fishing with Ernest Hemingway and was disappointed to lose out to Sam Wood in adapting the classic Spanish Civil War tale, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), which co-starred Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. Hawks was also a gifted carpenter and a silversmith and his ability to turn his hand to most things was reflected in his choice of film projects.

Despite his negative experience on The Outlaw, Hawks was keen to return to the frontier and, in Red River (1948), he produced one of the first psychological Westerns. Adapted by Borden Chase and Charles Schnee from the former's Saturday Evening Post story, 'The Chisholm Trail', the action centred on the strain placed upon the relationship between John Wayne and adopted son Montgomery Clift during an arduous cattle drive. Hawks got on so well with Wayne that they joined forces again on Rio Bravo (1959) and Hatari! (1962). Taking its title from the Swahili for 'danger', the latter is a typical 'men at work' venture, as Wayne leads a team of big-game hunters who capture wild animals for zoos. Being a Hawks picture, however, there's also a strong woman in the form of Elsa Martinelli, a photojournalist sent to East Africa by a Swiss zoo to record the capture of their commissions.

The great outdoors would also feature in The Big Sky (1952), a backwoods saga that harked back to 1832 to accompany trapper Kirk Douglas on a perilous expedition into Blackfoot territory along the Yellowstone River. Hawks would return to the Old West in his final two outings, El Dorado (1967) and Rio Lobo (1970), which reunited him with Duke Wayne. Adapted from Harry Brown's novel, The Stars in Their Courses, and essentially a remake of Rio Bravo, the former cast Wayne as a gun for hire who helps sheriff buddy Robert Mitchum protect rancher Ed Asner from a rival clan led by RG Armstrong. The latter was scripted by Leigh Brackett and Burton Wohl and pitched Wayne into the post-Civil War era to play a Confederate colonel who joins forces with mavericks Christopher Mitchum and Jorge Rivero to confound the Union renegades robbing trains bound for the Deep South.

Orson Welles once suggested that 'Hawks is great prose; Ford is poetry.' But he proved himself a match for Ford and such other masters of the genre as Henry Hathaway, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. Moreover, Hawks also showed he could handle the newer form of science fiction, as he guided Christian Nyby (who had edited The Big Sleep and Red River) through The Thing From Another World (1951), an alien invasion story set on a US Air Force base in the frozen Arctic that was adapted from the 1938 novella, Who Goes There?, that John W. Campbell had written under the pen name of Don A. Stuart. No one seems able to agree on the relative contributions of master and pupil, but the fact that Hawks only gave Nyby a tenth of the $50,000 directing fee that RKO paid to Winchester Productions seems conclusive.

Having failed to find a backer for the William E. Barrett novel about a missionary priest that Edward Dmytryk made with Humphrey Bogart as The Left Hand of God (1955), Hawks and Faulkner made their contribution to the widescreen epic with Land of the Pharaohs (1955), a fictional retelling of the building of the Great Pyramid. Hawks had hoped to revisit his own past in Man's Favorite Sport? (1964), as he wanted Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn to play the celebrated angler and the PR executive who discovers he's a fraud who has never cast a rod in his life. There was also a throwback element to Red Line 7000 (1965), as James Caan played a stock-car racer who feels guilty about the crash that killed his best buddy at Daytona.

There seems little doubt that Hawks was badly shaken by William Faulkner's death coming so soon after Ernest Hemingway's suicide in 1961. He spent much of the next decade working on a drama based on his late friend's partnership with photographer Robert Capa, while also toying with a loose remake of A Girl in Every Port, which was known at various times as Now, Mr Gus and When It's Hot, Play It Cool. Among the other intriguing projects that Hawks left unfinished were adaptations of Samuel Fuller's journalism novel, The Dark Page, and Ian Fleming's first James Bond book, Casino Royale, which were eventually filmed by Phil Karlson as Scandal Sheet (1952), and by Val Guest (1967) and Martin Campbell (2006) , with David Niven and Daniel Craig as 007.

Howard Hawks died at the age of 81 on 26 December 1977, shortly after sustaining injuries in tripping over his pet dog at his Palm Springs home. He can be seen in a couple of documentaries available from Cinema Paradiso, Peter Jones and Mark A. Catalena's Goldwyn: The Man and His Movies (2001) and Robert Trachtenberg's Cary Grant: A Class Apart (2004). What a shame Hawks failed to persuade Grant either to take the title role in an adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote or to play a consumptive dentist in a variation on the Doc Holliday story. But cinema is full of such tantalising 'if onlys' and we should be grateful for the rich legacy that Hawks has bequeathed us.