Howard Hawks

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION SERIES

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at http://wsupress.wayne.edu

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art

Institute of Chicago

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Peter Lehman

Arizona State University

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Robert J. Burgoyne

Wayne State University

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Anna McCarthy

New York University

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

New edition published 2006 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. Foreword and Introduction to 2006 edition © 2006 by Wayne State University Press. Originally published 1968 by Martin Secker &Warburg in association with the British Film Institute. © 1968 by Robin Wood. Revised edition published 1981 by the British Film Institute. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the

United States of America.

14 13 12 11 10      6 5 4 3 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wood, Robin, 1931

Howard Hawks / Robin Wood.— New ed.

p. cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and television series)

ISBN 0-8143-3276-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8143-3837-7 (e-book)

1. Hawks, Howard, 1896—Criticism and interpretation. 1. Title.

II. Series.

PN1998.3.H38W66 2005

791.4302’8092—dczz

2005027801

∞

Howard HAWKS

New Edition

Robin Wood

Wayne State University Press Detroit

Howard HAWKS

Contents

Cover

Copyright

Foreword

Introduction to 2006 Edition

1. Introduction to 1981 Edition

2. Self-Respect and Responsibility

Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), Rio Bravo (1959)

3. The Lure of Irresponsibility

Scarface (1932), Bringing up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), Monkey Business (1952), I Was a Male War Bride (1949)

4. The Group

Hawks and Ford, Air Force (1943), Ball of Fire (1941), The Thing from Another World (1951)

5. Male Relationships

A Girl in Every Port (1928), The Big Sky (1952), Come and Get It (1936), Red River (1948)

6. The Instinctive Consciousness

Hatari! (1962), Man’s Favourite Sport? (1964), Red Line 7000 (1965)

7. Down the Valley of the Shadow

El Dorado (1966)

Appendix: Failures and Marginal Works

Land of the Pharaohs (1955), Sergeant York (1941), The Big Sleep (1946), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

Retrospect

Filmography

Acknowledgements

Foreword

When the British film journal Movie published its first issue in 1962, it featured a chart that ranked directors according to their auteurist status, like Andrew Sarris’s infamous pantheon. Only two directors were included in Brilliant, the highest category: Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. Robin Wood has written major works on both of these filmmakers, and both books, like the directors who inspired them, can also be described as brilliant.

The two books set the standard for auteur criticism and have yet to be surpassed for their combination of critical rigor and insightful originality. Since its original publication in 1972, the Hawks book has set the terms for virtually all subsequent discussions of director Howard Hawks. Wood’s provocative connection between the professionalism of Hawks’s action film and their inverse in the comedies, with their lure of irresponsibility, has become one of the ways everyone thinks about Hawks’s films and the model to which all subsequent critical work on the director has had to respond in some fashion. Wood boasts that he is not a theorist, but this is true only insofar as he does not limit himself to a particular model or perspective. Although he was later attacked as an unreconstructed auteurist for books such as this one, the truth is that Wood was tackling questions of gender and ideology before the theoretical mantras of feminist and semiotic film studies even existed. When no one, including Wood, knew how to frame questions of the construction of masculinity and the relation of this masculinity to women, he was thinking about them but with a different critical vocabulary.

Wood’s new introduction for this reprint, like his recent monograph on Hawks’s Rio Bravo for the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series (2003), shows how his thinking about Hawks has deepened over time without fundamentally changing. This, of course, is not the same thing as saying that the author has thought nothing new on the subject. Living, as he says, with his favorite directors for decades, Wood has revised considerably his critical opinion of Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman; but as he notes in his new introduction, while he no longer sees Hitchcock and Bergman in the same way he did forty years ago, for him Hawks remains Hawks.

Thus Wood considers his book on Hawks to be, as he says in his preface to the revised edition of Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (2002), the best of his early auteurist books and the one least in need of revisionist thinking. True, Wood admits that if he were writing the book today, he would revise his opinion of the relative value of a few specific films—although on the achievement of Red Line 7000 he remains firmly unrepentent. But now, as then, Hawks represents for Wood the greatest communal director Hollywood has produced, and one who was concerned with fundamental issues of self-respect, emotional maturity, and personal relationships. If Wood thinks this book requires no significant revision, it is a testament to how deeply he understood Hawks’s films in the first place.

Also in that Hitchcock preface, Wood tells us that while attending Cambridge in the early 1950s he would sneak away after attending F. R. Leavis’s lectures to see Red River, The Thing from Another World, Monkey Business, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in the afternoon, and that while he didn’t realize these films were all made by the same director until ten years later, I already loved them. His introduction to this new edition of Howard Hawks, like the Rio Bravo monograph, shows that he still does. The book reveals a brimming joy for Hawks’s pragmatic style, and even though Wood is now a different kind of critic, his more overtly political assessment of Hawks never dampens the exhilaration. The new introduction, with its polemical tone and sense of urgency, is characteristic of Wood’s more recent writing. Yet if it seems an intriguing counterbalance to what he describes as the apolitical analysis of the book, clearly he admires Hawks no less than before. One cannot doubt Wood’s confession in the Hitchcock preface that Hawks’s movies are the films to which I most often return.

I am very pleased that several of Robin Wood’s early books will be published in Wayne State University Press’s Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television series, beginning with this volume on Howard Hawks. Although the book was written several decades ago, and is on one level a product of what Wood himself calls ‘primitive’ auteurism, it nevertheless remains as contemporary as when it was first published. Robin Wood has stubbornly resisted the trends of academic film studies, and in so doing has remained one of its most influential voices.

Barry Keith Grant

2005

Introduction to 2006 Edition

Of all my early books (by which I mean those written before the early 1970s, when film criticism became film theory with the explosion of semiotics, and my own work was fundamentally transformed by the influence of Andrew Britton, greatest of English-language film critics), this is the one that seems to me to require the least qualification and/or apology. The reason for this is embedded in my personal life, which at that time was deeply troubled. I now feel that my books on Hitchcock and, especially, Ingmar Bergman were disfigured by a tendency to annex these directors to my own worldview, my own despairing pessimism. My work on the former has now been extensively corrected by two subsequent editions of Hitchcock’s Films (published by Columbia University Press), reprinting the original little book but juxtaposing it with additional chapters that operate (I hope) as a counterbalance and correction. The Bergman book (to be reprinted later in the current series) will require even greater qualification and promises to end up being at least half as long again. Hitchcock and Bergman are simply not the same directors for me as they were in 1960–62, but Hawks remains Hawks. My recent monograph on Rio Bravo (in the BFI Film Classics series) elaborates on my account of that film here but does not fundamentally rewrite it. The reason for this difference is obvious enough: Hawks’s films defy assimilation into the troubled psyche of a confused thirty-year-old adolescent. Their importance to me when I wrote this book was not that I could enlist them in support of my then apolitical worldview but that they resolutely defied any such assimilation. I love Hawks’s films today for the same reasons I loved them in the 1960s. Were I writing the book today any changes would be more cosmetic than fundamental: The Big Sleep and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes would no longer be relegated to a perfunctory end-section on Failures and Minor Works, and El Dorado (which now seems to me among Hawks’s worst films) would receive brief notice (along with Rio Lobo) in their place. But let me say loud and clear, on Red Line 7000 I remain quite unrepentant, despite the fact that even some of my best friends see my account of it as a descent into raving lunacy.

I shall use the space of this brief new introduction to elaborate on one or two issues already touched upon in the book that follows.

Hollywood and Communal Art; Hawks and His Writers

Perhaps I assume that, over so many years, my work has changed more than it actually has. Rereading parts of this book for this reissue, I was surprised to find that my original introduction already discussed Classical Hollywood in terms of a kind of art now lost (at least in the West), an art in which there was no huge gap to be bridged between artist and audience, an art which could speak to both intellectuals and the general public. In fact, when I was writing this book, we were experiencing (without realization) the last great flourishing of what we now call Classical Hollywood: the years from 1958 to the mid-1960s gave us Hitchcock’s chain of masterpieces from Vertigo to Marnie; Hawks’s Rio Bravo and Hatari!; Preminger’s Exodus, Advise and Consent, and Bunny Lake Is Missing; Mann’s Man of the West and his two great epics, El Cid and Fall of the Roman Empire; and Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. These directors’ subsequent films are not without interest, but it is interest of a different kind, the interest one may feel in the oddities and uncertainties of artists left behind, no longer confident of a public with whom they can communicate. By then, critical interest had shifted to the European art house film and, for entertainment, Hollywood had been superceded by television and taken over by big business. Yes, Hollywood and business have always been inseparable, but there is a great difference between the movie moguls (such as Mayer, Goldwyn, Cohn, and Warner) who, however crass and vulgar they may have seemed to intellectuals, at least loved movies and financed the kinds of movies they themselves loved. Today one has the sense of a group of businessmen sitting around a table saying Well, what made the most money last year? . . . Hmm, well, let’s do a sequel, only a bit more so . . . What great, currently working, Hollywood directors can you name today? With most recent films, the director’s name really doesn’t matter: the films are made by technicians and special effects experts.

Capitalism is inimical to art in all ways and at all levels, with artists driven to do things just for the money (unless under the patronage of millionaires, whose generosity might be better extended to those homeless and starving in the streets, though that might not get them congratulated at gala openings). Short of Nazi or Stalinist totalitarianism it is the worst form of social organization imaginable, built exclusively on competition rather than cooperation, inevitably encouraging greed and the drive for power (where power equals money). As the modern world, led and dominated by the United States (where what we call Western civilization seems to be rapidly sinking toward its nadir), moves deeper and deeper into its ultimate phase of corporate capitalism, one may well be tempted to abandon hope. That is why art has become (inevitably but helplessly) a political issue: the serious critic’s constant temptation is to evaluate films in terms not of their quality but of their resistance or submission to capitalism. Hence the increasing isolation of the serious artist, the resulting absorption in the personal vision, the obsession with originality, to be achieved not in terms of development out of an established and supportive culture but as the pursuit of what has never been done before. Today the nearest thing we have to communal art is rock music, where one can still find something of the exchange of ideas, the development of trends, the building of some kind of tradition. However, it is an art form in which I have never felt able to develop great interest. Perhaps I’m wrong, but its range of expression, its ability to encompass the full range of human emotion and experience, seems extremely limited, and its most interesting aspect remains its commitment to protest and rage, though the rage has generally proven impotent, leading to little beyond destruction and (all too frequently) self-destruction rather than to significant social and political change.

The richest periods of art have always been characterized by communal development: the Renaissance in Italy, the Elizabethan drama, the Vienna of Haydn and Mozart. Such periods have produced not only our greatest artists but also an accumulation of riches within which minor talents can flourish, the richness depending upon the availability of common genres, accepted means of expression, and the continuous exchange of subject matter. If there was a certain degree of competitiveness, it was nothing like the dog-eat-dog model of capitalist one-upmanship, and it never excluded cooperation. Many great Renaissance paintings reveal to the expert the hand or brushstroke of more than one artist; a number of Shakespeare’s plays (Pericles is merely the most obvious) may have been partially written by others; Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven seem to have been totally unfazed by what we would today (with a lawsuit hovering in the background) call the stealing of themes from one another. In each of these periods the artists had at their disposal preexisting genres, motifs, subjects, and formal procedures that they used and developed without the slightest qualms; their originality lay in what they did with their legacy, the ways in which they inflected what they had inherited. The string quartets of Mozart and Haydn are (mostly) in four movements following a standard (if occasionally variable) pattern, and they are composed in the same general idiom. Anyone who can’t tell the difference between them doesn’t really know either composer.

The parallels to Classical Hollywood should be obvious. So should the one great (and limiting) difference, which can be expressed very simply. In order to paint, a painter requires a canvas and some paints; in order to write plays, a playwright requires a pen and a stack of paper; in order to compose an opera, a composer requires music sheets, and possibly a keyboard to try out ideas. But in order to make a Hollywood movie, a director requires very large sums of money, and even that will be controlled by his producers, who in turn will be controlled by their financiers, who think only in terms of profit. Aside from this (admittedly crucial) factor, there is no great difference (in practical terms, if not in achievement) between Shakespeare and Howard Hawks. When Shakespeare wrote his plays he had at his disposal an agreed medium (the iambic pentameter, alternating with prose for low life or low comedy), a whole set of genres (all of which he developed, none of which he invented: tragedy, comedy, history play, melodrama, as well as various subcategories such as revenge tragedy, romantic comedy, British or ancient history), and a stock of sources for possible adaptation (novels, stories, histories, legends). His one original story appears to have been the source of one of his weakest plays, The Merry Wives of Windsor. It is quite inaccurate to describe films such as A Thousand Acres or 10 Things I Hate About You as adaptations of Shakespeare when they are adaptations of plots Shakespeare used but didn’t write. Similarly, when Hawks made his films he had at his disposal a fully developed shooting/editing method (close-up, medium shot, long shot, two-shot, tracking shot, cut, fade, dissolve), a whole set of genres (comedy, western, war film, adventure film, sci/fi movie, plus those he never used such as domestic melodrama, domestic comedy), and an inexhaust ible supply of possible source material. Like Shakespeare, he is credited with only one original story (A Girl in Every Port), though not with the script of the film. Just as there is a fundamental difference between a play by Shakespeare and one by Samuel Beckett, there is a similar difference between a film by Hawks and a film by Fellini: the difference, precisely, between communal and personal art.

What I call communal art has two interrelated aspects: communication with a wide audience and collaboration among artists. Each great period of communal art has been defined (to a greater or lesser extent) partly by a widespread, nonexclusive audience, as opposed to a small following of intellectuals or connoisseurs. Many of the greatest Renaissance paintings were exhibited in churches or cathedrals, open to the general public. The Elizabethan theatre was essentially a popular art form, long looked down upon (though patronized) by the cognoscenti. Shakespeare’s plays were attended by the aristocracy, Elizabethan intellectuals, even royalty on occasion, but were also extremely popular with the lower classes, or groundlings, many of whom were illiterate. Certain arias from Mozart’s operas became popular hits, with copies sold in the streets as sheet music. To varying degrees, artists addressed a huge and heterogeneous public that found their works accessible and pleasurable, accessible precisely because they were immediately recognizable in their language of genres and idioms. Artists today typically define themselves as different, offering something new, something that has never been done before, a drastic and often desperate breach with the past. Communal artists define themselves as offering a personal inflection on the familiar—developing, varying, pushing things further, gradually transforming the forms, the genres, but never leaping so far ahead that the audience can no longer make necessary adjustments.

Within the context I have described it seems inevitable to claim Hawks as the exemplary (which need not necessarily imply greatest) Hollywood filmmaker, before all others. He worked happily and naturally within almost every genre (I shall return later to the exceptions, which are crucial in defining his significance), and in almost every case he extended the genre in new, interesting, and creative ways, pushing things further than they had been pushed before. Some have claimed that he made the best film in every genre, a claim I find debatable but not altogether ridiculous. Despite this generic heterogeneity, his work overall displays a remarkable coherence, the comedies standing as the necessary and logical inverse of the adventure films. That work, however, distinctive as it is, cannot simply be labeled Howard Hawks without considerable modification. Behind him was the fully evolved structure of Hollywood filmmaking; around him was an environment that, while in many ways competitive, also encouraged exchange, collaboration, cross-fertilization. Consider, on the most obvious level, the availability and use of stars. Conjure up a generalized image of John Wayne. Now conjure up, first, an image of Wayne in the films of Ford, then in the films of Hawks: he is instantly recognizable, of course, but nevertheless they are two quite distinct Waynes,