96

Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 2: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 3: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 4: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 5: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

same question. One can distinguish broadly (so long as one keepspolitics out of it) between 'revolutionary' and 'conservative' art:art that deliberate1y breaks with the immediate past, inventingentire1y new forms and new methods of expression, and art thatdeve10ps out of the immediate past, using forms and languagealready evolved. Although such distinctions can never be clear­cut, many of the greatest artists would fall into the latter category-Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart; and the fact that so many twentieth­century artists would fall into the former makes it important thatwe remember this. The genre movie is obviously (by its verynature) 'conservative' art in this sense; and one of the distinguishingfeatures of 'conservative' art is that it is immediate1y entertaining:audiences were entertained, from the outset, by Shakespeare'splays and by Mozart's operas, and it was possible for an aria fromThe Mam"age of Figaro to catch on instantly as a popular hit. Theoriginality of such works lay not in the evolution of a complete1ynew language, but in the artist's use and development of an alreadyexisting one; hence there was common ground, from the outset,between artist and audience, and 'entertainment' could happenspontaneously without the intervention of a lengthy period ofassimilation. It is distressing that one should have to remindpeople that a great work of art can be, at least on certain leve1s,immediately accessible and pleasurable, but, in the age of Beckettand Burroughs, of Finnegan's Wake and Marienbad, it has becomenecessary. We must beware of dismissing Hawks's films becausewe enjoy them.

The Hollywood cinema represents a kind of art that has large1ydisappeared: to find anything comparable we have to go back tothe Elizabethan drama. No other contemporary art form has beenable to speak to all social and intellectual leveis simultaneouslyand show a comparable achievement. There are two great contra­dictory truths about Hollywood, and the difficulty of keepingthem in reasonable balance is evidenced by the whole history offilm criticism, Anglo-Saxon and French alike: (a) Hollywood isthe vast commercial machine where box-office considerations

corrupt everyone and everything, where untrammelled artistic

8

expression is impossible; and (b) Hollywood is a great creativeworkshop, comparable to Elizabethan London or the Vienna ofMozart, where hundreds of talents have come together to evolve acommon language. Hold the two in balance and you see why thereare so many interesting Hollywood films, and so few entire1ysatisfying ones.

Modern art is characterised above all by self-consciousness. Tothe great artists of the past, art was a natural and spontaneousfunctioning of the whole man. The significance of a Shakespeareplay or of a Mozart opera deve10ps out of the artist's directinvolvement with his materials as a natural organic process. Themodern artist feels himse1f to be alone, cut off from the traditionsof the past, with which he is forced to manufacture some sort ofrelationship, eut offfrom modern society, which he tends to loathe.The result is an extreme and habituaI se1f-consciousness; insteadof submitting his will to the creative flow, he uses it to insist on thesignificance of what he is doing. Consider, as a characteristicmodern film, Joseph Losey's Eve, a distinguished and powerfulwork, with its own creative intensity, flawed continually by se1f­conscious insistence on significance. There is the use of thatsymbolic mask, beginning with its first appearance in the sequence-one of the worst in the film-with the African dancer in thenight-club. One fee1s an enormous gulf between any actualsignificance the mas1\:has, and the insistent and obtrusive way inwhich Losey keeps forcing it on our attention; we are far moreaware that he means it to mean something than of any actualmeaning. From a love scene on a bed Losey cuts to a fountaingushing. We see a gir1lay aside a book as her lover comes in: thecamera moves across to a close-up of the book so that we can seethat it is a copy of Eliot's poems. There is no objection tocharacterising the girl by showing her reading Eliot; but whywaste a whole camera-movement on it?

This kind of thing is so alien to Hawks that 1 am almost at aloss to find anything in his films sufficiently like it to make directcomparison possible; but there is one such moment in Red Line7000. Julie (Laura Devon), the she1tered younger sister of a

9

Page 6: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

Red Line 7000: 'The bubbles are ail gone'

race-team manager, sits waiting for her lover, one of the drivers,who has in fact left her. She waits most of the night, with an openedbottle of champagne on the table before her, and when her brothercornes to find her, and tells her he has seen her boy-friend outwith other women, she looks at the bottle and murmurs that thebubbles are aIl gone. It's not a profound bit of symbolism, butthe point is that Hawks doesn't treat it as if it werc. Itarisesnaturally from the scene, and is not imposed on it from theoutside: the champagne bottle, apart from any symbolic meaning,is an integral part of the scene, Julie's remark a perfectly naturalone. We are not nudged into exclaiming, 'Ah, a symbol! Howsignificant! How deep!'; the beauty of the scene, a very touchingone, arises not from any content that can be intellectualised andremoved from the images, but from the very precise timing of theacting and the editing, from gesture, expression, intonation,exchanged glance. This is why (the reader had best be warnednow) Hawks is ultimately unanalysable. When 1 am asked by

10

sceptics why 1 like a film like Red Line 7000 1 can work out adetailed intellectual explanation-the construction of the film, theinteraction of aIl the parts, is, as so often with Hawks, masterly­but it doesn't really satisfy me. What 1really like about Red Line7000 is the vital tension that is expressed throughout in the greatcomplex of action, gesture, expression, speech, camera movement,camera placing, and editing, that is cinema: the sense of the film'sbeing the work of a whole man, intuitively and spontaneously, asweIl as intellectually, alive. Nowhere in Hawks is one aware of'direction' as something distinct from the presentation oftheaction; there is no imposed 'style'. His definition of a gooddirector: 'Somebody who doesn't annoy you.'

For Hawks is not really a modern artist in the sense in which 1have been using the term. He is a survivor from the past, whosework has never been affiicted with this disease of self-consciousness.An artist like Hawks can only exist within a strong and vitaltradition, and the weaknesses and limitations of his work arelargely determined by those of the tradition that evolved him. Onone level, his lack of originality is quite staggering. ln a careerspanning (so far) over fort y years, he has given to the cinema not asingle innovation (un1ess you count the overlapping dialoguetechnique developed in certain of his comedies). Nearly aIl hisbest films are examples of established Hollywood genres, and invirtually every case the genre was fully established before Hawks'sfilm was made. Thus Only Angels Have Wings came towards theend of a whole series of films about civil aviation, and has manyforerunners which offer close parallels to the characters andsituations of Hawks's film-John Ford's Air Mail is among themost distinguished. The Big Sleep was not the first forties-stylegangster film: the innovator was John Huston with The MalteseFalcon. Scarface followed William Wellman's Public Enemy. HisGirl Friday was a remake of Lewis Milestone's The Front Page.To Have and Have Not perhaps owes more to Michael Curtiz'sCasablanca than to Ernest Hemingway. Rio Bravo-we have iton Hawks's authority-originated in Hawks's reaction againstFred Zinnemann's High Noon; but it is also a Western in the

II

Page 7: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

genre which High N oon (and before it Henry King's The Gunfighter)had established.

A moment's reflection should be sufficient to convince anyonethat the existence of established genres is enormously beneficialto the artist and that almost all the greatest art has been builtupon the strong and familiar foundations of a genre: Shakespeare'splays, Mozart's symphonies, and Renaissance painting offerobvious parallels. Of course, what we ultimately value in Mozartand Shakespeare are great personal qualities; the genre does notcreate these, but it does provide a means whereby they can findthe fullest and freest expression. The genre-Iess artist is in factless free, because he is continually preoccupied with the problemsof inventing his own framework, a task which màkes, among otherthings, for extreme self-consciousness. Why does Stravinsky'sachievement strike us, in the end, as so inferior to Mozart's? Notnecessarily because of any personal deficiencies, but becauseStravinsky has been forced by the circumstances in which heexists to devote most of his extraordinary creative energies to theinvention or discovery or resurrection of forms and frameworks:very often, to revivifying a genre (the classical symphony, classicalopera) that has gone dead.

Hawks may not have originated any genres, but he has producedprobably the best work within each genre he has tacklcd. He maynot be an innovator, but neither is he an imitator. Only AngelsHave Wings is no more an imitation of Ford's Air Mail (forinstance) than Hamlet is an imitation of The Spanish Tragedy. Thegenre in each case is transformed from within by the personalityof the artist, his way of looking at and feeling things. ln all caseswhere Hawks has taken up a genre initiated by another director­even, l must insist, in the case of The Big Sleep and The MalteseFalcon, though the difference in quality is much less extreme here-Hawks's film does not merely improve on its predecessor intechnical proficiency and general know-how: it is invariably thericher, denser, more personal work, and the earlier work looksthin beside it. More personal: that is the point. A corollary of it isthat one does not really think of classifying Hawks's work according

12

to genres. Rio Bravo may belong, superficially, in the same genreas High Noon, but it has far more in common with Only AngelsHave Wings and To Have and Have Not (and even with 1 Was aMale War Bride) than with Zinnemann's picture; and more incommon with them than with Hawks's other Westerns.

Hawks's adjustment to the Hollywood environment hasbetrayed remarkably few signs of tensions unassimilable into thewholeness of artistic expression. The factors that made thisadjustment possible are basic to his art. Before he came to filmshe flew aeroplanes and drove racing-cars, and he has maintainedsuch interests throughout his life. This has directed his attentionnaturally to the kind of characters and the kind of milieus mostreadily compatible with the demands of the box-office. There isno sense anywhere in his work that box-office considerations havecompelled him against his will to make films about flying, motor­racing, cattle-driving, or animal-hunting: it is a matter of a mosthappy coincidence. But there is more to the matter than that.Nowhere in Hawks's work does he show any interest in Ideas,abstracted from character, action, and situation: he has neverevinced any desire to make a film on a given moral or social theme.He has always been quite free of the kind of ambitions or preten­sions that most often bring directors into conflict with thecommercial interests of production companies. The significance ofbis films never arises from the conscious treatment of a Subject.

Hawks's method of work is firmly and consistently concrete. Hestarts always from the desire to tell a story. His raw materials arenot only the story and the characters, but also the players. Dialogueand situation are often modified during filming as the personalityof the actor becomes fused with the character he is playing. Thusthe true significance of a Hawks film is not something that couldexist on paper before the shooting. The final credit on the filmshe produces as weIl as directs frequently reverses the usualwording to read 'Directed and Produced by Howard Hawks';sometimes the word 'Directed' is given the prominence of largerlettering. A small point in itse1f, but it indicates where, for Hawks,the creation of a film really lies: neither in the preparation of the

13

Page 8: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

Bringing Up Baby: Cary Grant as David Huxley

script (as with Hitchcock, if we are to believe his repeated insistencethat for him the film is virtually completed before shooting begins,with the finalising of the shooting script), nor in the cutting-room(as with Welles), but in the collaboration with actors and camerasthat constitutes mise-en-scène: a concrete and practical art. Hisrelationship to his actors is at the furthest remove from Josef vonSternberg's. Sternberg regards his actors as 'puppets', it is wellknown; Hawks regards them as human beings, and works withthem in creative collaboration. One begins to understand thenature of his art when one grasps how important to the success of afilm is his relationship with its stars. It is in Hawks's films thatcertain of Hollywood's greatest stars (Cary Grant, HumphreyBogart, John Wayne) have achieved the completest self-expressionwithout ever leaving us with the sense that the film has beenmere1y a 'vehicle' for them.

AlI this finally undercuts a recurring objection raised againstthose critics who take Hawks more seriously than he takes himse1f.

14

"or he doesn't take his films 'seriously': in interviews, he never~;peaksofthem in terms of'art', always in terms of'entertainment'.(:haracteristically, he speaks of film-making as 'having fun': heand his actors 'had fun' with a certain character or situation. TheIlTm points to the one quality essential to a definition of art-theanist's personal involvement, his de1ight in the creative act; but1 Ile way in which Hawks uses it suggests involvement of a notvery intense kind. It is never in doubt whom he makes his filmslilr: himse1f and the mass audience, not 'intellectual' critics. Hesccms unaware that people are like1y to look at his œuvre as awhole: his readiness to imitate himse1f and.repeat effects, sometimesalter a gap of many years, sometimes after a few, sure1y implies(hat he doesn't expect audiences to remember the original. Heremarked to Peter Bogdanovich in a te1evision interview, 'Whenyou find out a thing goes pretty well, you might as well do itagain': part of the meaning of 'goes pretty weIl' is clearly 'succeedswith audiences', though it means more than this too. He seemedsurprised, when l met him, to learn that l see his films more than

once. There is no denying, l think, that this attitude, althoughinextricably bound up with the kind of artist he is and thereforewith his great qualities, has had a detrimental effect on his work.It is not just that sorne of the imitations are so inferior: in Man'sFavourite Sport? the night-club bit from Bringing up Baby, withthe 'love impulse expresses itself in terms of conflict' dialogue; inHatari! the piano-playing bit from Only Angels Have Wings('You'd better be good'). More than that, there is the inescapablesense that Hawks's work doesn't show the degree or consistencyof development one finos in the work of the greatest artists. Theinterrelatedness of Hawks's own limitations and the restrictionsimposed by the 'system' is suggested by his remarks (in the sameBogdanovich interview) on why he refused to direct FourteenHours: he himself 'doesn't like suicides'-he thinks them'cowardly'; he thinks 'people' don't like them; the film didn'tseem as if it were going to be 'any piece of entertainment'. Sorneremarks on the ending of Red River in an earlier interview withBogdanovich suggest a similar confusion of personal predilection

15

Page 9: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

,

and commercial considerations: 'It frustrates me to start killingpeople off for no reason at all. 1 did it in Dawn Patrol but when 1finished 1 realised how dose l' d come to messing the thing up and1 didn't want to monkey with that again. l'm interested in havingpeople go and see the picture, and enjoy it.'

But, although sorne of the limitations of Hawks's art aresuggested well enough by his own attitude to it, its full signi­ficanee is not. Shakespeare, one guesses, would have spoken ofhis work in terms of 'art' -a point that suggests something ofthe gulf that separates his work from that of Hawks; but one feelssure that he would never have explained his work in the sort ofterms commonly employed by critics-would have reactedfrequently, as does Hawks, by saying something like, 'Theyattribute things that 1 hadn't thought of .... It's been utterlyunconscious.' This does not invalidate critical analysis of his work.The discrepancy between what emerges in the interviews and thedaims 1 (among others) make for Hawks's films can in fact beeasily explained by referenee to his method of working, hiswhole concrete and empirical approach to film-making, hisintuitive response and spontaneous involvement. If an 'intellectual'film is one in which one senses that the thematic or moral signifi­canee was consciously worked out and deliberately expressed,then Hawks is eertainly the least intellectual of film-makers.When a masterpieee emerges, it is because Hawks was suddenlycompletely engaged by his material-not by its significanee,intellectually grasped, but by the concrete details of the materialitself. When his intuitive consciousness is fully alerte d, we get aScarface, a Rio Bravo; when it is alerted only spasmodically, weget a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or a Sergeant York. Only when hismaterial presents barriers to intuitive involvement and he has tofall back on a conscious mental working-out do we get a downrightfailure, like Land of the Pharaohs.

16

). Self-Respect and Responsibility1 )1//1' ,II/gels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944),/,'/" 1I1'(/,vo (1959)

()l/lcVAngels Have Wings

( II/Iv Angels Have Wings is a completely achieved masterpieee, and;1 n:markably inclusive film, drawing together the main thematicIiil'L'adsof Hawks's work in a single complex web.

"'he opening shots vividly create Barranca, the South AmericanIl)wn in and around which the film is set. The meeting of BonnieLœ (Jean Arthur) and Les and Joe, two mailplane pilots (Allynloslyn and Noah Beery, jun.) that inaugurates the action of theIdm emphasises their foreignness, and from the moment when theyenter the Dutchman's (Sig Ruman's) saloon the environment iscompletely ignored for the rest of the film. From here on, apartJ'rom mailplane flights and the arrivaI of a boat, we are never off1 he Dutchman's premises. Hawks gives us a group sealed off fromIhe outside world, forming a self-sufficient hermetic society withilS own values. Outside, we are mainly aware of storms, darkness,and towering, seemingly impassable mountains: only in TheThing from Another World does Hawks again find a setting as idealfor the expression of his metaphysic.

The film has a wonderful freshness, a total lack of self­consciousness: no previous film is so inclusive in its exposition ofthe director's interests. The method of work is absolutely charac­teristic: Hawks takes over a genre already firmly established, withcharacters who, reduced to their function in the narrative, werealready becoming stock types, and makes it the medium for a

17

Page 10: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

J

completely personal statement. There is no sign that the directoris deliberately rejuvenating a used formula-nowhere does onesense condescension towards the material. There are no intellectualinhibitions about using stock situations or far-fetched coincidences;nor about pushing a scene or a situation through to conclusionsmany might find excessive, but which are implicit in the material.That Hawks does not feel himself superior to material many mayfind 'corny', 'melodramatic', or 'banal' is not a sign of inferiorintelligence or sensibility. He responds, directly and spontaneously,to aIl that is valid in the genre, assimilates it and transforms it intoa means of personal expression.

The pattern of relationships is complicated; 1 shall selectcertain threads that help to make clear the basis of values on whichit is constructed. Jeff Carter (Cary Grant) sends men up in aIlweathers out of loyalty to the Dutchman, flying the plane himselfwhen the weather is too bad to send others. His motivation isprimarily self-respect: once a task has been undertaken it must bepursued either to success or to death. To the station cornes a fliercalled Bat (Richard Barthelmess), who once baled out of a blazingplane leaving another to die. He spends his life trying to escapefrom his own sense of disgrace, reflected in others' reactions: he ismotivated by his need to regain self-respect. Jeff's best friend andadorer, Kid (Thomas Mitchell), conceals the fact that his eyesightis failing, because having to give up flying is intolerable to him:flying represents his means of establishing his mastery of things,of preserving the respect of Jeff and hence his self-respect. Thesethree figures constantly recur in Hawks's work; for aIl three thereare ultimately the same values, beyond which there is darkness.

Why do the men fly? Kid tells Bonnie, '1 been in it twenty-twoyears, Miss Lee. 1 couldn't give you an answer that makes anysense.' Yeats's Irish Airman was more articulate. After cataloguing,only in order to dismiss, aIl the accepted reasons for enlisting as aflier in the First World War, he asserted that

A lonely impulse of delightDrove to this tumult in the clouds:

18

IlC had summed up past and future and both seemed futile, a'waste ofbreath'-all that was real was the impulse, the loneliness,and the tumult, and by those he (briefly) lived. The same despera­1 ion underlies the existence of Hawks's fliers; nowhere articulated,t'vcrywhere felt.

Attitudes to death are of central importance in Only AngelslIave Wings. Nowhere in Hawks's later work is this theme soexplicit and insistent, though often present. Bonnie Lee, whostrongly resembles later Hawks heroines, has in one respectexceptional importance. Bonnie is our means of access, of initiation.Accepting her-for aIl the unusual nature of her situation-as arcpresentative of our own civilised sensibility, we make ouradjustment to the group's code through her adjustment, pre­cipitated by the death of Joe, to life lived under the constantshadow of death.

The scene in which the shocked Bonnie watches the reactions ofJeff and the other fliers to Joe's death is justly famous: it generatesa terrifie intensity. The steaks ordered for Joe's and Bonnie'sdinner are served; Jeff takes Joe's. To Bonnie's horrified questionas to whether he intends to eat it,( Jeff answers, 'What do youwant me to do, have it stuffed?' Bonnie, incredulous, tells him itwas Joe's. 'Who's Joe?' he asks. Hawks never dwells on the gorydetails of violent death, but he finds images that make the fact ofdeath disturbingly immediate: the bowling-baIl in Scarface whosecontinuing trajectory we watch knowing that the person who castit is already dead. Here, as Jeff says 'Who's Joe?', we are aware(without the benefit of 'significant' close-ups) of Joe's steak on theplate before him. The tension between Jeff and Bonnie is reflectedin the spectator's consciousness. We are, on the whole, identifiedwith Bonnie, sharing her pain and bewilderment at the men'scallousness. Yet we know, more than she, that that callousness is

more apparent than real, and we are more aware of its necessity.Joe's fatal crash was preceded by the agonisingly tense sequencein which Jeffwith his friend Kid's help tried to guide Joe down byradio through a dense fog. We saw the intensity of Jeff's involve­ment. A successful landing is his responsibility as the head and

19

Page 11: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

l'1

,

-," ,.. .A...t...• ~- .,~~Only Angels Have Wings: Bonnie Lee and Jeff Carter

organiser (on the Dutchman's behalf) of the mailplane service: hesent Joe up, insisting on his carrying out his duties: besides, Joeis bis friend. The involvement and responsibility underlies andnecessitates the brutality: insulation against pain too great to bearrather than cynical tough-mindedness. When the Dutchmanexpostulates with him about his determination to get the mail outof the wrecked plane and off in another immediately after the crash,Jeff asks if Dutchy thinks he's the only one who cares, then adds,'Joe died Hying, didn't he? Well, that was his job. He just wasn'tgood enough'-a phrase echoed in many of Hawks's adventurefilms. 'He'd rather be where he is than quit.' Flying, here, likeanimal-catching in Hatari! or racing in Red Line 7000, becomes ameans whereby the individual can test himse1f-a test of characterand integrity as much as of skill or physical stamina.

The question of responsibility for the crash adds a furtherdimension. Part of the responsibility lies with Joe himse1f: he insistson trying to land, against advice, because he is having dinner with

20

Illlllllw: Iikc Jim Loomis in Red Line 7000, he has allowed hisl, , IIII)'.Sl(lr a woman to affect his judgement and 1ead him into1II'·'l'ollsibility. lt constitutes a breach of the professional code, aIldllll' 10 pass the test, and it is behind Jeff's brutal judgement,'II, )llsl wasn't good enough' (which doesn't mean 'sufficientlyJdIld as a Hier'). But the full responsibility is not simply pushed111110 Joc. Just before the steak incident Bonnie asks Jeff if it was11("1Lndt. 'Sure it was your fault,' he answers. 'You were going toILIVI'dinner with him, the Dutchman hired him, 1sent him up on'( I1nllllc, the fog came in, a tree got in the way. AlI your fault.'1Ill' bitter irony points beyond the idea of assignable blame to a

(oillplcx of circumstances whose interaction at one point in time\Vasllnpredictable and uncontrollable. The death was everyone'sLlilii and no one's fault. The characters are denied the comfort of

I,lacing the responsibility squarely on one person or one factor.TheIlilTShave to live with this daily. Death may come to us at anyIllinute, but most ofus are able to spend most of our lives forgettingIbis; for the men of Only Angels Have Wings there is no forgetting:;hort of a deliberate and extreme rejection: they are constantlyn;posed to the surrounding darkness. No one who has seen thelilm will forget Jeff's singing (with Bonnie's participation) of the'l'canut Vendor', as thc culmination of the sequence of Bonnie'slIlitiation into, and acceptance of, the Hiers' code. Joe has beendcad perhaps an hour. We haven't forgotten, and we know that1 hey haven't. But Joe's death has ceased to be the issue: the songbecomes a shout of defiance in the face of the darkness surroundinghuman life and the chaos of the universe,

This sequence is balanced by the scenes involving the death ofKid. Here the fact of death is brought home to the spectator byKid's final isolation, under the single light that emphasises thedarkness around. He asks for everyone to go until only Jeff is left-and then sends Jeff away too. Ultimately, man is alone; eventhose close friendships to which Hawks attaches so muchimportance cease to be of comfort. There follows Jeff's inventoryof Kid's belongings, with the comment 'Not much to show fortwenty years' Hying.' Scene and comment echo a scene earlier,

21

Page 12: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

r'

,

after the death of Joe (and are to be echoed again, most movingly,in Air Force), conveying a sense of a stoical ritual. One mayrecall John Wayne's words over the successive burials in RedRiver: 'We brought nothing into this world, and it's certain wecan take nothing out.' Jeff weeps for his friend's death: anacknowledgement of the limitations of the technique of insulationthe fliers have evolved-of the ultimate desolation that underlies,somewhere, the warmth, the humour, the affection of Hawks'sadventure films-of all that is kept at arm's length by deliberatestoicism.

It is tempting to relate Hawks to existentialism: the existen­tialist insistence on the need for self-definition-for the establish­ing, by an act of will, of one's personal identity-has affinities withHawks's insistence on the need to establish and preserve self­respect. But Hawks is an artist, never a philosopher; he may leadus to certain conclusions through his presentation of an action; butthe action is never conceived as illustration of the conclusions,as in Sartre's plays. Compare rather another artist whom existen­tialists have found interesting: Joseph Conrad. To gauge howextreme are the superficial differences one has only to place Heartof Darkness beside Monkey Business; yet the same network ofinterrelated themes underlies the work of both artists.

The scene in Only Angels Have Wings where Jeff forces Kid toadmit that his eyesight is failing recalls Singleton in The Nigger ofthe Narcissus, where he collapses after his stoical endurance of thestorm, and his age is brought home to him for the first time. Forboth men, the meaning of life has been bound up with a task to be

carried out, their means of self-assertion, on which identitydepends: and suddenly they are threatened with the removal of thetask. Bat, in Only Angels Have Wings, is a sitnplified Lord Jim.The moment in Rio Bravo where John Wayne dismisses a gunmanset to watch the jail, simply by 100king at him and repeating'Good evening' in a certain tone, calls to mind the scene (Nigger ofthe Narcissus again) in which Captain Allistoun compels Donkinto retrieve and replace the implement flung during the abortivemutiny: in both cases the authority derives from moral integrity,

22

l' I( Il cd in a firm sense of personal identity-of being committed,1111 imately, to certain values. Hawks's interest in the group',olllctimes recalls Conrad's sea stories (though the cavalryWesterns of Ford, with their intense feeling for tradition, offerdoser parallels here): the most striking correspondence is in Airh>l'ce, where the Mary Ann (the B49) becomes for the crew theIlIlifying symbol and centre ofloyalty that the ship is for Conrad's:,;Iilors.Hawks's use of certain settings-the Andes in Only AngelsIlave Wings, the Arctic wast es of The Thing from Another World­hring to mind Conrad's use of the sea (though, again, Ford'sprairie is closer still): it is surprising that Hawks has never made:t sea story.

These specifie examples indicate a similar implicit metaphysic.Marlow introduces his 'yarn' in Youth:

'you fellows know there are those voyages that seem orderedfor the illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol ofexistence. You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself,sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something-and you can't. Not from any fault of yours. You simplycan do nothing, neither great nor little-not a thing in theworld-not even ... get a wretched 6oo-ton cargo of coal toits port of destination.'

I-Iawks's heroes usually do accomplish the tasks they undertake,yet, though this seems at first an important difference, we are 1eftwith a very similar emphasis. If Conrad's heroes fail it is 'notfrom any fault of theirs'. Actually, in the sea stories, they usuallysucceed, in the essential of remaining true to themselves-theonly real failures are like those of Lord Jim, where loss of self­respect, of secure identity, is the penalty. For Hawks's heroes theprice of success is often heavy, and the same darkness surroundstheir achievements as surrounds the defeat of the characters inConrad. The value lies, for Hawks as for Conrad, in the assertionof basic human qualities of courage and endurance, the stoicalinsistence on innate human dignity.

23

Page 13: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

5

1

~"

This insistence on 'darkness' and death has been necessary toestablish the background to Hawks's art; burno one who has seenOnly Angels Have Wings will regard it as a gloomy film. Buoyant,vital, exhilarating, are more likely epithets to spring to mind. Thistension existing between background and foreground is what givesthe most fully characteristic of the adventure films their distinctiveftavour. One consistent feature is the positive, dynamic qualityof the relationships. It is one of Hawks's greatest strengths-intwentieth-century art a somewhat rare one-that he is ableconvincingly to portray creative relationships in which the

characters help each other, and through which they developtowards a greater maturity, self-reliance, and balance. Is this,rather than the straightforward, functional camera-style andediting, what makes SOrne people regard Hawks's films as old­fashioned? By the end of Only Angels Have Wings almost everycharacter has undergone a pro cess of improvement: Bat has re­established himself in the eyes of the other characters and in hisown; his wife (Rita Hayworth) has been educated by Jeff-in themost direct way-in her personal responsibilities; Kid has learntto respect a man for whom he previously felt only contempt(although he has died learning it). Above all, there is the mutualmodification of attitude effected between Jeff and Bonny. Thefilm, finally, does not simply uphold Jeff's original attitude. Hisacceptance of Bonnie, and of the need for feeling and personalcommitment even in the sword-of-Damoc1es world of the ftiers,is at least as important as hers of the ftiers' code (his breakdown,witnessed by Bonnie, after the death of Kid, is an important stage).The directness-the vital, spontaneous frankness-with which thecharacters confront and attack each other is enormously affecting,because this urgency of contact derives from their constant (notnecessarily conscious) sense of the imminence of death, of thesurrounding darkness, a physical intuition that prompts them to!ive, now, to the maximum. Ir is partly this that makes Hawks'sfilms, in fact, so modern: in the world of the hydrogen bomb, onedoesn't have to be an Andes mailplane ftier to feel that one maybe dead tomorrow.

24

('"Iv Angels Have Wings: Judith, Jcff and Bonnic

'1'0 Have and Have Not

'1'0 Have and Have Not had an unflattering critical reception in1 his country in 1945, traceable to three causes. Advance publicitywas mostly concerned with selling the new discovery, LaurenBacall-'Slinky, sultry, sensational'-and determination to appearimpervious to indoctrination led many to dismiss Bacall (incredibleas it now seems) as a gimmick. There was a feeling thatIIemingway's nove1 had been betrayed (in fact, it is not so muchhetrayed as ignored-only the first quarter of an hour of the filmbears any c1ear relation to it). Finally, we were too involved in thewar to accept-and in a frivolous popular entertainment!-ahero who consistently refused commitment to the right side onthe grounds of 'minding his own business', and whose eventualdecision to help Free France is primarily motivated by the needto get money to help (a) a girl and (h) himself, not necessarily inthat order. One got the impression from reviews of a thoroughlydisreputable film.

25

Page 14: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

1

~...

Ta Have and Have Not: Captain Renard, Slim (Lauren Bacall) and Morgan(Humphrey Bogart)

ln fact-frivolous popular entertainment or not- 1'0 Have andHave Not embodies one of the most basic anti-fascist statementsthe cinema has given us. The sense of moral outrage at theinfringement of individual liberty expressed through Bogart'sperformance is, in its purity and simplicity of feeling, unanswerable:one feels behind itall of Hawks's belief in the individual necd forintegrity and self-respect.

Bogart is very much the centre of 1'0 Have and Have Not; theperformance is arguably at once the completest realisation of theactor's personality and the most perfect embodiment of the Hawkshero. Hawks always works within a naturalistic framework

(everything realised through the details of character and action)but his work shows a continuaI tendency (favoured and encouragedby the genre system, indeed by the star system itself) to movetowards myth. Lorelei and Dorothy in Gentlemen Prefer Blondesare more liké figures in myth than figures from reallife-distilla­tions from essential reality rather than depictions of reality itself.

26

1 Liwks's Harry Morgan is really no more a 'real' character thanIIIl" hcroes of Homer, though we accept him as real during ourIl( pl"ricnce of the film just as we accept Homer's heroes as real.1\\. lrgan, though entirely unidealistic (and from some points of viewIIl1haoic), embodies a certain heroic ideal. Argument must bet llllccrned with the validity of the values it represents.

Morgan persistently rejects commitment, until the time comeswhm he is directly and personally involved and it is no longer a111:111er of choice. It would be mistaken to see the subject of the1ilIIIas the necessity for commitment, although the scenario couldl,," read like that without much wrenching, and doubtless thehao's eventually entering the fray on the right side helped tolIlake the film just acceptable in 1945. But even when he finallyJoins the fight against fascism (represented mainly by the gross(:aptain Renard, a superb performance by Dan Seymour),Morgan continues to see things in resolutely personal terms: '1Iike you and l ,don't like them.' The '1' is all important. Hawks:md Bogart give us a man who exists exclusively from his ownccntre, his actions stemming from the immediate perceptions andimpulses of his consciousness. Here the term 'individual' reallymeans something: not merely 'Someone who is different fromother people', but 'a conscious being who lives from his ownfeeling centre of identity'. It is not a question of egotism: Morganis never self-indulgent, or self-seeking beyond what he defines ashis rights. He is a man whose sense of essential responsibility hasbeen remarkably uncorrupted by either materialism or idealism.Morgan acknowledges a certain responsibility to Johnson (WalterSande), who is hiring both Morgan and his boat; but he sees thisas secondary to his responsibility to Eddie (Walter Brennan), thealcoholic hanger-on who 'used to be good', and when the tworesponsibilities clash there is no question which Morgan putsfust. When Captain Renard asks him, 'What are your sympathies?'Morgan replies, in a phrase taken up and developed in Rio Bravo,'Mindingmy own business'; but his 'own business' includes Eddieand, later, Slim (Bacall)-includes anyone who earns Morgan'srespect and .personal allegiance. Responsibility is for Morgan a

27

Page 15: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

matter of instinct, not dut y, an impulse of sympathy arisingspontaneously from the living centre.

Life lived from a spontaneous-intuitive centre is life withoutfixed rules. Bogart's character determines the film's flexible andempirical morality. Bacall's theft of Johnson's wallet reveals thatJohnson intended to 'skip' without paying Bogart. A rigid moralitywould insist on the reprehensibility of both actions (the stealingand the skipping). But here actions are referred to what you are­there are no rigid moral rules. We watch Bogart confront bothBacall and Johnson with their dishonesty, and we compare thedifferences in their reactions. Bacall makes no attempt to coyerup for herse1f, refusing to show shame. It was something she wasforced to do so she did it-she, as a person, remains unaffected .It is the principle of Vi'vresa Vie, where, we are toId, Anna Karinasells her body but preserves her soul: in both cases, a distinction ismade between what one does and what one is, with the implicationthat it is possible to retain a sense of personal identity which isnot contaminated or affected by one's actions if one doesn't let itbe. Johnson gets no sympathy at aIl, again because of what he is:

confronted with his dishonesty, he bluffs, squirms, loses dignity.Bogart himse1f has to learn not to judge from appearances; to

learn the dangers of the stock response. He assumes he knowsBacall From the way she took the slap administered by brutishofficialdom: 'It takes practice,' he casually comments. She tellshim (and Angie Dickinson will echo the words in Rio Bravo) thathe has made up his mind about her too soon: he must learn, inother words, to see her as an individual, not a type; to see thewoman, not the actions. Gradually, beneath her façade of tough­ness, her vulnerability becomes touchingly apparent. The maskis for the world: beneath it she has preserved her innate sensi­tivity.

Bogart, like Bacall, is direct and honest about himse1f. 'Yousave France,' he tells de Bursac (Walter Molnar), Tm going tosave my boat.' He is equally direct in his dealings with others.The re1ationship with Slim deve10ps so rapidly because he lets her

know exactly how he thinks about her, and can therefore quickly

28

1" l'IOved wrong. He consistently refuses to sympathise with1"•'1,1t- who ask for sympathy. When Frenchy (Marcel Dalio) tells111111pl;lintive1ythat Madame de Bursac 'is not herself', his instant1"I","se is to inquire 'Who is she?' Later Madame apologises for1"111)',;1 trouble. 'You're not sorry at aIl,' he tells her. 'You're just."11y you made a fool of yourse1f.' As a result, the woman's self­11I'I",rlant superiority breaks down, and the human being beneathII "lllerges. His treatment of Eddie anticipates Chance's training ofIhlde in Rio Bravo-especially in their confrontation after EddieILl',:;Iowed away in the boat. He is worried in case Eddie 'doesn't

Il.,J(1 1 ogether', and tells him so straight out, withholding sympathyl'n:lllSC it would weaken the man. Yet the treatment is not callous:.III 1hat Bogart does is done from a responsible concern. ThistIlrectness comes across, not as any form of se1f-display, certainlylit>1 as an affectation or a tough pose, but simply as the expression•• 1 Bogart's individualism. It creates instant antagonisms-he;Hllllitsto Bacall that most people 'get sore' at him as soon as theyIlleet him-yet it is the quickest way to a true understanding,Il'sling and discovering the other person.

1 spoke earIier of an 'anti-fascist statement', using the term'I:\scist' somewhat loosely. The protest is against any authoritarianIIlterference with the rights of the individual. Hawks admits toIlot being very interested in the 'political intrigues', and sees theplot as 'just an excuse for some scenes'. Fair enough. And clearlyhl' sees the scenes in terms of the essential expression of Bogartand Bacall. But it is precisely through them that the basic politicalstatement is made. It is the individualism of Bogart/Morgan thatgives such force to moments like the one where Bacall/Slim isslapped in the face. Tremendous moral authority is invested inBogart in these scenes: the protest of the true individual againstthe abuses of those in power. Hawks works as Bogart/Morganworks, in absolute1y concrete, empirical terms. One never has thefeeling that a 'message' is being 'put across': the significancegrows spontaneously out of the relationship of director, actor,character, and situation, and has the greater force for doing so: thescenes, like Bogart's actions, become the direct expression of an

29

Page 16: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 17: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

precision. l cannot understand why the reputation of this film'scompanion-piece, The Big Sleep, stands so much higher. Thedialogue of The Big Sleep is consistently slick and clever; that ofTo Have and Have Not is too, but it is given far more edge byourawareness of freer and more powerful emotions underlying it. Theworld of the later film is much more enclosed, in terms of therange and intensity of feeling possible within it. Whereas TheBig Sleep is marginal to Hawks's work, To Have and Have Not iscentral to il.

Rio Bravo

The genesis of Rio Bravo was Hawks's reaction against High Noon:the hero of High Noon spends the whole film asking for help andin the end he doesn't need it. Hawks decided to reverse the process:the hero of Rio Bravo never asks for help and often rejects it; andhe needs it at every crisis. The relationship between the two filmsis not quite as simple as that; the two exceptions to this generalreversaI-pattern are interesting, as they may both have suggestedto Hawks, whether he was aware of it or not, aspects of Rio Bravo:(1) The Marshal (Gary Cooper) in High Noon does once reject thehelp of a one-eyed drunken cripple who sees in his offer ofassistance the possibility of regaining his self-respect: '1 used to begood', he tells Cooper, a line doubtless as common in Westernsas certain musical phrases were common in late eighteenth-centurymusic, yet one which Hawks (like Mozart with his contemporaryclichés) can fill with intensity. Are we to see in this the genesis ofDude and Stumpy? ln one way obviously not, because both thesecharacters, and their relation to the film's main hero-figure,have their ancestry in Hawks's own work, notably Eddie in ToHave and Have Not. Yet, given the admitted relationship of RioBravo to High Noon, and the complexity of influence and remini­scence that can underlie any great work of art, it may not befar-fetched to feel sorne significance in this passing resemblance.(2) Grace Kelly's final intervention (shooting a man in the back tosave her husband, against her Quaker principles) is one pointwhere Cooper does need help, and may point forward to Rio

32

/lf/WO'S celebrated flower-pot scene and Angie Dickinson's:,lIhsequent distress at having been responsible for the deaths•• 1' (llUrmen.

The reputation of High Noon-it is still widely regarded as one•• 1' Ihe best Westerns, a film that confers dignity on a low genre byIIdusing into it a seriousness of moral purpose-is very revealing,;IS regards current attitudes to the Western and to film in general.'( 'his reputation is my only reason for undertaking a brief<'Innparison of the two films: High Noon in itself doesn't offeranything that the critic who regards the cinema as, in itspotentialities and to sorne extent its achievements, the equal of theolher arts is likely to find worth serious consideration. Tt strikesIlle as the archetypal 'Oscar' film, product of the combined talentsof the archetypal 'Oscar' director (Zinnemann), the archetypal'Oscar' writer (Carl Foreman), and the archetypal 'Oscar' producer(Stanley Kramer): three gentlemen whose work has been charac­lerised by those Good Intentions with which we understand theroad to hell to be paved. Mental intentions, not emotional orintuitive intentions: intentions of the conscious, willing mind, notof the whole man. The film reeks of contrivance. Every sequenceis constructed to lead up to, and malœ, a simple moral point,character, action, and dialogue being painstakingly manipulatedto this end. Nowhere is there that sense of inner logic, of organicdevelopment, of the working-out ofnatural processes through theinteraction of the characters, that one finds in the best films ofHawks. This characteristic is not only in the script. Zinnemann'sdirection, external and shallow, matches it perfectly. His handlingof the actors is almost uniformly abominable, cliché-gesturefollowing cliché-gesture (see, for instance, poor Thomas Mitchell,whose Kid in Only Angels Have Wings is among the Americancinema's great supporting performances, in the church scene),just as cliché-set-up follows cliché-set-up in the camera position­ing.

Quite fundamental issues are involved here, including thequestion ofwhat constitutes cliché. But in High Noon not a singlecharacter or situation is spontaneously-intuitively felt-everything

33

Page 18: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

is in the head, a painstaking application of carefully learnt lessons.One could attack Carl Foreman's script for its contrivance, but,ultimately, to understand why High Noon is a bad film is tounderstand that the cinema is a director's art. There are situations,such as the scene between Kat y Jurado and Lloyd Bridges whereher contempt for him finally erupts after long suppression, whichare perfectly valid emotionally, but which Zinnemann relentlesslyturns into cliché-melodrama with his academically conceivedjumps into close-up at the most obvious moments, his insistenceon acting that is conventional in the worst sense (it isn't theactors' fault), the obviousness of gesture and expression exactlycorresponding to the obviousness of the editing.

Judgements of this kind are notoriously difficult to enforcewhen dealing with the cinema (how great an advantage theliterary critic has in being able to quote!): one has to appeal notonly to the reader's common experience, but to his memory of thatexperience. One can, however, in the case of High Noon, point toseveral obvious major inadequacies which are symptomatic of thequality of the film as a whole-its quality as a work of art, as arecord oflived and felt experience (however indirectly expressed).There is the entire church sequence, where the cliché-treatmentboth of the congregation en masse and of individuals reachesrisible extremes. There is the handling of the Cooper-Kellyrelationship. It is presumably of importance that the audience feelthis as meaningful, that a sense of frustrated mutual needs andresulting tensions is communicated. Yet if we look at whatZinnemann actually offers us we find, apart from one or twotentative attempts at inwardness from Grace Kelly in the carlystages of the film, nothing at aIl convincing. The wife remains amere puppet, manipulated according to the requirements of theplot: no understanding of her reactions is communicated, beyondthe explicit statement ofher Quakerism, which is then merely takenfor granted. Everything important, in fact, is taken for granted:Cooper's need for her, the importance of the marriage to him, isreduced to a bit of data, never felt as real. Someone, indeed,seems to have feh that there was something missing there, that

34

1 he marriage-theme needed a bit of artificial bolstering; hence1 he tiresome repetition on the soundtrack of the lines from the1 herne-song, 'l'm not afraid of death but Oh! what will 1 do ifyou leave me?' -the importance of the marriage is only there in1 he song, an explicit statement of intentions that remain quitellnrealised.

But most interesting of aIl, in relation to Hawks and Rio Bravo,is the motivation of the hero's actions. It is clear, 1 think, that forthe Marshal, as for Hawks's heroes, the essential motivation is thepreservation of self-respect-he goes back to face Frank Millerbecause a failure to do so would be, for him, a failure to live upto his own conception of manhood. One may reflect that this is atheme that lends itself readily to (could even be said to be implicitin) the Western genre. It is not its theme that makes Rio Bravogreat, but the intensity and emotional maturity with which it isfelt. The level on which the theme is handled in High Noon can be,1 think, fairly represented by the scene where Grace Kellyconfronts Kat y Jurado and asks her why Cooper is determined tostay. Cut to close-up of Jurado, who says, with heavy emphasis,'If you don't know, 1 can't explain it to you.' The reader whodoesn't sec what 1 mean by cliché (in terms of acting, editing,camera-position) couldn't do better than study that moment. Thereputation of High Noon rests, in fact, on two things, both quitesuperficial in relation to what the film actually is: its strictobservation of the unities (which it never lets us forget), and its'Message'. Its message is really its whole raison d'être.

Rio Bravo is the most traditional of films. The whole of Hawksis immediately behind it, and the whole tradition of the Western,and behind that is Hollywood itself. If 1 were asked to choose afilm that would justify the existence of Hollywood, 1 think itwould be Rio Bravo. Hawks is at his most completely personaland individual when his work is most firmly traditional: the moreestablished the foundations, the freer he feels to be himself.Everything in Rio Bravo can be traced back to the Westerntradition, yet everything in it is essential Hawks-every character,

35

Page 19: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

every situation, every sequence expresses him as surely as everydetail in an Antonioni film expresses Antonioni.

List the stock types of Western convention, and your list willalmost certainly include the following:

1. Hero: strong, silent, infallible.

2. Hero's friend: flawed, fallible, may let him down or betrayhim (through cowardice, avarice, etc.).

3· Woman of doubtful virtue, works or sings in saloon, gambles;will probably die saving hero's life.

4· Nice girl, schoolteacher or farmer's daughter, open-air type,public-spirited; will marry hero when he settles down.

5· Hero's comic assistant, talks too much, drinks.6. Singing cowboy, plays guitar.7· Comic Mexican, cowardly, talks too much, gesticulates.

ln six of these seven stock types we can recognise the basis of thesix leading characters of Rio Bravo; only the clean-living farmer'sdaughter is missing. These stock figures are used without theslightest self-consciousness or condescension. Hawks builds on

these traditional foundations; he also builds on his actors, exploringand using their particular resources and limitations creatively.Just as To Have and Have Not gave us the fullest expression ofBogart, so here John Wayne, Dean Martin, Walter Brennan, andothers are able to realise themselves, to fulfil the potentialities oftheir familiar screenpersonae. The extraordinary thing is that,while they can aIl be referred back to traditional Western types andto the personalities of the actors, the characters of Rio Bravo areat the same time entirely and quintessentially Hawksian, un­mistakable in their behaviour, their attitudes, their dialogue. Thefilm offers, 1 think, the most complete expression we have had ofHawks himself, the completest statement of his position. Thereare no clichés in Rio Bravo.

The complex flavour of the film can be partly defined in termsof apparent contradictions: it is strongly traditional yet absolutelypersonal; it is the most natural of Westerns, aIl the action and

36

1111 crrelationships developing organically from thematic germs1 hal are themselves expressed as actions, yet it is also stylised; if'1I1C looks at it dispassionately, one becomes aware of an extreme;\lIslerity-a few characters, the barest of settings, no concessions10 spectacle (with the exception of the dynamite at the end) orpreltiness, yet if one submits to the atmosphere and 'feel' of the111111 one is chiefly aware of great richness and warmth. Thesecharacteristics are aIl very closely interconnected. It is the1 raditional qualities of the Western that allow Hawks to make aIdm so stylised in which we are so little aware, until we stand backand think about it, of stylisation; the stylisation and the austerity:tn: but two ways of naming the same thing; the richness andwarmth emanate from Hawks's personality, which pervades thewhole; and it is the traditional and stylised form that sets him free,()express himself with the minimum of constraint or interference.

The term 'traditional', applied to the Western, can mean two'hings, and two very different kinds of Western. The genre givesgreat scope to the director with a feeling for America's past, forIhe borderline of history and myth, the early stages of civilisation,primitive, precarious, and touching. But the genre also offers acollection of convenient conventions which allow the director toescape from the trammels of contemporary surface reality and thedemand for verisimilitude, and express certain fundamentalhuman urges or explore themes personal to· him. If the classicWesterns of John Ford, with their loving and nostalgie evocationof the past, are the supreme examples of the first kind, Rio Bravois the supreme example of the second. The distinction, obviousenough yet very important, can be exemplified by comparing thelown in Ford's My Darling Clementine with the town in Rio Bravo.Ford's Tombstone is created in loving detail to convey preciselythat sense of primitive civilisation against the vastness andimpersonality of nature, the profound respect for human endeavourand human achievement exemplified in even the simplest of menthat is so characteristic of this director: on the one hand the Bon

Ton Tonsorial Parlour and the honeysuckle-scented hair-spray,the tables in rows neatly laid with cloths in the dim hotel

37

Page 20: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

dining-room; on the other, the vast expanses of wilderness fromwhich strange-shaped rocky projections grandly rise. Ford placeshis community against the wilderness, the wooden hotel, theskeletal wooden church tower, the dancers on the uncoveredchurch floor unselfconsciously enjoying themselves under thesky, surrounded on alI sides by the vast emptiness of desert.

There is nothing like this in Rio Bravo. Here the whole Fordtheme of the defence of civilised order and civilised values againstdestructive elements is compressed into the single strong reactionevoked so powerfulIy by the murder, brutal, gratuitous, stupid,that precipitates the entire action. Hawks's town consists of jail,hotel, saloons, and rows of unadorned and inconspicuous house­fronts; inhabitants appear only when the narrative demands theirpresence, and there is never the least attempt to evoke that senseof community that is one of the finest and most characteristicfeatures of the work of Ford. If a barn contains agriculturalimplements, they are there to provide coyer in a gun-fight, not tosuggest a background of agricultural activity; if the barn is litteredwith dust and straw, this is not to create atmosphere or a sense ofplace, but simply to use to blind a character momentarily. Everyitem of décor is strictly functional to the action. The socialbackground is kept to the barest minimum below which we wouldbe aware of stylisation. Even the jail and hoteI which are the twomain centres of the action are not felt as having any real socialfunction (no one seems to stay in the hotel unless the plot requiresthem: mainly only Angie Dickinson); but there is a certainunobtrusive symbolic opposition between them (women tend todominate in the hotel, and are excluded from the jail, where aminiature alI-male society develops in isolation). The bar in whichthe action begins is so neutral in atmosphere that it scarceIyregisters on the spectator as a 'presence': Hawks uses it neither to

suggest any potential fineness of civilisation (however primitive)nor to create a background of incipient violence and disorder: it isjust a bar. Neither is there any attempt at 'period' evocation: thecostumes, while not obtrusiveIy stylised, are quite neutral in effect.

The result of alI this is twofold. It frees Hawks from alI obligation

38

III IliliiI the demands of surface naturalism, the accumulatedl , III\T Illion of the Western tradition alIowing him the simplest of1IIIIICworkswhich can be taken on trust; and this enables him to.• 1I1(l"lltrateattention on the characters and their relationships, andIl,, ('Ilaracteristic attitudes and themes developed through those1,l:lIionships, to an extent impossible in an outdoor Western: we1 • .-1 Llr more intimate with the characters of Rio Bravo than withtli":;l"of Red River, let alone The Big Sky. The neutral background,,1 t Ile opening scene throws the initial confrontation between\X';Iyneand Martin into forceful relief. But it would be a mistakel,1 sec the stark simplicity of setting in this film as merely a•ollvenience. Tt has also, and more importantly, an expressiveIllIlction, providing a perfect environment for the stoicism that.Ilaracterises Hawks's attitude to life. The action of Rio Bravo is

l'layed out against a background hard and bare, with nothing to.Iislract the individual from working out his essential relationship10 life. The virtual removal of a social framework-the relegatinglit' society to the function of a pretext-throws alI the emphasis on1 he characters' sense of self: on their need to find a sense of purposeand meaning not through alIegiance to any developing order, butwithin themselves, in their own instinctual needs.

'l'he value of existing conventions is that they not only give youa firm basis to build on but arouse expectations in the spectatorwhich can be creatively cheated. We can study this principle inany art form in any period where a highly deve10ped tradition isavailable to the artist. One can see it very clearly in Mozart: muchof the freshness of his music, its ability continualIy to surpriseand stimulate the listener into new awareness, derives from hisuse of the 'conventional' language of the age in order to arouseand then cheat expectations-from a constant tension between theconventional background and the actual notes written. The effectdepends very much on our awareness of the background, whichneedn't necessarily be a consciousawareness. This tension betweenforeground and background, between the conventions of theWestern and what Hawks actually does with them, is everywhere

39

Page 21: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 22: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

Colorado has a surname somewhere, but who remembers it? Onefeels the characters as coming from a folk-ballad rather than fromany actual social context: they have that kind of relationship toreality.

Feathers is the product of the union of her basic 'type'-thesaloon girl-and the Hawks woman, sturdy and independent yetsensitive and vulnerable, the equal of any man yet not in the leastmasculine. The tension between background (convention) andforeground (actual character) is nowhere more evident. We arevery far here from the brash 'entertainer' with a heart of gold whodies (more often than not) stopping a bullet intended for thehero. Angie Dickinson's marvellous performance gives us theperfect embodiment of the Hawksian woman, intelligent, resilient,and responsive. There is a continuaI sense of a woman who reallygrasps what is important to her. One is struck by the beautyof the character, the beauty of a living individual respondingspontaneously to every situation from a secure centre of self. It isnot so much a matter of characterisation as the communication ofa life-quality (a much rarer thing). What one most loves aboutHawks, finally, is the aliveness of so many of his people.

Stumpy (Walter Brennan) and Carlos (Pedro Gonzalez­Gonzalez) are brilliant variants on the Western's traditional'comic relief' stock types. Both are so completely integrated, notonly in the action, but in the overall moral pattern, that the term'cornic relief' is ludicrously inadequate to describe their function.With Stumpy, as with Chance/Wayne, the traditional figuremerges indistinguishably into the personality of the actor.Brennan's persona of garrulous and toothless old cripplc has beenbuilt up in numerous other films (some of them Hawks's-ToHave and Have Not, Red River). Hawks's method with Brennan/Stumpy is the same as with Wayne/Chance: the character ispushed to an extreme that verges on parody. With Chance thishas the effect of testing the validity of the values the personaembodies by exposing them ta the possibility of ridicule. WithStumpy the effect is dual: on the one hand we have Brennan'sfunniest and richest, most completely realised impersonation; on

42

III(' other, the character's position in the film ceases to be marginal(:IS 'comic relief' suggests). His garrulity gradually reveals itself:1:. a coyer for fear and a sense of inadequacy; it plays an essential

11art in the development of the action, contributing to Dude'shrcakdown. With Stumpy, humour and pathos are inseparable.'l'!le response the characterisation evokes is remarkably complex:lil" is funny, pathetic, maddening, often all at the same time; yet,IlIl1yaware of his limitations, we never cease to respect him.

Carlos raises a more general problem: what some critics havedcscribed as Hawks's racialist tendencies. 1 feel myself thatIlawks is entirely free of racial feeling; with Carlos, with theDutchman in Only Angels Have Wings, with the French-Canadiansin The Big Sky, he is simply taking over genre-figures (and often1 he character-actors associated with them) and building on them.One can say that the very existence of such stock figures is itselfillsulting, and this is fair enough; one can, 1suppose, go on fromIhat to complain that Hawks is unthinkingly helping to perpetuateIhe insult; but that is rather different from finding actual racialmalice in his attitude. He is simply-and very characteristically­making use of the conventions (and the actors) that are to hand,and not questioning their initial validity. He takes the stock figureof the comic, cowardly, gesticulating, garrulous Mexican and, byeliminating the cowardliness while playing up the excitability,builds up a character whose dauntlessness and determination winour sympathy and respect even as we laugh at him. Hawks'shandling not only revivifies and humanises the stock type, butgreatly increases his dignity and (moral!) stature.

But it is the figure of the Hero's Fallible Friend that is mostfully worked on and transformed in Rio Bravo. Significantly,perhaps, this is the least stereotype d, the most uncertain andunpredictable, of the traditional Western ingredients. What 1have in mind, however, is a character the variations on which thereader will have little difficulty in recognising, whose function isusually ta act as a foil to the hero, to set off his integrity andincorruptibility. Usually, he falls from grace either throughweakness, personal inadequacy, or (more often perhaps) his

43

Page 23: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

betrayal of the hero, and gets killed. The characters played byArthur Kennedy in two of Anthony Mann's excellent Westerns,Where the River Bends and The Man from Laramie, are interestingvariants on the basic type; Lloyd Bridges in High Noon is anotherexample. A part of this function-a foil to set off the hero's moralinfallibility-is still clearly operative in Rio Bravo; but Dude takeson such importance in the film that it becomes a question at timeswho is a foil for whom. Hawks says Rio Bravo is really DeanMartin's picture; and if one disagrees, it's not because it's JohnWayne's, but because what gives Rio Bravo its beauty is above aIlthe interaction of aIl the parts, the sense that its significancearises from the ensemble, not from any individual character inisolation. Otherwise Hawks (who said of the ending of Red Riverthat he couldn't see the sense of killing people off unnecessarily)exactly reverses the Fallible Friend's usual progress: instead ofdecline and betrayal, we have a movement (despite setbacks)towards salvation. And it is very important that the first step inthat salyation is the mainspring of the film's who1e action: it istypical of Hawks that everything should hang, ultimately, on amatter of personal responsibility, not social duty.

Rio Bravo, then, is firmly rooted in a certain Hollywoodtradition, and awareness of the tradition and its conventions canhelp to enrich our response to it. Nevertheless, it is equaIly trueto say that the film can be understood without reference to 'theWestern' at aIl. It is as firmly rooted in Hawks's own past. Hawkshas never rejected his pas t, and never reaIly 1eft it behind. ln asense, Rio Bravo subsumes almost everything he had donepreviously (without, of course, making the other films redundant).The expository first few minutes, where the situation from whichaIl the action develops, and the film's central rc1ationship, areestablished without a word being spoken, constitute, whetherintentionaIly or not, a homage to the silent cinema that takes us

right back to Hawks's roots. The who1e pattern of re1ationshipsin the film will be familiar to those who have seen Only AngelsHave Wings and Ta Have and Have Not. Consider the followingparalle1s between the three films: the three heroes (Grant, Bogart,

44

Wayne) are aIl variations on a basic concept; the women (Arthur,!t;lcall,Dickinson) aIl share a strong family resemblance, and there.11" dear similarities in their relationships with the films' respectiveIl("roes. Stumpy, obviously, can be traced back to Eddie in TaIla'ile and Have Not: the fact that both are played by Walter!trmnan makes the similarity very conspicuous. But Dude can be1 r:lccdback to Eddie too, and also to Bat in Only Angels Have Wingsl'•Ile would not readily have connected Bat and Eddie without this',l'lise that they are both partly subsumed in Dude). Stumpy is;dso related to Kid in Only Angels Have Wings-there is the samekar of growing old and no longer being of any use. Carlos has:;omething in common with the Dutchman in Only Angels HavelVings and with Frenchy in Ta Have and Have Not; further, the'responsibility' he is given of putting Feathers on the stagecoachrcealls the task of putting Slim on the plane entrusted to Crickett(1 Ioagy Carmichae1). Both fail.

What is important to note are the ditferences that such juxta­positions force on the attention. The quite ditferent 'feel' of thelhree films is largely determined by the differences between theirhcroes. Grant in Only Angels Have Wings is much younger thanthe other two men, and strikes one as essentially more vulnerable(he is l think the only Hawks hero who ever cries), 1ess finallyformed by experience, his maturity and balance less secure.Hence the more extreme and drastic-almost exhibitionistic­nature of his rejection of sentimentality: it almost becomes therejection of feeling itself, a trait criticised and qualified duringthe film. With the other two, especially Wayne, we are madeaware of limitations rather than imperfections. AIso, while Wayneand Bogart are both confronted with the possibility of theirassociates' death or collapse, Grant is the only one confronted withdeath itse1f. The possibility of desperation, which seems always,aImost invisibly, to underlie the good-humoured surface of theadventure films, is much more apparent in Only Angels HaveWings than in the later works, and it is largely the nature of theprotagonist that makes this possible. Bogart, on the other hand, ofthe three is the one most completely in command of the situations

45

Page 24: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 25: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

the film. When Chance prevented Dude from taking the coin fromthe spittoon, Dude was made conscious of his degradation; hisbeating-up by Joe intensifies this consciousness. Above all, he isconfronted by two opposite examples: the moral disintegration ofJoe, the moral integrity of Chance. On his choice between them

depends his salvation as a human being: his decision to he1pChance (physically) commits him to an attempt to save himse1f(morally and spiritually). To express all this pure1y throughsimple physical actions is profoundly characteristic of Hawks; sois the immediately established positive trend of the character­development. There is nothing glib or sentimental about Hawks'streatment of his characters, but if he can possibly steer themtowards salvation, he does. This spirit of generosity, the mostcreative human characteristic, vivifies all his best films. Even

Tony Camonte, in Scarface, obviously an exception to anygeneral mIe one could make about Hawks's protagonists, becomesmost interesting when se1f-awareness begins, belatedly, to breakon him. It is consistently a moral rather than a psychologicalinterest: the cure is always therapeutic, never psycho-analytical(though what happens to Dunson in Red River has certainaffinities with the process of psycho-analysis).

If in Rio Bravo the traditional Western theme of the defence ofcivilised values is reduced to litde more than a pretext, where,then, does Hawks put the emphasis? On values below the socialleve1, but on which social values, if valid, must neccssarily bebuilt: man's innate need for self-respect or se1f-definition. As amotif, it will be easily seen that this pervades the film, as a unifyingprincip1e of composition. It is stated through virtually everycharacter, usuaIly on his first appearance, like the subject of afugue, and developed throughout contrapuntally with fugalrigour. The film's first actions constitute a negative statement(Dude grovelling for the coin in the spittoon) and a positive one(Chance's intervention, and the ensuing arrest of Joe Burdett).The first words of Colorado (Ricky Nelson) insist on his rightsas an individual: when Chance questions Pat Wheeler (Ward

48

Bond) about him in his presence, he interrupts with, '1 speakFllglish, Sheriff, you wanna ask me.' Pat, too old and unsteadyIII be of direct use, risking (and giving) his life to get others toIwlp Chance; Stumpy asserting his independence by disobeying(:ltance's orders and standing in the jail doorway; Feathers1 elÜsing to stop gambling and wearing feathers as a way of escaping;1 suspect past ('That's what l'd do if l were the kind of girl thatyou think l am'); Carlos insisting with sudden touching dignityon his right to arrange matters as he pleases in his own hote!: aIlIltese constitute variants on the theme. Variants, not repetitions:Ilte statements range from broad humour (Stumpy) to near1 ragedy (Dude): each is distinct from the others in tone and inmoral weiglrt. Examples could be multiplied throughout the film..l'here is a continuaI sense of the contrapuntal interaction of thevarious levels of seriousness and humour, so that great complexityof tone often results. Consider for example the way in which

Stumpy's comic need to emphasise his alertness and mastery tooUset his sense of disability ('Old cripp1es ain't wanted') precipi­lates Dude's breakdown when Stumpy shoots, as ordered, themoment someone fails to give the word on entering the jail(Dude, bathed and shaved, was unrecognisab1e). Everything in thefilm can be referred back to this unifying motif, yet, as always, it isnowhere given explicit statement. The density of the thematicdevelopment is increased by the e1ement of parody introducedlhrough the villains. Nathan Burdett (John Russell) goes to suchlengths to get his brother out of jail not from motives of affectionbut from pride in his position: his actions are dictated, that is tosay, by the desire not to lose face, a caricature of the motives forwhich. the heroes act, rendered further invalid by the fact that heis defending a morally indefensib1e action. When Nathan tellsDude that everyone should have a taste of power before he dies,we are made strongly aware of the distinction between the kindof power Dude is experiencing in overcoming his tendency todisintegration, and the sort of power Burdett experiences.

By shifting the emphasis from man's responsibility to society(still there as a starting-point but no more than that) to his

49

Page 26: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

responsibility to himself, Hawks strips everything down to a basicstoic principle. From this follows his conception of friendship asa relationship based on mutual respect and mutual independence.Throughout the film we see Chance training Dude for theindependence and self-respect that constitutes true manhood­for a relationship based on a balance of equality between free men.There are those who can see no more to this theme of closefriendship between men in Hawks's films than the endorsement ofa hearty, superficial matiness: nothing could be further from thetruth. These relationships in Hawks almost invariably embodysomething strong, positive, and fruitful: at the 1east (The Thing) awarmth ofmutual response; at the most (Rio Bravo) the veritablesalvation of a human being.

Here, too, the essential things are conveyed through-or moreaccurately perhaps grow out of-physical actions. It is worthquoting Hawks here-a passage from the earlier of the twointerviews he gave Peter Bogdanovich which throws much lighton his methods:

' ... we have to feel our way as we go along and we can add to

a character or get a piece of business between two peopleand start sorne relationship going and then further it. ln RioBravo Dean Martin had a bit in which he was required toroll a cigarette. His fingers weren't equal to it and Waynekept passing him cigarettes. AlI of a sudden you realise thatthey are awfully good friends or he wouldn't be doing it. Thatgrew out of Martin's asking me one day "Well, if my fingersare shaky, how can l roll this thing?" So Wayne said, "Here,1'11 hand you one", and suddenly we had something going .... '

There is a beautiful example in Only Angels Have Wings of theestablishment of a relationship purely through actions: the scenewhere Cary Grant and Thomas Mitchell try to guide Joe downthrough the fog. Hawks builds the scene on a sense of instinctiveawareness between the two men, Mitchell using his ears andGrant his voice as if they were two aspects of the same humanbeing; at the end, when Joe has crashed, Mitchell holds out a

•Il',:11L'Ilehe has rolled and Grant takes it, as if he knew it wouldIII l'Xactly there at exactly that moment, without looking. One1I1"llIentin Rio Bravo, in itself very smaIl, beautifully defines theI.LtI ionship between Chance and Dude. Chance takes Dude out1" palrol the streets, mainly to help him overcome the strain he is11111kr from his need for alcohol, pauses by the paid gunman whoh,l'; been appointed by Burdett to watch the jail, says 'Good'\'L'lling' to him and stands there till the man shuffies uneasily andIIIOvesaway. We see Dude watching from the other side of the',IIL'et,and from his face the impact on him of this expression ofIIi0ral force, the authority that cornes from integrity.

But for Hawks there cornes a point where these friendships,valuable and creative as they are, reach the limit oftheir power toIIdluence and affect, beyond which point the individual is alonewilh his own resources or sheer chance to fall back on. We saw1 his in the treatment of Kid's death in Only Angels Have Wings;11\ Rio Bravo Dude's salvation rests ultimately, not on Chance,hlll on chance. At the climax of his relapse, when he has failed in

his responsibilities and decidcd to hand in his badge, he clumsilypOUfS out a glass of whisky, nerves gone, hands tremblinghdplessly: it is his moment of defeat, from which it seems likelyt hat he will never recover. Chance's example, combined with hissloic refusaI to indulge him, no longer reaches him. Then, as heraises the glass, the 'Alamo' music starts up again from the saloonacross the street, and we see its immediate implications ('Noquarter!'-it is being played on Burdett's orders) and its heroicassociations strike him. He pauses, then pours the whisky backinto the thin-necked bottle unfalteringly-'Didn't spill a drop.' Itis his moment of victory, and one of the great moments of thecinema. !ts power to move derives partly from its context (it is,after aIl, one of the central moments in a film single-mindedlyconcerned with self-respect), partly from the irony (the tuneplayed to undermine courage in fact has the opposite effect), andpartly on our sense of the precariousness of everything.

One of the concerns common to Red River and Rio Bravo­

though it takes very different forms in the two films-is a

51

Page 27: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

preoccupation with heroism, the conditions necessary to it, andthe human limitations that accompany those conditions. This willbe obvious enough in the earlier film, with its examination of thelimits of the acceptability of Dunson's ruthlessness. The conceptof the hero in Rio Bravo-of Hawks's attitude to him-may atfirst sight appear less complex, in that Chance is presentedthroughout as morally infallible. Yet Hawks's conception here issubtler. Without qualifying our sense of moral infallibility,Hawks defines in the course of the action the limitations that notonly accompany it but are to sorne extent the conditions for itsexistence. Consider, for example, the song sequence, one of thefilm's focal points (it is often regarded as an irrelevance, forced intothe action to give Ricky Nelson something to sing). It occurs justafter Dude's triumph over his weakness, which in its turn waspreceded by Colorado's intervention, his ceasing to 'mind his ownbusiness', in the flower-pot scene. Earlier, his refusaI to commithimself helped to make possible the murder of his boss, PatWheeler: Colorado, like Dude, was guilty of a failure of responsi­bility. ln the song sequence he, Dude, and Stumpy sit in a circlein the jail, Stumpy accompanying on the harmonica while theother two sing. It is perhaps the best expression in Hawks's workof the spontaneous-intuitive sympathy which he makes soimportant as the basis of human relations. The compositions andthe editing (by making us aware of the exchange of glances) aswell as the acting contribute gradually to link the three men in abond of fellow-feeling through the shared experience of the music.Throughout it, Chance stands outside the circle looking on, apaternally approving smile on his face, but none the less excluded

from the common experience. The three physically or morallyfallible men-cripple, reformed drunk, boy who failed once in hisresponsibility-are able to achieve a communion which theinfallible man is denied, excluded by his very infallibility.

More obviously, Chance's limitations are revealed in hisrelationship with Feathers. For, if Rio Bravo as a whole is a

summing-up of Hawks's adventure films, its love relationship,with the repeated discomfiture of the hero, succinctly recapitulates

52

"~'"~Bravo: Stumpy, Dude and Colorado--the song sequence

llawksian comedy, and the film is enormously enriched by theIllteraction ofthe two. It is the first time in Hawks's work that thiskind of relationship, so basic to the comedies, appears in an:Illventure film. Certainly the Grant/Arthur and Bogart/Bacallrdationships in Only Angels Have Wings and Ta Have and HaveNot have points in common with it; but Grant and Bogart, while1 hey may have resisted thcir women for a time, were always able10 handle them. Rio Bravo marks the beginning of a tendency(here kept beautifully under control and in balance) to satirise thehcro-a tendency carried further with Wayne in Hatari!, andtaking different forms in the parodistic 'Wildcat Jones' song ofRed Line 7000 and in El Dorado, where the challenge cornes notl'rom women but from age.

Feathers's first appearance eonstitutes a humorous inversionof the fugue theme-Chance, the seemingly invulnerable, almostmythic figure. of the 'strong, silent man', finding his dignityabruptly undermined when the searlet bloomers ordered for

53

Page 28: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

Carlos's wife are held up against him for Carlos's approval, andthe woman greets him with, 'Those things have great possibilities,Sheriff, but not on you.' She has to take the initiative throughouttheir relationship; but-and this is what makes it so differentfrom the man-woman relationship in, say, 1 Was a Male WarBride-its development is repeatedly given impetus by herattempts to drive him to establish authority over her, therebycompleting his mastery of his world. Peathers, in fact, trainsChance rather as Chance trains Dude-trains him for a relationshipof spiritual equals, for it is always clear that the establishment ofmale authority will be a matter of voluntary surrender on her part.It is true that Hawks never shows his man-woman relationshipsdeveloping beyond a certain point; nevertheless, the relationshipreached at the end of Rio Bravo carries a beautiful and satisfyingsense of maturity, with both partners strong enough to preservea certain independence and to come together on terms of equality.Again, it is a relationship of free people, each existing from anestablished centre of self-respect. The final scene between them,where Chance 'tells her he loves her' by ordering her not to godown to the saloon to sing in the very revealing 'entertainer's'

costume which she wore before she knew him, far from seemingan anti-climax after the gun-and-dynamite showdown withBurdett and his men, is the true climax of the film. The lightlyhumorous treatment shouldn't blind us to its underlying seriousnessand beauty.

There is a sense in which Chance's independence and self­

sufficiency is illusory. He goes through the film systematicallyrejecting the help of others; yet every crisis without exception,from the arrest of Joe Burdett on, would end in disaster were itnot for the unsolicited intervention of others. Without the cripple,the drunk, the comic Mexican, the teenage boy, a girl on hand tofling a well-timed flower-pot, the superman would be defeatedbefore he had the chance to perform a single decisive action. Yetif the others are physically indispensable to him, it is never indoubt that Chance is spiritually indispensable to them. Removehim from the film, and you would be left largely with human

54

Rio Bravo: Feathers and Chance

Page 29: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 30: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

3: The Lure of Irresponsibility

Scarface (1932), Bringing up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940),Monkey Business (1952), 1Was a Male War Bride (1949)

Scarface

Ir may seem perverse to approach the comedies via a gangsterfilm of exceptional ferocity, almost the only Hawks film in whichthe protagonist dies. But Scarface belongs with the comedies.

There are interesting paraUels between Scarface and Godard'sLes Carabiniers. Though utterly different in style and method,both have leading characters who consistently perform monstrousviolent actions which the films never condone, yet who retain theaudience's sympathy to the end, and for similar reasons. Godardgives his Michelangelo the characteristics, not only of a primitive,but of a young child, an innocent immune from moral judgementsbecause he has never developed moral awareness. Farfrom weaken­ing the statement of harror and despair, this intensifies it.

Tony Camonte (Paul Muni), the 'hero' of Scarface, is alwaystouching and eventuaUy pathetic, because he too is an innocent.Indeed, he captures and keeps more of the spectator's affectionthan Michelangelo; this is surprising, because Hawks aUows us tosee him killing sympathetic characters (Guino Rinaldo), whereGodard keeps the slaughter in Les Carabiniers strictly impersonal;but Hawks's method, though consistently objective, aUows usmuch doser to the characters than Godard's. There is onebasic difference between the two films: Scarface remains firmlywithin the conventions of naturalism, whereas Les Carabiniersrefuses aU such limitations (thereby discovering limitations of its

58

11\\'11). The difference is apparent in the 'childlike' presentation of10llYand Michelangelo (and even in their names). Tony's primi­

11\'1:,111 is entirely credible naturalistically, where Michelangelo's11I1;lIItilismis very stylised.

Tony is introduced as a squat shadow, evoking ape or Neander­Ilia 1er.His fascinated attraction to gaudy trappings (loud dressing­",oWIlS,ties, jewellery, etc.) recalls the savage's fondness for beads.IIISattempts at elegance-large acreage ofhandkerchief protruding1 10III breast pocket, huge tie-are grotesque. With this goes his'l',llorance. When Poppy (Karen Morley) tells him that jewellery1111 men is 'effeminate' he is boyishly delighted, automaticaUya:;suming a compliment. When she tells him his place is 'kind of",;lUdy',his reply is 'Isn't it though? Glad you like it.' When helises to power as Johnny Lovo's right-hand man, he wears a new:.hirt each day, sports an even fancier dressing-gown than Lovo's,!1oaststo Poppy of having several more suits, 'aIl different colours',J1llnpsup and down on the bed showing it to her, saying, 'It's gotIIIsidesprings. Bought it at an auction.' His attempts at seduction:,1lOWa childlike· naïveté which eventually, touching Poppy,becomes an important factor in her capitulation. His infantileconfusion of values-woman and dressing-gown placed on roughlyt Ile same level, half gaudy toys, half status symbols-anticipatesinterestingly Michelangelo's response to the carabinier's catalogueof the treasures of the world that he will bring back as loot.

This essential innocence is reftected in other characters. Thelilt Italian gangster CostiUo, celebrating at a New Year's Eveparty, paper-hatted amidst a debris of festoons among which is adiscarded bra, boasts childishly of his prosperity (he is about toget shot), mentioning in the same breath the girl and the auto­mobile that he can now afford. Guino Rinaldo (George Raft),when Cesca (Ann Dvorak) caUs on him, is cutting out paper doUs;and it is he, the tough gangster, who is seduced by the shelteredCesca. As Tony cornes to kill Guino, Cesca is singing a comic songabout a train-driver, complete with 'poop-poop' noises. Tony'silliterate secretary has continuaI difficulty with te1ephones: he isafraid of them, and at one point wants to shoot one. Both here and

59

Page 31: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

in Les Carabiniers we are made to feel the frightening discrepancybetween the achievements of civilisation and the actual level ofculture attained by the individuals who are its by-products.

Characteristically-though, considering the ostensible subject ofScarface, remarkably-there is little sense of social context.Members of normal society appear only as the merest backgroundfigures (waiters in the machine-gunned restaurant, nurses held upin the hospital where Meehan is finished off). Considered toosimply, Scarface appears a dangerously immoral film. It openswith an explicitly moralising foreword about ' ... the intention ofthe producer ... ', and halfway through there is an embarrassinglyhammy scene (added by another director, apparently, as a safeguardagainst censorship) where a newspaper editor accused of sensa­tionalism defends his position, arguing the need to expose outrages.But the film shows remarkably little society either to outrage or todefend. Hawks's 'naturalism' is highly selective: he works bysimply eliminating society. Hence in Scarface the ostensiblesubject-society threatened by gangsters-isn't really treated ataIl. We see almost nothing of the results of the outrages-bombexplosions, machine-gunning_in terms of human suffering. Thepolice are uniformly unsympathetic. Hawks presents his gangwars as kids' games played with real buIlets. A sardonic, macabrehumour is seldom absent, and some of the outrages are treated asuninhibited farce: Gaffney's machine-gunning of the restaurant,with Tony's secretary struggling to cope with the telephone-anattempt continued, doggedly, throughout the attack, with boilingtea pouring out over his bottom through the buIlet -holes in anurn. The film communicates, strongly, a sense of exhilaration:Hawks actuaIly encourages us to share the gangsters' enjoyment ofviolence. If Tony has the innocence of a child or a savage, he alsohas the energy and vitality that goes with it.

Yet no one with a sensibility more developed than TonyCamonte's could find Scarface ultimately immoral. The attitude toTony is complex. If we regard him sympatheticaIly, we never feelthat he is being glorified. His pitiful end is implicit throughout. Heis funnyand touching because he is an overgrown child, emotionaIly

60

1111 ('~;Iedat an early stage, with no sympathetic awareness of others1111 (1no self-awareness. He dies when he loses his essential innocence

when, in a very shadowy, disturbing way, he begins to see1lillISclf,and his armour of boyish self-confidence, Iike his steelhllltcrs ('1 got nobody-I'm aIl alone-my steel shutters don't

w"rk'), is no longer any protection.Ilow, then, does Hawks 'place' this monstrous innocence and

Il', dt'ects?-why, if the killings are often exhilarating and farcical,,Ill' [bey also so disturbing? Hawks faced a difficult problem: how1 () discover images or references which could be incorporatedIllIostentatiously within the naturalistic conventions? Instead ofIllviting judgement on the gangsters for subverting the social"rdcr, Hawks disturbs our response to the film's humour withIInages and leitmotifs, very simple and traditional yet the more('vocative because of it, with their accumulated associations. One1 hinks of the passage from Borges which Godard quotes at theslart of Les Carabiniers: the writer returns increasingly to the 'oldIlIctaphors' because they are enriched by past usage.

The image of the cross pervades the whole film. It is the first1 hing we see; every killing is accompanied (often unobtrusively)hy a cross, sometimes formed by patterns of light or shadow; thescar on Tony's face is a cross. ln the scene of the St Valentine's1)ay Massacre the camera moves down from seven crosses-thepattern in a wooden overhang-to show the seven victims. Themajority of these are the multiplication-sign form of the cross-aslraightforward sign for death, the crossing-out of a human being;but several take the traditional Christian shape. The pervasiveimage carries associative emotional overtones which contributeimportantly to the effect of the killings. Individual instances carrytheir own overtones. Near the end of the film Tony, incestuouslyinvolved with Cesca without understanding the nature of his ownfeelings, kiIIs Guino out of possessive jealousy; at the first meetingof Guino and Cesca, Guino is seen through a cross formed by thebalcony edge and its support. The effect is very unobtrusive­Hawks never sacrifices the action of a scene to symbolism-butwe are by that time sufficiently used to the association of the

6r

Page 32: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 33: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

the hearse. ln two scenes flowers are used. Tony's men enter ahospital to finish off Meehan, survivor-though badly injured-ofa previous attack. The intensity and terrible poetry of the scene arepartly the product of its economy: no preliminaries, simply a briefsequence of shots of the gangsters, carrying bouquets, holding upterrified nurses in a corridor, opening a door beyond which is aheavily bandaged figure in a bed, with one leg strapped up,unable to move to coyer, the leg support casting a cross-shapedshadow on the far wall. The figure is blasted with bullets, then abouquet is flung in on the body as a parting cynicism. The scene(it is aIl over in a few seconds) epitomises the disturbing power ofthe film. The tension and pace of direction and editing capture asense of exhilaration, we respond to the uninhibited audacity ofthe gangsters, their freedom from aIl social and moral restraints,their ability to perform outrageous actions in the face of socialinstitutions. At the same time the horror of the scene is over­whelming: only a Tony in the audience could find it merelyexhilarating. As eIsewhere in Hawks's work (Monkey Businessoffering the extremest instance), our yearnings for totalirresponsibility are evoked to be chastised. Through the images ofcross and flowers, the utter heIplessness of the victim, the valuesappealed to are absolute rather than social; our horror derivesfrom deeper sources than the violation of social stability.

The other scene centred on a flower is equally complex anddisturbing. Guino Rinaldo brings Tony a rose as a token that hehas killed a rival who ran a flower-shop. Tony later in the scenegives it to Poppy, whom he is trying to seduce. The scene evokesthe rose's traditional associations with love and beauty, tendernessand transience, and juxtaposes these with our knowledge of itsactual dramatic significance.

Hawks, like Godard, uses the arts to suggest more developedvalues beyond the reach of the characters; though the examples inHawks's film are again much simpler, and entireIy integrated inthe action. Tony's signature tune, whistled every time he kills(the sextet from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, 'Chi me frena?',What restrains me?) gives his first appearance an almost surrealist

64

'1'1,diIY: the squat ape-like shadow juxtaposed with the eIegant1d Il;ISI:Sof Italian opera. His visit to the theatre and his reactions'" 1111: play (Rain) anticipate Les Carabiniers' cinema scene. Tony.1•••. :; not, like Michelangelo, totally misunderstand the nature ofIII('IIlcdium; but his attitude shows a similarly eIementary contact.III:; dimly awakening sense of the existence of moral problemslllll'shadows his downfaIl: he is quite unable to grasp their nature,kl alone cope with them. He tries to explain the play to hisdlTctary, who prefers 'shows with jokes': 'This Sadie, she's a1',111with a problem .... She's what you calI disillusioned.' HeIt-:IVCSthe secretary to find out how the play ends while he goes to,llIolher killing that can't wait, and when he gets the garbledl''port, gives Sadie's solution (she 'c1imbed back in the hay with1hl' army') his delighted approval. His incomprehension of the1';:;IlCS(counterpointed with his further progress in bloodshed)Iwautifully defines the terrible innocence that permits him to kill;11Il1 plunder, and which also alIows him not to question his;111achmentto Cesca or his immediate ferocious jealousy of anyIllan who comes near her.

Ln the scenes of Tony's muddled self-realisation and subsequent(kath the film's moral force becomes finally evident. Far fromhcing a 'moral' ending hastily tacked on in an attempt to make anImmoral film respectable, it is as inevitable as the ending of AHout de Souffle. Tony is strong only while he remains unaware. The:;llOotingof Guino and Cesca's ensuing outcry are crucial. Tonyloses control over her because he is losing control over himself­wc see from his facial expression, from his inability, now, to holdI1cr,his dim, reIuctant realisation of what his real feelings for herare. When Tony's secretary dies struggling with the phone, it isPoppy on the other end. AlI Tony can find to say to her is a vague,confused, '1 didn't know', which can refer simply to the deadsecretary- Tony hadn't realised that he was hit-or to the realisa­Lionof his own involvement with Cesca (which makes Poppy nolonger of the slightest importance to him). The ambiguity pre ventsus from applying the words narrowly: they sum up Tony's wholeappalling ignorance: after aIl the massacres, the audacities, the

65

Page 34: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

exhilaration, the success, they are aIl he can find to say for himself.After it, his reaction to Cesca's failure to kill him is 'Why didn'tyou shoot?' -followed by a hysterical defiance of the encirclingpolice which grotesquely parodies the exhilaration of the violenceearlier in the film. His hysterical triumphant laughter coincideswith Cesca's being struck by a bullet-which ricochets off themuch-vaunted steel shutter, symbol to Tony ofhis invulnerability,which he is holding open at that moment. The cross that has

accompanied aIl Tony's killings is appropriately, though ironically,there for the death of his sister; after which his disintegration intoblind panic as the gas bombs cxplode around him-the risingand overpowering clouds of gas providing the perfect visualexpression for his bewildered state of mind, the protectiveinnocence punctured-stands as judgement on aIl his pasto

The essential condemnation of Tony Camonte, like that ofMichel Poiccard in A Bout de Souffle, whose anti-social behaviouralso conveys to the audience an irresistible exhilaration, is not

66

Illq10sedfrom any external moral standpoint (despite Scarface's11l1l'wordto the effect that ' ... Justice always catches up with the, IlIllinal who must answer for his sins'), but is arrived at empiri­,,,lIy in terms of the character's own development. Tony andMichel condemn themselves, ultimately, because their behaviourl', :;df-destructive, not only in the simple, literal sense that it gets1 hem killed, but because Ït denies them fulfilment of their basiclI("cds.Both directors have the courage to treat their characters'I,'jcction of responsibility and rush towards self-destructionIIIwardly, with the implicit admission that they are dealing withIIl1iversaltraits and urges. A dangerous method (both films havehl'en accused of immorality); but valid morality must be based onhOllesty.

The comparison with Godard reveals Hawks's strength andIllnitations. At first sight Scarface seems richer than Les Carabiniers.Il works brilliantly on a popular narrative level, a dimension that(;odard's film doesn't pretend to. Beyond this is the essential:,1 ability of Hawks's character and the traditional nature of his art:his successful films are pervaded by a robustness derived from:;Iable values-Ioyalty, courage, endurance, mastery of self andl'Ilvironment-whereas the emotion underlying and characterisingl,cs Carabiniers is a terrible despair, arising from Godard'sl'xposure to the complexities and confusions, the disintegration ofaccepted values, inherent in contemporary society. Les CarabiniersIS a statement about the modern world of a kind Hawks nowhereattempts. This defines him as an artist-Ït doesn't invalidate him.1lawks takes the state of civilisation for granted in a way that hashccome increasingly difficult for the modern artist, and he hasheen helped in this by the availability to him of cinematic traditionswhich manifest themselves in the genres, but his inability to makestatements about modern society limits his work, affectingparticularly certain of the comedies.

It is with the comedies that Scarface unquestionably belongs.[t has almost nothing in common with the adventure films (besidesthe enclosed group); it has almost everything in common withthe comedies. The overlapping and combining of farce and

67

Page 35: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

,

~~•...... ' .

/l1/Il!;ing Up Baby: David and Susan

'1'he inspiration isn't consistent. The tension throughout is inIIIL' Grant-Hepburn relationship; scenes involving minor characters.IIL' sometimes laboured. Major Horace Applegate (Charles1{lIggles), the effeminate and ineffectual big-game hunter, is1111t:restingas a crazy-mirror reftection of the men of action,dominant and professional, who. people the adventure films, but'.tlmewhat tedious in himself. Barry Fitzgerald's drunken IrishI~ardener seems predictable. Worse, the invention ftags in the11Iiddle of the film, even in scenes involving the principals.1 )uring the first hour, with Hepburn ruining Grant's golf-gamewith an important business connection, bringing every conceivabledisaster upon him in a night-club, then blackmailing him intohdping her take Baby (her leopard) ta Connecticut, the inspira­I ion, bath in script and direction, never lets up. But later, in the~œnes where the two search for the missing leopard in the woodsat night, conception and execution falter, the material is thin anddirectional inspiration more spasmodic. Incidents where characters

horror points ahead to His Girl Friday, Tony's destructiveinnocence to that of Lorelei Lee; in Monkey Business, the juxta­positions of ape, savages, and children are clearly related to thepresentation of the gangsters in Scarface. Above aIl, Scarface givesus the essential theme of Hawks's most characteristic comedies.If the adventure films place high value on the sense of responsi­bility, the comedies derive much of their tension and intensityfrom the fascination exerted by irresponsibility. l pass now totwo films in which this fascination is not quite under control.

Bringing up Baby

Bringing up Baby is perhaps the funniest of Hawks's comedies butnot the best. Again and again, after no matter how many viewings,the spectator is delighted by smaIl touches of comic business oftenbeyond the critic's reach, since they defy verbal description:matters of gesture, expression, intonation. Consider the little scenewhere the delivery-man brings Professor David Huxley (CaryGrant) the intercostal clavicle while David is speaking on thetelephone to his fiancée: one or two laconic comments by thedelivery-man ('Don't let it throw you, bus ter') aside, the humourlies in the way the characters are standing, the way they look ateach other, the way they speak. Or there is the moment whenDavid, in an elaborately feminine negligée, opens the front doorto Katherine Hepburn's aunt, a determined masculine-Iookingwoman in manly tweeds, and, already driven to near-frenzy bythe systematic humiliations to which he has been subjected, inanswer to her question as to what he's doing dressed like that,gives a frenetic little leap in the air, waggles his arms, and shouts'1 went gay suddenly.' It is a moment that epitomises many of theessentials of Hawksian comedy. There is the extremeness of it, inthe Context of the light comedy genre: we are almost in the worldof the Marx Brothers. There is the sexual reversaI, the humiliationof the male, his loss of mastery, which makes the comedies aninversion of the adventure films. FinaIly, there is the resilience ofthe male, his ability to live through extremes of humiliationretaining an innate dignity.

68

69

Page 36: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

faU down banks and get entangled in poison ivy are not very funny,nor do they add much in terms of thematic development. With

the release of the dangerous circus leopard the film picks upagain and the invention regains something of its previous density;but the sense of élan, once lost, is hard to recapture.

The real nature of the flaw in Bringing up Baby lies deeper, andis far more revealing of Hawks's limitations and weaknesses. Thestructure is satisfyingly bold and symmetrical, with leaningstowards aUegory, built on oppositions. ln the centre is ProfessorHuxley, on the surface entirely dedicated to zoological research(the reconstruction of a dinosaur skeleton). On one side is hismousy, earnest, sexless secretary-fiancée, who refuses a honeymoonon the grounds that it would interfere with his work; on the otherthere is Susan (Hepburn). It is easy to see them as Dut y (conceivedas deadeningly dry and repressive) and Nature (conceived as

amoral and entirely irresponsible); and tempting to simplifyfurther (the film encourages it) and see them in Preudian terms asSuperego and Id. David's dedication to his work im't complete:in his extreme absent-mindedness, his inability to cope practicaUy

with situations, we feel inner forces working against it; and we 1.

note that he wants a honeymoon even if his bride-to-be doesn't.Hepburn erupts at moments when he is about to c1inch a deal that

will ensure his future; and each time she shatters to fragments the 1superficial order of his life. Once she has materialised, he iscompletely helpless against her. The entire characterisation ofSusan favours this interpretation. She is not so much immoral asamoral: she seems never to feel a twinge of guilt, never acknowledg­ing responsibility for the comic disasters she precipitates. Theopposition of the two womenin the film's basic pattern is reinforcedby the equaUy c1ear-cut opposition of animaIs, living and dead: the

dinosaur skeleton (represented for us during most of the film bythe intercostal c1avic1e)and the leopard, extensions, respectivelyof David's way of life and Susan's. There is a fairly systematicprogression in the film, from the world of the dominance of theSuperego to that of the Id: starting amid the most civilisedsettings-museum, golf-course, night-c1Ub-the film moves to the

70

\ olllltry-house of Susan's aunt, thence to the garden, thence toIhe woods; and there is a corresponding movement from light to.Iarkness. We pass from the unnatural order of the museum to theliaiural disorder of the woods at night. One can see a parallell'lllgression in the animaIs, dead dinosaur, pet terrier, tameknpard, wild leopard, though they are not introduced in quiteIhal order (no one who sees the film will find it as crudely schematicJI:' l have made it sound). The release of the semi-wild leopard,·.lIggesting forces beyond anything Susan represents (even she is1 nrified of it, when she realises it isn't Baby), c1inches this senseni a descent into a dangerous, disordered world of nature.

The Grant and Hepburn characters exist on different levels ofIl'ality. The trouble is that they are also a man and a woman, and~,\lIneofthe slackening of tension in the scenes in the woods can beaccounted for by the feeling that on this level Hawks simply didn'tknow what to do with them. This discrepancy between levels givesrisc to doubts about the film's resolution, and the total outlook itexpresses. With Hepburn as Id-figure the end works rather well.(;rant, restored to or der, is putting the finishing touches to hisIife-work, the dinosaur skeleton, at the top of a huge scaffolding.Ilcpburn reappears and c1imbs up to him; Grant admits that hehas enjoyed their misadventures; and within minutes the entireskeletal structure has collapsed. The dry bones represent his life­work and are an image of his way of life, destroyed finally by theeruption of the Id. But it is impossible to see the film only like that:one is forced also to contemplate Hepburn as a suitable life-partnerI(lr him. One can only feel uneasy, and question whether the1 riumph of total irresponsibility the film appears to be offering astitting resolution is in fact acceptable. There is no sense of apossible synthesis or even compromise; the only alternative toSusan is made so ridiculous as to be instantly discounted. Hasn'tthe temptation to irresponsibility, that gives Scarface and MonkeyBusiness their tension and vividness, here got the better of Hawks'sjudgement?-as it is to do again, and more disturbingly, in HisGirl Friday. And isn't the film's facile ridicule of the stock figureof the Preudian psychiatrist rather revealing?

71

Page 37: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

His Girl Friday

'1 was going to prove to somebody one night that The FrontPage had the finest modern dialogue that had been written,and 1asked a girl to read Hildy's part and 1 read the editorand 1stopped and 1said, "Hell, it's better between a girl anda man than between two men," and 1called Ben Hecht and1 said, "What would you think of changing it so thatHildy is a girl?" And he said, "1 think it's a great idea," andhe came out and we did it.' (Hawks, interviewed by PeterBogdanovich. )

Consequently, the part of Hildy Johnson, ace reporter for theMorning Post whose brilliance makes him indispensable to hiseditor, played by Pat O'Brien in Lewis Milestone's The Front Page,was played by Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday: Hildebrandbecame Hildegard, his fiancée a fiancé. The decision transformsthe whole character of the film, in more ways than may at firstbe obvious.

Even ignoring the difference in sex, Rosalind Russell'sperformance is immensely superior to Pat O'Brien's. ln TheFront Page Hildy's indispensability has to be taken on trust:nothing convinces one of it as a tangible reality. Rosalind Russellconveys an intelligence, quickness, efficiency, and insight thatmake Walter's need of her, and her fellow journalists' admiration,entirely convincing. But the fact that she is female adds otherlevels. Hildy in His Girl Friday is indispensable to Walter in waysthe male partnership of The Front Page precluded: she has beenmarried to him and has divorced him: he wants her back in othercapacities than that of star reporter.

The Front Page has two centres of interest: (1) Will WalterBurns succeed in preventing Hildy from marrying his fiancée andforsaking the Morning Post (and journalism)? (2) Will Earl

Williams, pathetic condemned murderer and victim of corruptlocal politicians, be hanged? The attempt at balancing the two isundermined by the intrinsic disproportion of significance. Noparticular values are invested in Hildy beyond mere professional

72

'1l1ciency (and even that not dramaticalIy realised); his fiancéel', ('ommonplace, and we are clearly meant to want the engagementIlillken, but the outcome seems of negligible importance. To askIl',, at the end, to focus on so trivial an issue after much moredt:;lurbing feelings have been aroused by the Earl Williams plot·,t'nus calIous. The film's chief virtue-its brilliant dialogue­1wcomes almost a vice: its dazzle masks an essential heartlessnesswhich the film seems at times to be judging but which is never, in1 :Icl, adequately 'placed'. Hawks succeeds in modifying thisIIIherent weakness without removing it: His Girl Friday, while

Il easily eclipses its original, remains a flawed film, though theIl:tlUreof the flaw becomes somewhat different ..

The attempt at balancing the two issues has been abandoned:1 he first twenty minutes of His Girl Friday leaves us in no doubtwhere the focus of our interest is to be. The Front Page beginswith prison officiaIs testing the gallows; His Girl Friday opens inIhe offices of the Morning Post and the first twenty minutes­which, apart from sorne snatches of transposed dialogue, have nocquivalent in the earlier film-are concerned exclusively with therdationship between Hildy and Walter, the Earl Williams hangingcxisting (at this stage) purely as a counter in Walter's moves. TheEarl Williams plot is kept secondary throughout the film andIhough we are not left with quite the same sense of cynicalIriviality at the conclusion, a marriage relationship being inquestion, wc are, 1think, stillleft with considerable uneasiness andùissatisfaction.

To pass from The Front Page to His Girl Friday is to be madeaware all over again of Hawks's genius. His creative collaborationwith his actors goes far beyond the efficient professionalism ofMilestone. Many small touches of comic invention through gestureand expression give the film its surface aliveness. Two tiny ex­amples to represent this: (1) Grant learns that Hildy is gettingmarried tomorrow; one watches the determination to prevent thisform on his face like a reflex as tentative strategies flit across hismind-he rubs his hand, touches the phone, then his hand, as ifinstinctively, picks up a carnation from the vase on his desk and

73

Page 38: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

1

slips it in his buttonhole. (2) Much later in the film, Grant lavisheson Bensiger a place on his newspaper and a huge salary (neitherof which Bensiger will in fact ever get) in order to distract himfrom opening his roll-top desk (in which the escaped Earl Williamsis hidden). Prim, fussy little Bensiger, suddenly and for the firsttime carried away, slaps him on the back then, realising what heis doing, timidly retracts his hand, shocked at himself.

The humanisation of the whole film is ultimately traceable to theinitial decision to make Hildy a woman, but it is realised throughthe direction of the actors. 1 want first to consider the differencesarising from the change of Hildy's sex. The first seems surprising,until we remember that this is a Hawks picture: Hildy, appears farmore dominating, confident, and self-reliant ('1 can han dIe him',she tells her fiancé of Walter) than her male COunterpart in TheFront Page. But Hawks's women, independent, even aggressive, asthey may be, are always intensely feminine (even Ann Sheridanin 1 Was a Male War Bride 1) and Hildy's femininity counts for agreat deal. It makes the reporters' admiration for her immediatelycomprehensible. Hawks gets it, beautifully, both ways: she istwice the man Pat O'Brien Was (ready, if necessary, to rugger­tackle a witness to officiaI incompetence_an incident, done withterrifie panache, which is not in The Front Page), yet she neverceases to be very much a Woman. Her femininity makes her desireto 'be respectable, lead a halfway normallife', to 'have babies andtake care of them and give them cod liver oil' intrinsically moreimportant. It also adds a new dimension to the camaraderie inthe press-room.

The scene with Earl Williams in the death-cell (no equivalent inThe Front Page) is beautifully judged. Behind it is the highlyequivocal 'mission' of the Morning Post: to get Earl Williamsreprieved on the grounds of insanity (the plea is justifiable_Williams is merely a pawn in a political game-yet Walter Burnsis going to exploit it to make journalistic capital). Hildy fastenson the one point Earl remembers from listening to soap-boxorators-'Production for use: everything should be made use of'­and prompts him with it to support the insanity plea: what was he

74

,i

1

/lis Girl Friday: Mollie Malloy upbraids the journalists

thinking of when he shot the policeman?-the gun was in his hand-'production for use'? The moraUty is dubious, and Hawks keepsus aware ofthis by slightly emphasising the pressure Hildy puts onEarl. At the same time Hildy is but translating into journalesewhat is obviously true-Williams is, if not insane, at least un­balanced. Clouding the issue further is Hildy's sympathy forWilliams: the scene is beautifully realised as a meeting betweentwo people, and what is most important in it cannot be conveyedby quoting the script. Its most important moment is the line'Good-bye, Earl; good luck,' as Hildy leaves. The camera is at adistance from the two characters. We see Earl hunched in hiswretched cage, Hild y leaving to freedom; the essence of the momentis the precise attitudes in which they are seen, and the completelyunsentimental, yet gentle and sympathetic, way in which RosalindRussell delivers the commonplace line.

The importance of another woman's presence when MollieMalloy upbraids the journalists for callousness should also be

75

Page 39: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

\

His Girl Friday: Walter Burns (Cary Grant), Bruce Baldwin and Hildy Johnson

obvious. Hawks gives more weight to this scene than Milestone:the men are more affected by Mollie, their card-game broken up,and one feels that this is due in part to the other woman'spresence. Hildy's condemnatory 'Gentlemen of the Press!' as shesurveys them from the doorway, really makes itself fell.

His Girl Friday's peculiarly sharp flavour derives from itsdisturbing complexity of tone, felt even in the relativc1y uncloudedcomedy of the opening. Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), Hildy'sfiancé, is (unlike his opposite number in The Front Page) abeautifully created character who, at this stage of the film, is notridiculous. He represents a life of unadventurous respectability,certainly, but Hawks encourages the actor to build up a character­isation at times almost touching. His innocent reactions to Walter

Burns, for whom he discovers an immediate liking, show generosityas much as stupidity, and his treatment of Hildy is gentle andconsiderate. Our reaction when Walter sets out deliberately tomake him ridiculous is therefore not unquestioning approval: our

76

11I11',lIreralready contains elements of discomfort. ln the central1'.1',:.agesthis complexity becomes far more pronounced: we movedllllptly from the very funny, fast, cut-and-thrust dialogue ofIII<'journalists to Mollie Malloy's attempted suicide (which HawksIILlkes more abrupt, hence more devastating, than Milestone),111<'11as quickly into the broad farce of Mrs Baldwin's kidnapping1,\,Diamond Louie. As we laugh at the exchanges between Grant1111\Russell, and the complications arising from the incursions ofItIllCC'S mother, the Sheriff, the Mayor, we cannot forget that1':11'1Williams is suffocating inside the roll-top desk, never out of1 :lInera-range for long. Our feelings about Earl and Mollie work,11',ainstour response to the slick, cynical brilliance of WalterIlurns, making us question our readiness to laugh at Ît. By the end,Walter's ethos is thoroughly undermined, as Hawks and the',niptwriters drive him to excess after excess ('1 don't care if there's;\ million dead,' he yells into a phone when, while ordering the1ront page of his paper clear, he is reminded of the Chinese,'arthquake). Unfortunately, the film is unable to follow through1 Ile implications of this: the implicit judgement on Walter Burns;\IldaIl he stands for is never allowed much force, and the personalrdationship is resolved rather easily in the man's typicallylIlexplicit admission that he loves the woman. We cannot feel (as1 Ile film evidently wishes us to) that Hildy has made a satisfactorychoice: the life Walter offers her strikes us as at lcast as constrictingas the respectability offered by Bruce.

The flaw in His Girl Friday resemblcs that in Bringing up Baby:1 he choice offered Hildy is much too narrow to be acceptable, thesurrender to irresponsibility too easily made, the alternative toOglibly rendered ridiculous (given the alternatives the film offers,the only morally acceptable ending would be to have Hildy walkout on both men; or to present her capitulation to Walter astragic). Surrender to irresponsibility seems to be a constanttemptation for Hawks: it offers, in the comedies, an escape fromthe constricting routines of modern society which parallels themore valid escape offered by group societies in the adventure films.This temptation gives the comedies their peculiar intensity. When

77

Page 40: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

it is adequately countered by opposition or control, the result canbe a masterpiece like Scarface or Monkey Business; at other times,as in Bringing up Baby and His Girl Priday, it creates a seriousimbalance. Hawks's comedies disturb and disconcert; but wemust differentiate c1earlybetween the disturbance that results froma fully realised, fully organised work of art, and the uneasinessproduced by unresolved or unbalanced elements in a flawedwork.

Monkey Business

Scarface apart, Hawks's greatest comedy is Monkey Business. Herethe disturbing elements that characterise the comedies areassimilated into an entirely coherent, perfectly proportioned whole.

Like Bringing up Baby, Monkey Business begins with an absent­minded Cary Grant (this time Professor Barnaby Fulton); buthere the background to the absent-mindedness is not a skeletaldinosaur and an equally arid fiancée, but an apparently successfuland stable marriage. Edwina (Ginger Rogers) is indeed remarkablypatient and sympathetic. They are going to a party; after a fewunsuccessful attempts ta get her husband to carry out some verysimple instructions about putting on and offappropriate lights andc10sing a door with himself on the outside, she gives up and theyseule down to work on his preoccupation. It takes him some timeeven to realise that they haven't gone out. Briefly they discuss theirmarriage (and wiU do so again in the film's central-in aU ways­scene): their lives have become something of a routine. Theroutine has bcen broken tonight, certainly, by staying away from aparty; but they have stayed home for inteUectual reasons; theyrecaUanother partythey once stayed home from for non-intellectualreasons, with regret that that doesn't happen any more. We alsonotice that Edwina treats Barnaby as if he were a young andslightly retarded child. Soon Hank Entwhistle (Hugh Marlowe)arrives, an old flame of Edwina's, now a friend-of-the-family. Thethree have a very civilised relationship, with no apparent tensions;though there is a certain amount of playful harping on whetherEdwina shouldn't have married Hank. If on the whole we still

78

Monkey Business: Edwina, Barnaby and Mr Oxly

have the impression of a happy, stable marriage, we have come tofcel, l think, that the happiness and stability depend on thesuppression of quite a lot that is never mentioned and scarcelythought about. No one would guess the development of MonkeyBusiness from this opening; but the seeds have aU been planted.

Barnaby's preoccupation is a drug, tentatively christened B-4(they can advertise it as 'B-4 and after'), which he is supposed tobe discovering: a drug to restore people's youth. Barnaby can't getthe ingredients right. Unkn()wn to anyone, the drug is mixedcorrectly and poured into the laboratory drinking water supply byan escaped chimpanzee; the main part of Monkey Business startsfrom this premise. ln the first half of the film Barnaby and Edwinadrink the watcr in turn and revert to teenagers; in the second halfthey drink an overdose simultaneously and revert to young children(in aU cases without physical change beyond such things asimproved vision and cured back-aches).

They do not revert to the teenagers they once were. We are told

79

Page 41: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

nothing about Barnaby's youth, but we do not believe, from theadult we have seen, that he ever had crew-cuts, drove sports carsrecklessly over town, wore far-out socks, ties, jackets. We are toldthat in her teens Edwina was a serious and dedicated student ofichthyology: we cannot imagine her as either the wildly undisci­plined and demanding teenager or the shy, shrinking virgin thatshe alternates between under the influence of the drug. 'B-4'releases aIl the things they weren't. There is a splendid momentwhen Barnaby (buying his sports car) sees the legs of his boss'ssecretary Miss Laurel (Marilyn Monroe) walking past under abillboard and recognises their owner from them unhesitatingly. Itis so funny in itself that we may miss the essential point: earlierin the film she asked him to examine her stockings, and the jokethen derived from his seeing only the stockings, not what wasinside them. He has registered the legs subconsciously only; and itis the subconscious that B-4 releases. What Barnaby records(with reference both to his own and Edwina's behaviour underthe influence of the drug) is 'Complete reversaI of normal behaviourpattern.'

The comedy of the first half of Monkey Business is so fast andfunny that we scarcely have time to realise what is happening. Thesecond reversion over, Barnaby and Edwina go to the laboratoryto record reactions-and perhaps to destroy the formula (themixture they think has affected them, in fact perfectly innocuous).It is difficult to see what more can happen. Both are subdued andrestless: we sense things uns poken between them. Then they-andwe-begin to grasp the full implications of their behaviour.Barnaby has flirted with, and been kissed by, Miss Laurel; Edwinahas demanded a divorce from her 'cruel' husband and contactedHank Entwhistle; both have cast off aIl inhibitions, aIl sense ofdecorum and responsibility. Barnaby confronts Edwina with thefacts; she hedges, saying, 'It was just the formula.' To whichBarnaby retorts, 'Oh, l understand it was the formula that broughtit out .... ' He talks of'subconscious aversion', 'buried resentments';theyare brought to admit that they are 'having doubts' about theirmarriage. ln fact, more even than their marriage is in question:

80

Monkey Business: Barnaby, Edwina and Miss Laurel

the whole basis of their lives. The drug has released aIl those

impulses on the suppression of which their past, and theirpresent and future, stability depend. Monkey Business is at onceHawks's most consistently funny film, and the one in which hemoves closest to tragedy.

Having reached the brink, Barnaby and Edwina move hastilyback: he determines to destroy the formula-its implications aretoo subversive and disturbing, it undermines the whole of civilisedexistence. At that very moment Edwina turns on the laboratory tapfor water for coffee, and Barnaby, slightly on edge, points out thatit's not drinking water and directs her to the water in the cooler, inwhich the effective drug is mixed. A moment, for the audience, ofextreme panic: a world of subversion and disruption opens upbefore us: what further can the drug reveal about the Fultons'lives-about our lives?

The panic is fully justified by the sequel. One is not surprisedat the widespread complaints that the last part of Monkey Business

81

Page 42: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

goes too far and ceases to be funny; but for those stable enough toaccept them the excesses to which Hawks-with ruthless logic­pushes things are the most brilliant part of the film. The reversionto childhood has the effect of removing finally aIl restraints, aIlresponsibility. Barnaby and Edwina can now do aIl the things theyreally wanted to do as adults. The 'subconscious aversions' and'buried resentments' come out in the scene where they slosh paintover each other with increasing ferocity. Previously, faced withthe presence oflipstick on Barnaby's face after his drive with MissLaurel, Edwina has responded with a charming, sophisticatedirony behind which one sensed Suppressed jealousy; now shecatapaults Miss Laurel's backside and tries to assault her. Barnaby,learning that Hank is coming to the house, gets a gang of boysdressed as redskins to lure him to a pole, tie him to it, and halfscalp him.

At the end of the film order is restored, but not before aIlBarnaby's colleagues have drunk overdoses of B-4 and swungaround the laboratory with the chimpanzee, squirting each otherwith soda-water. Man reverts, in the course of the film, notmere1y to childhood but right back to the ape stage, via theintermediate stage of savagery (the redskins). We have alreadymet the collocation of infant, savage, and ape in the gangsters ofScarfacej the rather similar principle behind two very differentfilms should now be clear. Both insist on the savagery that underliescivilised life. ln discussing Only Angels Have Wings 1 drewattention to the paralle1s that can be drawn between Hawks andConrad, and used Monkey Business and Heart of Darkness to stressthe great gulf that divides them. It is true, of course, that Hawkshas no equivalent to show for one of the most terrible works infiction; yet thematically (or, if you prefer, in terms of fundamentalassumptions about life) the paralle1 strikingly holds.

The final resolution is simple and beautiful. The water contain­ing the drug has been removed before anyone realised what Wasin it; the professors are trying to encourage the monkey to repeatits fortuitous success. Meanwhile, Barnaby and Edwina stayhome from a night out for non-intellectual reasons. There is no

82

pretence that anything has been solved-what solution could therehc to such an analysis of the predicament of civilised man?-but1 he two face their lives in a spirit of acceptance. Barnaby seemslather more purposeful and in control of things, Edwina lesslIIaternal: perhaps she has learnt something from her readiness('arlier to accept a nine-month-old baby as her husband, onpurely circumstantial evidence?

The reversions in Monkey Business, like the anti-social behaviourof the gangsters of Scarface, strike sympathetic chords in aIl of us;1 he unflagging zest of the film suggests that they strike sympatheticchords in Hawks. This disturbing ambivalence of feeling-thesimultaneous attraction to the rational and the instinctive, thecivilised and the primitive-is central to much of Hawks's work.We never reach anything remotely approaching 'the horror-thehorror' of Heart of Darkness; if the descent into primitiveness ofMonkey Business conveys a sense of dangerous uncontrol it conveyssimultaneously a joyous exhilaration. Our primitive selves respond,our civilised selves tell us to be ashamed of the response: this is thetension that underlies Monkey Business, and Hawks here keeps theconflicting impulses perfectly in balance, without sacrifice ofvitality.

If Monkey Business is the greatest of Hawks's comedies, it islinally because it is the most organic. Once the principle has beengrasped, every detail of the film fits into place. Barnaby's boss MrOxly (Charles Coburn), contemplating with unqualified admirationthe imbecilic cavortings of a supposedly rejuvenated chimpanzeesuggests, near the beginning of the film, the folly ofhuman desiresand reminds us of the connection between the childish and thesenile. The 'half-infant' Monroe character stands as an example oflully developed immaturity. Edwina's mother adds a furthercomplexity by showing us that Edwina's early behaviour under thedrug-her reversion to helpless, trembling virginity-is just whatthe mother likes to see, conforming to her image of what a girlshould be. Edwina's very first action after taking the drug-thedropping of a fish down Oxly's trousers-with its ironic appropri­ateness to the dedicated student of ichthyology and its combining

83

Page 43: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

of an irresponsible teenage joke with inescapable sexual overtones,shows us very economically the discrepancy between what she wasand what the drug alIows her to become. Her later assumptionthat the naked infant that has strayed into the house is herdrasticalIy retrogressed husband is anticipated not only in hermotherly handling of Barnaby at the beginning, but by her half­gleeful talk about the possibility of his reverting to infancy in thecoffee-making scene half-way through. The image of the eminentlycivilised and scholarly Barnaby daubed with war-paint andexecuting a war-dance with a gang of kids round a bound andpetrified Hank, at whom he brandishes a lethal-looking pair ofscissors, crystallises (with its simultaneous sense of the loss ofcontrol and the gaining of vitality) the ambivalent feeling of thewhole film. There are no irrelevances: the comic invention is thefunnier for being so satisfyingly organic.

1 Was a Male War Bride

1 Was a Male War Bride (released in Great Britain as Vou Can'tSleep Here, but there seems to be general agreement now to call itby its right name) stands apart from the other comedies. Besidesbeing thematically independent, it lacks the organic constructionof Monkey Business or Bringing up Baby. Its general movement isconsistent enough: we folIow Captain Henri Rochard (FreeFrench army, occupying Germany just after the Second WorldWar)-Cary Grant again-through progressive humiliations, inthe first half at the hands of a woman, in the second imposed byofficialdom, until the logical culmination has him disguised as aWAAC calIed Florence, in a wig made from a horse's tail. Thisgeneral movement is realised in episodcs loosely strung together.

That this is the least funny of Hawks's successful comedies,however (for it is on the whole successful), lies in its very nature.No other comedy, surely, has looked so drab. The credit sequence,with Grant riding in a jeep past acres ofbomb ruins, sets the tone.The settings-military offices, bare corridors, dark inn-room-areuniformly dingy, the lighting even more subdued than usual in aHawks comedy; there are many night scenes. Even when the film

84

moves briefly out into open country there is no brilliance. Thewomen are in uniform throughout. An oppressive dinginess hangsover the whole film, even in the sequences of most extremecomedy. It noticeably slows down the tempo-there is little hereof the invigorating élan of the other comedies. Significantly,despite the fact that its settings are far removed from those ofnormal society (military HQ, hostels, troopship), this is of aIlHawks's films the one that makes the closest contact with therealities ofthe modern world: it is the darkest ofhis comedies, andthe one that gains most from being seen in the context of theadventure films. Its oppressive atmosphere contrasts strikinglywith the exhilarating freshness, the sense of uncluttered freedom,that characterises the extra-social groups of the adventure films. Itisn't a matter of physical constriction: the men in the (more or less)besieged jail of Rio Bravo are spiritualIy and emotionalIy freerthan the characters of 1 Was a Male War Bride.

The film uses its satire on the bureaucracy of the militarymachine to attack certain characteristic trends of modern America.At the beginning European muddle sets off American super­efficiency: Henri cannot learn the way to Heidelberg from eitherhis German driver or the civilians the driver questions. While theyfrantically contradict each other, Henri leans out and asks anAmerican soldier, who tells him with quiet precision. This imageof America is sustained throughout the film, notably through thecharacter of Lieutenant Catherine Gates (Ann Sheridan) whoaccompanies Henri on his mission and accomplishes it for himwhile he is in prison owing to a misunderstanding which shedeliberately omits to clear up. The film is chiefly concerned withthe corollary of this efficiency: ruthlessness, totallack of flexibility,tendency totreat human beings as stereotypes. If the film falIs intotwo halves, in the first of which Henri is up against the Americanfemale, in the second the whole bureaucratic machine, it is notbroken-backed; both are depicted as the product of the samenational tendency. Lieutenant Gates is Hawks's extremest andmost explicit portrait of the modern American female, aggressiveand domineering, determinedly subjugating the male. With this

85

Page 44: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

...• -----1 Was a Male War Bride: Cap tain and Madame Rochard (Cary Grant andAnn Sheridan)

goes an extreme sexual prudishness: she is reluctant even to allowHenri to rub her back. It is one of the strengths of the film that weare made to register all this as a matter of conditioned response,while we are repeatedly made aware of the character's submergedfemininity.

The pivot of the film is the scene culminating in Henri's andCatherine's discovery that they aren't going to have a wedding­night, at least not together. Hawks and his players convey, in aminute or so, the sense of a mature relationship developing, amutual tenderness and respect, with a much-mellowed Catherine.Certain sequences in the first half of the film point forward to this:the moments of direct physical contact (Henri rubbing her back),where we become aware of Catherine as a woman, beneath themilitary uniform and the puritanical manner; the excursions intonatural surroundings, culminating in the beautiful and funnyscene in the middle of a haystack where the two characters'mutual attraction is mutually acknowledged. After the wedding-

86

night scene, when officialdom takes over, Catherine becomes againthe militant female, gloating over her husband's discomfitures. Theone central scene 'places' all that precedes and all that follows.l Was a Male War Bride pushes furthest the sexual reversaI

characteristic of Hawksian comedy. Henri's progress as an 'alien

spouse offemale military personnel en route to the United Statesunder Public Law 271', from the moment when he learns he iseligible to travel as his wife's bride, leads inevitably to the actualassumption offemale disguise. The process gives opportunities forHawks's funniest sex-reversal jokes: Henri, in a room full of warbrides, listens to the fashion news coming over the loudspeakersystem and, on learning that the 'natural bust-line' is returning,surreptitiously transfers his wallet to his hip pocket. Yet one isnever in doubt as to the character's masculinity. Henri has aresilience characteristic of the Hawks hero, whether in adventurefilm or comedy. When, during his nocturnal search for somewhereto sleep, he starts learning to knit with the girl at the enquiry deskof one of the 'female buildings', there is no loss of male dignity.By means of his sardonic humour and emotional balance andmaturity, he preserves his sanity and manliness to the end.

The difference between Henri Rochard and the heroes of theadventure films is purely environmental. The charming scenebetween Henri and the private from Brooklyn, with its warmintuitive sympathy, takes us into the atmosphere of the adventurefilms and their male groups. Henri is quite distinct from the heroesofthe other comedies. The disasters that befall the protagonists ofBringing up Baby, Monkey Business, Man's Pavourite Sport?, andScarface are directly related to weaknesses or lacks in their owncharacters. ln Henri, a protagonist from Hawks's adventure filmsis transplanted into an environment he isn't equipped to cope with:but it is the environment, not the character, that is intrinsically'wrong'. Henri is the Hawks hero isolated. ln nearly all theadventure films the hero opera tes within a more or less unifiedgroup, to which he gives strength but from which he also derivesit. Henri has no support beyond his own resource and resilience.

The humiliations Henri undergoes culminate logically not only

87

Page 45: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 46: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

escape from?) the organised modern society in which the comediesare nominally set.

Hawks's groups contrast with those in John Ford's cavalryWesterns. The theme of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is the relation­

ship of the individual to the cavalry troop and its traditions. Theemphasis is on the need for submission to a discipline. The men­and the women (the education of Olivia Dandridge in becomingan 'army wife' is a leading thematic and narrative thread)-aredefined by their allegiance to an established code of behaviour.The tradition-which offers a definition of manhood that includesloyalty, gallantry, and personal initiative side by side with courtes yand consideration for women as the representatives of the civilisedvalues-ennobles all who subscribe to its influence and disciplines.Consider the film's memorable scenes-the operation in themoving wagon during the thunderstorm, with the Major's wifesinging 'Round her leg she wore a yellow garter' with the woundedman; the death and burial of General (or Trooper) Clay; thepresentation of the silver watch to Captain Brittles on his retire­ment-and this sense of the tradition and the values it embodies

will quickly be felt as an all-pervading influence, determining thetone andfeel of the film.

There is nothing of this in Hawks: the idea of tradition seemsnot to exist for him. Ford's cavalrymen, like Conrad's sailors, arereferred back to the traditions of the service to which they belong;in Air Force the group loyalty, and loyalty to the plane that unifiesthe group, develops spontaneously between the men and themachine: there is no sense that the men are being formed by valuessanctioned by an accumulated tradition. The soldiers in TheThing from Another World are a group of men who happen to besoldiers; the characters of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon are cavalrymenfirst, individuals second. AlI of Hawks's groups are ad hoc collec­tions of individuals who remain individuals first and foremost;their responsibilities are to personal ties.

ln an age when the sense of traditions is collapsing, it is inevitablethat Hawks, whose work shows little sense of the past and whosecharacters live in and for the present, seems the more modern

artist. It is significant that the prevalent emotion in Ford'sWesterns is nostalgia, and that it is so difficult, in his work, todistinguish the valid response to valid ideals from sentimentality.But the advantage is certainly not all on Hawks's side. What onemisses in his work consistently-it is strongly present in Ford's­is a sense of the potentialities of civilisation. He is a primitive: ormore precisely, a curious mixture of the primitive and thesophisticated, which is why the relationship between the two issuch a conspicuous feature of his work (Bringing up Baby, MonkeyBusiness, Hatari!). As such he has his own particular strengths:the importance in his work of the spontaneous and instinctive, theemphasis on physical contact and physical experience. It is trueof most artists that their strengths carry attendant limitations.

What one registers as a permanent immaturity in Hawks-theinability to come to grips with modern civilisation-goes hand inhand with the maturity of his heroes. A favourable condition forthe existence of their maturity is the absence of organised society;which suggests that the maturity is somewhat limited. It remains,however, within the limitations, a perfectly valid concept. Thematurity lies in the man's inner freedom from constraints, hisability to trust his own spontaneous impulses of attraction andrepulsion; in his achieved sense of identity, based on a defining ofhis responsibilities and allegiances; in his preservation of inde­pendence. The Hawks hero, typically, is committed to nothingbeyond the preservation of his self-respect and any personal tieshe chooses to acknowledge. The ideal environment for maturitythus conceived is a society more informaI, less stratified-in factmore primitive-than our own, a society in which the maximumpossible freedom co-exists with the minimum necessary security.The Hawks group always has a leader, but he is more a benevolentfather-figure (Wayne in Rio Bravo and Hatari! is the perfectexample) than a dictator: in several films he is addressed as 'Papa'.When he becomes a dictator, as in Red River, the group eschewshim. He is always a naturalleader, neither elected nor imposed,holding his position purely because he embodies the Hawksianmaturity more completely than anybody else. He is more an

91

Page 47: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

example to be foIlowed than a commander: a touchstone againstwhich success and failure can be measured. Despite the presenceof this leader-figure, one's chief impression is of a society withouta government: the laws are naturallaws that are learnt throughexperience (as Colorado learns responsibility in Rio Bravo), notcommandments imposed from on high. The recurring pattern(A Girl in Every Port, Red River, The Big Sky, Hatari!) of arelationship beginning in hostility and rivalry and passing throughexchanged blows or sorne kind of trial such as target-shooting tomutual acceptance and respect, cornes to look like ritual, and oneis tempted to talk in terms of clubs and initiation ceremonies; to doso is misleading, because such 'initiation' is always treated inpurely personal terms, never as a condition of group membership.What almost gets Chips (Gérard Blain) excluded from the groupin Hatari! is the suspicion that he is meanly self-seeking, lackingthe outgoing impulses which vital relationship demands. There isno rigid test of manhood: Pockets (Red Buttons), who is terrifiedof animaIs and incapable of fighting anyone, is a fully acceptedmember of the hunters' society in Hatari! Within the group, onefeels an absence of civilised sensibility, but the strong presence ofthe uncultivated, instinctive sensibility that must underlie anyvalid civilisation: intuitive-sympathetic contact, a sturdily positive,generous spirit.

Air Force

Hawks seems litde interested in Air Force: it is scarcely alluded toin his fairly inclusive interviews. It was, we are told, his 'contribu­tion to the war effort'. 1 approached it with litde enthusiasm,expecting at best an efficient, external war film. It proved to be oneof his greatest works: in feeling perhaps the noblest.

It is less completely personal than, say, Only Angels Have Wingsonly in that it is less typical; if one made a parody of Hawks, AirForce would be almost untouched by it. None the less, onlyHawks could have made it. It bears an essential relationship to the'typical' films, is superior to sorne (for instance, Hatari!); and isinformed by a deep commitment. The imposed situation-the

92

action exclusively concerning a bomber and its crew-seems tohave acted as a discipline, supplying Hawks with a congenialtheme while withholding opportunities of introducing thecharacters and situations that recur in the mainstream films.

Air Force has the perfect proportion one finds in so many ofHawks's films. It is built up on a cumulative rhythm of alternation(flights alternating with episodes on various Pacific islands)moving steadily to the climax. 1 have had to take that climax ontrust: though promised in the officiaI synopsis and referred to incontemporary reviews, it is inexplicably missing from the copyin the British Film Archive. The main body of the film is framedbetween two corresponding moments: the first when, after thenews of the attack on Pearl Harbor has been received over the

radio, planes of the air fleet diverge; the second when the MaryAnn, after accidentally sighting a Japanese fleet, joins anotherforce of bombers and guides them to the attack for the Battle ofthe Coral Sea. We never entirely lose sight of the Mary Ann'sfunction as a single unit of a vast organism; but between thosetwo moments she is alone. This principle of single-units-of-a-vast­organism is basic to the film. We watch the integration of theindividual into the crew of the Mary Ann; the integration of theMary Ann into the large force; and the film ends with preparationsfor a massed attack on Tokyo.

The Mary Ann becomes a symbol of preserved order­preserved by teamwork to which each individual contributes-ina chaotic world. The internaI order within the plane, with itsaccompanying sense of security, is played off against shots of thedesolated, bombed airfields on which the plane lands, improvisedbeacons flaring through the darkness, menacing jungle aIl round.By stressing its basis in the realistic and the practical, Hawkspurges the idealism of the men's feeling for their plane of anysuggestion of sentimentality. The plane is the focus of loyalty thatunifies the group.

The opening scene of farewell-the Captain's goodbye to hiswife, his meeting with the mother of the very young crew-member-has in its simplicity an intensity that evokes Dunson's parting

93

Page 48: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

from Fen at the beginning of Red River. Though brief, it links themen with a stable background of civilised emotions, from whichthey are eut off for the remainder of the film. They carry theircivilisation with them, in their own miniature society. Two smallreminders of civilised values are carried within the Mary Ann: themascot-toy sent by the Captain's small son, and the dog Tripoli,picked up on Wake Island. One is struck here by the total absenceof sentimentality in Hawks's treatment of ideas that positivelyencourage it. The 'charm' neither saves the Captain's life nor isused to make a poignant-ironie point when he dies-it remains

merely a concrete reminder of what has been left behind. Tripoliis handed to Corporal Weinberg (George Tobias) by the marineson Wake Island who know (and the crew of the Mary Ann knowit too) that they will never get off. The dog is the sole remainingfocus for emotions associated with home and peacetime, and thesolicitude of the crew for him is much more than sentimentalityover one small animal.

The crew of the Mary Ann are less strongly individualised thanis usual with Hawks's characters: their separate identities mergeinto their group identity. The relative evaluation of individualismand group responsibility, with the possibility of reconciling thetwo to their mutual benefit, is principally developed throughthe rear-gunner Winocki (John Garfield). The central thread ofthe first half of Air Force is Winocki's integration into the group.At the beginning, his determination to preserve independence isreinforced by a personal grudge against the Captain, who beforethe take-off tells him 'We aIl belong to this aeroplane. Every manhas got to rely on every other man to do the right thing at the righttime.' Against Winocki is set the Mary Ann's navigator, son of afamous flier, who wanted to be a pilot but who accepts his role asa unit of the group, and whose personal triumph cornes when hefinds the airfield on Wake Island through almost impenetrablestorm-clouds.

Winocki's individualism is at first aggressive and destructive;we trace the process, not of its suppression, but of its conversioninto a positive force. It is Winocki who accepts responsibility for

94

smuggling Tripoli on board, making explicit what the dog means10 everyone: the self-styled outcast becomes a spokesman for thevalues of the crew. The integration which follows carries forWinocki a sense offulfilment: far from losing integrity, he gains it.That fulfilment finds its expression in action when the plane is hitand the Captain mortally wounded. The crew baIe out, Winockiremains-against orders-and brings plane and captain to theground, in a crash-landing. Winocki has achieved his ambition tobe a pilot, but the personal ambition has been assimilated intosomething nobler: it is the triumph of individualism placed at theservice of something beyond itsdf, plane and Captain constitutingIhe focal point of group unity. Despite its officially hierarchicnature, the crew appears an ideal democracy in microcosm: theatmosphere is one of voluntary service, of discipline freely accepted;a perfect balance is achieved between individual fulfilment andthe responsibility of each member to the whole. The crew enactthe values they are fighting for.

Winocki is the centre of the film's moment of maximumintensity: the scene where a young Hier is machine-gunned by ancnemy fighter-pilot, first as he hangs, defenceless, in mid-air fromthe straps of his parachute, then as, gravely wounded, parachutestill attache d, he tries to crawl to coyer. The sequence is given usIhrough Winocki's consciousness: he watches, and it is he whobrings down the fighter and 'executes'-we feel it as that-thepilot as he struggles out. An eye for an eye, and very horrible; yetbehind the action there is so powerful an accumulation of moraloutrage that one accepts it. Reduced to intellectual ideas, thescene is banal: a man sees something horrible, feels revulsion, isspurred to violent reprisaI. ln terms of the communication offeeling, it is intensely moving: we see a hitherto unthinking manreach, through instinctive reaction, conscious moral awareness,and we share with him, through the force of the images, thecxperience of reaching it. The whole film, and particularly thisscene, have doubtless benefited from the time-Iapse since AirForce was made. The superficiallevel of anti- Japanese propaganda,presumably taken for granted in 1943, now seems almost entirely

95

Air Force: the machine-gunning of the parachutisr ~

Page 49: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 50: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

illusory, and the real theme emerges, stripped of aIl nationalisticpettiness. Even the climactic bombing of the Japanese fleetcornes across in its context more as the logical symbolic culmina­tion of a dramatic poem about the group than as the expression ofnationalist feeling.

Every scene in the film is informed by Hawks's concept of thegroup built on shared values, common purpose,intuitive sympathy,and mutual dependence. Three sequences stand out. The first is

the scene in which (on arrivaI at Manila) the Crew Chief (HarryCarey) receives the news of his son's death, and his few pitifulsurviving belongings wrapped in a handkerchief. It provides theonly moment in Air Force that directly recalls anotherHawks film, in the father's comment, 'Not much to show fortwenty years' (compare Only Angels Have Wings). The effect hereis even more poignant than in the earlier film, because of ourawareness of the man's feelings about the son: the pride of a manwho in middle age is still a sergeant in the son who at twenty isalready a lieutenant (the actor beautifully conveys humiliationwithout resentment, and a sense that he is fulfilling through theboy the ambitions he had for himself). No softening is allowed:the boy didn't die a hero, he 'didn't even get off the ground'.Then, abruptly, as the father stands holding the handkerchief, araid begins, the Mary Ann must be got off the ground, privategrief is submerged in group action.

Any attempt to describe the sequence of Captain Quincannon'sdeath will make it sound insufferably sentimental; its apparentexcesses are carried, magnificently, by the intensity of feelinggenerated and by our awareness of its logic as one of the film'sculminating expressions of group feeling (according to Hawks, thescene was written by William Faulkner). The Captain dies in ahospital bed surrounded by his crew, believing that the Mary Ann(condemned as beyond repair) is taking off with themall aboard.Gradually the crew fall in with the illusion, each man acting hisrole in the group, until the Navigator is asked for the direction('Due east-into the sunrise') and the Captain dies. The deathscene becomes a group ritual. One cannot talk of sentimentality

98

when emotion and meaning are so beautifully integrated into theLotalstructure.

The third scene-a long sequence interrupted by the incidentof the machine-gunning of the parachutist-is the film's supremeachievement (unless the missing climax outdoes it): the rebuilding,against orders, of the Mary Ann by its crew, with spare partsstolen from other wrecks. The intensity of this scene derives fromseveral sources. There is the controlled suspense of the fightagainst time: the plane must be off the ground before the Japanesereach the airfield, or the crew must blow it up. The suspense istightened in a tremendous accelerando:as the Japanese break outof the jungle, the explosives are in readiness, and Weinberg, on thenose, is still tightening the last propeller screw as the plane ismoved into position for take-off. The context of the scene isimportant, following the Captain's death: the death-take-off wasa lie, the lie must be made truth. Above aIl the scene is the supremeexample of group expression. With the resurrection of the plane,as the focus for loyalties, the group can survive the death of itsleader. The scene is profoundly stirring, the men's fervourspreading so that the group attracts others to its aid like a magnet,the marines forming a human chain to refuel the engines. When theMary Ann takes off, it is piloted by Lieutenant Rader, the fighter­pilot who earlier scoffed at the 'responsibility' and 'dependence'of work in a bomber.

The original film ends-apparently-with a crash-Ianding onan Australian beach and a new Mary Ann serving as focal point forthe same crew-members, setting out in the massed attack onTokyo. This gives, clearly, a further 'resurrection', and shows thegroup surviving not only its Captain but its unifying centre.

Air Force has a flawless thematic logic that entirely overcomesone's resistance to an action often far-fetched. lt communicates amagnificently realised sense of fulfilment and wholeness, anddeserves to become a permanent classic of the American cinema.

BalI of Fire

While more typical of the comedies than Air Force is of the

99

Air Force: the rebuilding of the Mary Ann ~

Page 51: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 52: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

adventure films, Bali of Fire is not fully representative (like AirForce, it gets neglected in Hawks's interviews). It hasn't quite theélan of most of the comedies, nor their qualities of excess, despiteits extravagant basic situation (gangster's moll hides out in homeof eight bachelor professors single-mindedly dedicated to work onan exhaustive encyclopedia, on the pretext ofhelping them in theirresearches into slang). Its unusual gentleness is perfectly suited toits essential subject.

Its most obvious re1ationship is to Bringing up Baby: it couldalmost have been made to right the imbalances of the earlier film.Again the favourite Hawksian clash of opposite worlds: on the onehand a world of serious (even when absurd) dedication to learning,on the other a world of total irresponsibility. Only this time thefilm cornes down firmly-though not without qualifications-onthe side of culture and dedication, with the barbarians unequivo­cally routed. The decisive factor-in terms of the director'ssympathies-is the presence of Hawks's oddest group.

What surprises from the outset is the weight given to thededication. Hawks never allows its seriousness to be affected bythe characters' endearing absurdity. The prof essors are conceivedin comic terms that verge on caricature; yet when Miss Totten'ssolicitor, trying to get the encyclopedia pushed to its conclusionwithout further expenditure, tells them to 'Slap it together', weregister the words as brutally insensitive. ln a later scene, thegangsters' shooting-up of the professors' house just for the hell ofit cornes across as totally unfunny. The feeling is of pure moraloutrage: we are far here from the insidious involvement inanarchy of Scarface.

Hawks distinguishes firmly between the absurdity of thecharacters and the seriousness of their work. The professorswander in the park for their lunch-break, together, yet entirelyseparate, aIl talking, yet each in his own world, the field in whichhe is a specialist. Break over, they return to the house and ta the

encyclopedia, and immediately the barriers break down, and theycohere as a group. Separately, each is absurd; united in groupactivity, they take on dignity. The housekeeper, Miss Bragg, is a

102

,t:1

~\

,

f

1

formidable, bossy mother-figure, the professors absurd children:Professor Oddly (Richard Haydn) has stolen a pot ofjam and has tobe reprimanded. But the moment any conflict arises over theirwork, they are the masters-they grow up, and order Miss Braggabout peremptorily. It is not only a matter of dedication. WhenOddly steals a pot of jam he is an individual; when their work isthreatened they are a group.

From the introduction of Sugarpuss, the central thread of thefilm becomes not so much a conflict between two worlds as theirmutual improvement through interaction. Sugarpuss's crude,sensual vitality stimulates the professors' capacity for spontaneousenjoyment; the prof essors' innocence and gentleness develop inSugarpuss a rudimentary conscience and sensitivity. Sugarpuss'sprimitive, if vulgarised, energy apart, Hawks here allows novirtues to the representatives ofirresponsibility. The gangsters arepresented as complacent and brutish; the feeling of the film, in thescenes where Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) is progressively dupedand humiliated by them is very pure: we are never invited to laughat Bertram, only-and then uneasily-at the situations.

This purity of feeling manifests itself in the smallest details ofthe mise-en-scène.When Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews) strikes Cooper'sface and punches him in the belly (Cooper bears traces of Sugar­puss's lipstick), he chucks a lighted cigarette at the dining-tablewhere the other professors are still seated. Professor Robinson(Tully Marshall) drops it with an off-hand, almost unconsciousand instinctive contempt in a coffee-cup, so that it won't mark thetable. The gesture (done quite unobtrusively: Hawks never cutsin to close-up for such things) beautifully expresses the civilisedvalues that place the gangsters' vicious vandalism. The attitude tolearning in general, and the treatment of the Cooper character inparticular, consistently reverses the pattern of feeling in Bringingup Baby. ln Bal! of Fire the movement of the comedy is moreconstructive. It lacks something of the earlier film's flashes ofcrazy invention but it is more balance d, and fundamentally moresensitive.

The balance between the primitive and the civilised is satisfying

1°3

Page 53: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 54: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

coarseness, to suggest that Cooper is being given a group blessing:informaI ritual again plays its part. ln the marriage reminiscencesof Professor Oddly (the only widower in the group) HawksbeautifuUy balances the absurd and the poignant: there is touchingtenderness for the past, and for the dead Genevieve, co-existingwith ludicrous timidity ('1 kissed her hand each night, astonishedat my own boldness'). Throughout the speech, Cooper is pre­occupied with his own imminent (and very different) marriage,and the two become juxtaposed when Oddly produces a lock ofGenevieve's hair which still, he says, looks as if the sunlight werein it (seeing Sugarpuss with the sunlight in her hair first madeCooper aware of his feelings for her). The men sing 'Genevieve,sweet Genevieve', as a group tribute to Oddly; eut to a shot ofSugarpuss alone in her room, brooding and disturbed, the songfrom across the court yard-a gain juxtaposing the two verydifferent women, living and dead. Oddly retires, asking them to goon singing 'Genevieve'. The communal singing expresses groupsolidarity, group nostalgia-Oddly's nostalgia, here experiencedvicariously by the whole group-and regret at lost youth and aUthey have missed (aUthat Bertram, they believe, is to have, for themanother vicarious experience). 'Genevieve' gives way to 'Gaude­amus igitur', which, off-screen, accompanies Bertram as he goesto ask Oddly's advice about marriage. Bertram, however, goes tothe wrong room: in the dark, he makes his speech, intended forOddly, to Sugarpuss: a speech about the relative impurity of hisfeelings for his bride. Sugarpuss gets up and embraces him: shehas found a man who offers her a completelove. Cooper's seriousnessis given great weight in the scene.

l have described this sequence in detail to try to suggest therichness and complexity of the feeling it communicates. Essentialto that richness is the sense of contact, of tenderness communicatedand experience shared through sympathy, that springs from thepresence of the group, felt through the singing even when thecharacters are off-screen. Bal! of Fire may not be the most vivid ofHawks's comedies, but it is an intensely personal film whosemeUowness earns it a special place in one's affections.

106

The Thing from Another World: finding the Flying Saucer

The Thing from Another World

The Thing was dirccted by Christian Nyby, Hawks's editor inRed River and othcr films; Hawks prepared the script and super­vised the production. No one who has secn it can doubt that in aBessentials it is a Hawks film. Not only the perfection of its structureand its close thematic relevance but the who1c style ofthe directionitself (the trcatment of dialogue, for example, with that rapidoverlapping technique developed by Hawks in the comedies)unmistakably expresses Hawks's personality. Beside Hawks'smasterpiece, 17œ Thing is a minor work, but much of the feel ofRio Bravo is there, if in miniature. There is the almost exc1usivelymale group, and the group feeling. There is the Hawksian woman(Margaret Sheridan), the equal of any man, yet intensely feminine.And there is the sense of isolation from any established society.There is also the austere and comfortless setting (in Rio Bravo ajail, here a few Nissen huts in the Arctic wastes), fitting backgroundto Hawks's stoicism. But here there is another, larger context, a

1°7

,

,

Page 55: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

new perspective: outer space. For aIl the strength and resilience ofthe characters, with their characteristic warmth, their admirableresourcefulness, the scene where the men spread themselves outon the ice to discover the shape of the space-ship and find them­selves forming a perfect circle chiIlingly conveys the sense ofman's smaIlness and helplessness in a vast and mysterious universe.Who but Hawks, who in Monkey Business treated man's innatesubversive primitivism as a subject for riotous comedy, couldcounter the feelings of terror induced here with so firm a sense ofhumour and lightness of spirit?

The scene is complex in tone; the flexible groupings, mostly inmedium- or long-shot, keep various contrasted characters-soldiers,scientists, journalist-and their contrasted reactions before ussimultaneously, held in balance against each other, and the dreadis qualified by a continuaI play of humour. Scott y, the journalist,is very exactly realised: he is treated with sympathy but at thesame time with a consistent irony. His responses invariably takethe form of slogans in current journalese: he breaks the awedamazement at the discovery of the space-ship's shape with anenthusiastic cry of 'We've found a flying saucer!' The Thing is tohim an 'intellectual carrot' ('the mind boggles!')-when it hasceased to be a 'Man from Mars'. His final warning to 'Watch theskies' is a good example of the exactness of touch Hawks achieves.It is perfectly in character, and in line with Scotty's other clichés:behind him, as he broadcasts, stand three of the soldiers, strikingmodest-heroic poses with a comic effect the greater for beingunderstated. But it also points to the essential terrors underlyingthe habituaI tone of light comedy: the precariousness of Man'sposition in the universe, at the mercy of whatever forces may beOut There. We have seen what one Thing can do, and grasped thespeed with which it can multiply; what about a hundred Things?A thousand ....

Considered purely as an example of the fifties cycle of films aboutflying saucers and invasions from space, The Thing has severaldistinguishing characteristics. The raison d'être ofmost SF moviesis to provide a field-day for the special effects department: in The

108

Thing there are no superimpositions, no inflated mechanicalmonsters cavorting on one strip of film while human beings shriekand gesticulate on another. ln technique it is simple and rigorous,depending for its suspense and its shocks partly on its construction(the alternation of long and leisurely build-ups and very briefexplosions of violence again evokes Rio Bravo), partly on timingso perfectly judged that after repeated viewings one still jumps,partly on the directness and honesty of the staging of each scene.James Arness, The Thing itself, staggers round a room blazingwhile the other actors, with characteristic Hawksian abandon,fling kerosene over him, and we see the flinging and the blazing inthe same shot. The chief effect of this technical simplicity is todirect our attention where it belongs and where, in SF movies, itseldom goes, to the characters and, through them, to the film'sessential concerns.

ln most SF films the characters are bloodless stereotypes; one'ssympathies are aIl with the monster or the invading force and oneis very disheartened when it is wiped out Capoint ofwhich a few,but only a few, films have made expressive use: King Kong is theobvious example). The Thing gives us sorne grounds for caringabout the survival of the human race. This helps the filmenormously on the 'thriller' level; but, more than this, it isessential to its deeper concerns. The characterisation is notpsychologically detailed, having the simplicity befitting a parable.What makes the characters live is the human values they embody.The affection of the characters for each other reflects that which

Hawks feels for them: an affection warm but unidealising, dignifiedby respect. ln the scenes between the soldiers there is a continuaIsense of living human beings responding to one another with anintuitive awareness the scientists largely lack. There is nothingprofound or remarkable in their dialogue, which is mostly on thelevel of amusing chaff; the effect is conveyed through that relaxedbut mutually responsive acting typical of Hawks's films, on whichthe sense of mutual sympathy Cinits root sense of feeling together)is built.

Hawks's affection for human beings finds its clearest embodiment

1°9

Page 56: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

The Thing from Another World: Cap tain Hcndrcy and Nikki

in the film in the relationship between Captain Hendrey andNikki, Professor Carrington's secretary. Far from being theusual bit of perfunctory love interest, this is an economicallysketched Hawksian man-woman rc1ationship, which perfectlyfulfils an important function.

The central conflict in The Thing is not between humanity anda destructive invader, but between two opposed concepts ofvalue embodied in the two opposed groups whose clash the Thingprecipitates. To Professor Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite)knowledge is the only aim worth living for, its pursuit the justifica­tion for man's existence. Man is constantly retarded in this aim byall that part ofhis nature that he shares with the animaIs: sexualityand emotions. To Carrington the Thing, vegetable, reproducingitself by dropping seeds from the palms of its hands, capable ofneither pleasure nor pain, and evidencing, through its space-ship,an intellectual development enormously in advance of mankind's,becomes an ideal, to be preserved at all costs, even that of

IIO

humanity: if it is superior beyond comparison to mankind, hasn'tit the right to use men as we use, say cattle?

Carrington's position has the strength of a reasoned case.Captain Hendrey, his chief opponent, has nothing behind him butinstinct, and the background of human warmth and spontaneityrepresented by the soldiers. The Thing does indeed use men aswe use cattle (hangs them upside-down with their throats eut likecarcasses in a slaughterhouse and drains their blood); it must at allcosts be destroyed. There is more here than mere self-preservation.It is human relationships that, to Hendrey as to Hawks, give lifeits value, the vital intercourse between human beings: affectionand respect, love and friendship. The Thing represents a logicalextension of all Carrington stands for: without emotions but witha great intellect, it can have nothing to live for but the pursuit ofknowledge. As he says of it admiringly, 'No pleasure, no pain ...no emotions .... Our superior in every way.'

There is no question which side the film is on: it upholds thedevelopment to maturity of the whole human being as againstthat of the intellect in isolation. Its relationship to certain ofHawks's comedies, notably Bringing up Baby and Monkey Business(where Cornthwaite's reappearance as a scientist draws attentionto the connection), is clear. While remaining so different in moodand overt subject-matter, the three films are linked by theirimplication of the failure of scientific interests to develop andmature the whole personality. lt is the tendency of the scientificoutlook to inhibit emotional development that makes possibleBarnaby Fulton's escape into total irresponsibility (MonkeyBusiness) and is at the root of all the humiliations undergone byDavid Huxley (Bringing up Baby); a by no means negligiblesubject in a world becoming increasingly science-orientated.

But The Thing's strength derives partly from its fairness to theother side. Carrington-whi1e he is the perfect opponent of every­thing Hawks, with his 'primitive' feeling for spontaneity andinstinct, stands for-is never made absurd: he is on the contraryconsistently presented as intelligent, dedicated, and courageous,willing to die for his beliefs. There are sorne beautiful moments in

III

Page 57: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

Cornthwaite's performance, behind which we sense Hawks'srespect for professionalism in whatever cause: the humility withwhich he apologises to Hendrey for the vagueness of his informa­tion about the unidentified flying object; the sense of humiliationwhen he admits that he, with his pride in his intellect, is no moreimpressive or useful to the Thing than a cabbage is to us. Theclimax of the film gains great intensity by this determination tokeep us aware of the strength of the opposite position. The Thing,when at last we see it clearly, loses much of its terror. ln mediumlong-shotand from a medium-high angle,it ceases to look huge,andits close likeness to a human being (the human being of a future towhich Carrington looks forward) becomes evident. (1 can'timagine why people find this a weakness of the film: do they reallywant a goggle-eyed robot?) The impossibility of communicationbecomes almost poignant-it looks as if it would be so easy to talkto. It is destroyed: we watch a marvellous, if terrible, beingreduced to a small pile of smouldering ashes, on which the cameralingers to allow the spectator a complex reaction: we have beenmade to respect Carrington's viewpoint sufficiently for us to findthe outcome a triumph not unqualified, a reaction shared by thecharacters on the screen, who stand by in stunned silence. Wealso realise that Hawks's position here is not the simple anti­intellectual one that could be read into Bringing up Baby: the Thinghas been destroyed by science. One of the points that emerges isthat science is for man's use-Carrington's viewpoint would turneverything topsy-turvy, making man the servant of science.

Finally, to compare with the above account there is Hawks's

own. Asked by Peter Bogdanovich whether he was criticisingscientists in The Thing, he replied: 'Oh no, it just worked out thatway. You see, we had to make it plausible-why they let theThing live.'

II2

5: Male Relationships

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

A Girl in Every Port, The Big Sky

A Girl in Every Port is the first example in Hawks's work of 'alove story between two men'; it points forward especially to TheBig Sky. The early film is the more fully realised: but The Big Skyis the more interesting and it has by far the more acceptableresolution.

Dissatisfaction with A Girl in Every Port centres upon a 'happyending' in which the characters remain arrested at an immaturestage of development. Bill (Robert Armstrong), a lady-killer withconquests aIl over the world, and a compulsive need to establishownership by affixing his mark (a tattooed heart and anchor) tothem, appears to lose interest in girls as soon as his relationshipwith Spike (Victor McLaglen) is established. They get drunktogether, after cementing their union by pushing a policeman intothe water; Spike shows interest in a girl in the bar, and Billrepeatedly picks fights to distract Spike's attention from her andkeep it on himself. Bill's lack of feeling for women becomesc1earer still when Spike expresses the need to settle down: Billsees women only as 'sexy skirts' and he can't understand whyanyone should jump ship for one.

The character c1early anticipates Boone in The Big Sky; butBoone's position in the relationship is more firmly defined, hisimmaturity placed and eventually transcended. The ending ofA Girl in Every Port, with its total-and cursorily handled-

II3

Page 58: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

exclusion of the woman from the men's lives, cornes across oddly,given the spirit in which it is offered. Not only is the men'sfriendship-permanently, apparently-confirmed by excludingwomen (and Spike, at least, seems to need them); the relationshipitself hasn't undergone any significant development, arrested at alevel of jolly fisticuffs. Probably it couldn't have been deepenedwithout acknowledgement-both on themen's part and on Hawks's-of its strong homosexual undertones, and much of the film'scharm lies in its innocence. This resolution never again satisfiedHawks; the ending of The Big Sky is not only more complex andsubtle-it shows an altogether more mature awareness.

A secondary-and related-source of dissatisfaction is Hawks'sfailure to realise the potentialities of Louise Brooks. She mightwell have established the tradition of the Hawks woman, but, aftera promising beginning, her part degenerates into a commonplacefigure of female duplicity, simplifying the issues unfairly andmaking it impossible to use the actress's full resources.

The Big Sky is the least of Hawks's Westerns, as surely as RioBravo is the best. One only intermittently senses the depth andintensity of personal involvement that give Red River and RioBravo their concentrated significance. Hawks failed to achievethe right creative relationship with Kirk Douglas, and failed torealise the characterofTeal Eye, the Indian girl: she is meant to beremote and mysterious, but one must feel that her creator under­stands her. However, the film is unmistakably Hawks's, especiallyin its treatment of the male relationship.

ln The Big Sky Hawks places the complex relationships of thetwo men and a girl against the story of the first journey up theMissouri river by white men in a keel-boat; a major weakness isthe looseness of the relationship between the personal story andthe epic background. Like Red River, The Big Sky has as a leadingtheme a young man's growth to maturity; but whereas in RedRiver the stages in that growth were also stages in the cattle-trek,public and private developments coinciding, it is difficult to findany such close connection in The Big Sky. Hawks at times forces

Il4

the two elements together, as in the episode of the boat accidentwhere the two men rescue Teal Eye from drowning; but that oneuses the words 'force together' suggests the lack of organicrelationship. This structural looseness is partly offset by themarked rhythm of the film, which is also the rhythm of thecharacters' lives: the alternation of daytime scenes on the riverwith night scenes in camp, the former for the most part forwardingthe public story, the latter the private.

That we are led away so often from the personal story partly

explains why we never feel very intimately involved with thecharacters. The use of long-shot as a stylistic feature inçreasesthe detachment, but offers compensating advantages. ln The BigSky the actors haul a real keel-boat up a real river, and the audiencecan see this. As with the pyramid-building in Land of the Pharaohsthe use of long-shot makes it impossible to fake anything, andemphasises the importance of the group, by showing actionsintact as group activities; though this isn't treated deeply in TheBig Sky. Finally, filming in long-shot beautifully captures thesense of men amidst the unknown: the shots of Indians alongthe banks ominously following the boat have a mysterious beauty.

But the personal story remains the most interesting feature ofThe Big Sky. Hawks has returned repeatedly to the subject ofclose relationship between men, and he himself is explicit incalling it 'love'. Love is clearly the word: sec, for instance, KirkDouglas and Dewey Martin in the saloon scene of The Big Skysinging 'Whisky, leave me alone' together. But one should bechary of the word 'homos<;xual': for many it has unpleasantconnotations and the close male friendships of Hawks's films areinvariably presented as thoroughly healthy and natural. Theiressence is a deep and strong mutual respect. The nearest homo­sexual character is probably Kid in Only Angels Have Wings: Kid'sdevotion to Cary Grant is absolute, and he shows no interest inwomen at all. But this is untypical; usually this 'love between men'either co-exists with heterosexual love or (as in The Big Sky)

finally yields to it. On this basic theme Hawks has worked manyvariations. Most frequently, but also less centrally in the films

Ils

l'

Page 59: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

The Big Sky: Jim Dcakins and Boonc

concerne d, we have a rclationship of equals (Montgomery Cliftand John lr.eland in Red River: Hardy Kruger and Gérard Blainin Hatari!); sometimes of extreme unequals, one of whom teachesand saves the other (Wayne and Martin in Rio Bravo). ln RedRiver the central relationship (WaynejClift) is virtually one offather and son; in .The Big ,S'hy it is a relationship between elderand younger brothers. The Blackfoot lndian's scalp which Boone(Dewey Martin) perpetually carries around is (so Boone be1ieves)the scalp of the lndian who killed his brother, who died, Uncle Zeb(Arthur Hunnicutt) tells Boone, 'when he was only a few yearsoider than you are now'. When Zeb speaks the words, the camerais on him and Jim Deakins (Kirk Douglas): Jim has taken thebrother's place.

Boone, for allhis show of independence, continually reveals hisneed for an older man to model himself on. Zeb partly fills therole (Boone adopts his favourite exclamation, 'Well 1'11 be dogged'),but Jim fills it better: the gap between them is far less and he is

I16

roughly the age Boone's real brother was when he was killed. Thepattern of behaviour is established in the saloon scene, whichoffers close parallels with the bar scene in A Girl in Every Port.Jim gets hold of a waitress and dances her round, Boone (whowants Jim to himself) pulls him away; Jim leans back against thebar and whoops at the girl and Boone promptly imitates him. Aclearer example-and one that points forward more directly to thefilm's development-comes during the first night's camping on thebanks of the Missouri. The lndian girl, Teal Eye (ElizabethThreatt), has kept her face resolutely covered; Jim begins to talkof the need for women he feels when he gets into the wilds, andtells of a veiled woman he saw once who obsessed him until he'dseen her face. Whereupon Boone-who hates lndians and has sofar shown only hostility and distaste towards her-pulls theblanket from Teal Eye's face. Throughout the film, Boone doeseither what he thinks Jim expects of him or what Jim wants todo himself. Jim falls in love with Teal Eye, so Boone 'marries'her. After the arrivaI at the lndian camp, Boone, bored and restless(and, like Bill in the earlier film, uneasy at his friend's attractionto the idea of settling down), suggests going hunting; but Jim 'hasa reason to stick around' (Teal Eye); whereupon Boone, as ifpicking up a eue, immediately says, 'Maybe l have a reason tostick around, too.' He goes to Teal Eye's tent because that iswhat Jim wants to do. One might see in this a hint that Boone(without bcing consciously aware of any such motivation) isfinding a way of prcventing Jim from deserting him (as his realbrother deserted him by getting killed): significantly Boone's lovefor Jim is cxpressing itsclf through self-identification.

The position of a woman in this male relationship was suggestedin the saloon scene. As they sing together, Jim lets the girl inbetween them but it is Boone who offers her whisky: she has to

accept them both. Teal Eye remains an enigmatic figure throughout(less a mysterious presence than a mere absence); yet one infersthat, in different ways, she loves both men. They are so closelyinvolved with each other that the woman becomes drawn to both.Her attraction to Boone expresses itself in a violent sex-antagonism

I17

Page 60: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

that relates interestingly to other man-woman relationships inHawks. Her method of curing the wound she herself has inflictedon him is delightedly to pour whisky into it: Zeb says she has 'gotthrough two whole gallons in three days'. Her love for Jimexpresses itself in a protective tenderness, particularly strong inthe scene where, after he is wounded, she warms him by holdinghim to her-a gesture that has great force when one recalls herextreme physical reticence earlier. ln both cases, communicationis exdusively and intensely physical. This is indeed likely to be thecase with a woman who can't speak the men's language, but in anyevent touch counts for a great deal in Hawks's films. One feels in1 Was a Male War Bride how important a moment it is whenCary Grant rubs Ann Sheridan's back: below the mentalantagonism the intuitive contact develops. Teal Eye's gift of atoken to Jim is ambiguous: it means that she loves him, but, Zebadds, 'like a brother'. Is she deliberately keeping him at a distanceto get Boone, or is she being as forward as she can allow herself tobe (remember her shame over the loss of her skirt, when the menrescued her from drowning)? And her attitude to Boone when heenters her tent -maidenly modesty or disappointment? l got theimpression that the wrong man had come, and that she acceptsBoone because it is the nearest she can get to Jim: she is submissive,more resigned than enthusiastic. Her farewell to Jim, with the signthat means 'Her heart is yours', shows deep sorrow.

The end of the film is emotionally very complex: very nearlytragic-ironic, but in fact triumphant. Boone's decision to return toTeal Eye (who was less valuable to him than the rifle with whichhe was asked to 'pay' for her) is made primarily in order to regainJim's respect-not from love for the girl. Boone is chiefly consciousof Jim's scorn: their exchanged glances, in the incident of thepayment for Teal Eye, and later on the boat and in the camp, arethe film's moments of maximum intensity. Yet, the decisiontaken, Boone accepts it joyfully, with a sense of new-foundfreedom, returning to Teal Eye a happy man: it is an affirmative,not a tragic, ending. He has grown up. Crucial is the burning ofthe scalp, demonstrating his newly-gained independence of the

Il8

1The Big Sky: paymcnt for Tcal Eyc

elder-brothcr-figure. It is important that he burns it: if he werethinking of Tcal Eye he would have given it to her to bury. Theburning of the scalp marks less his acceptance of lndians than hisnew freedom from his own obsessions. He casts off the immaturerelationship for the mature one. His responsibility to Teal Eye wascasually incurred, and for confused and partly unconsciousmotives; his growth to maturity is marked by his consciousacceptance of il.

Come and Get It, Red River

Red River bears an even doser relationship to Come and Get Itthan The Big Sky to A Girl in Every Port; here there is no doubtof the superiority of the later film. A brief synopsis will make therelationship dear: Ambitious young man loves girl but leaves herto better himself. She dies. Time-gap. Man has reached middleage and achieved material success, at the cost of inward hardening.His son comes to oppose the rigidity ofhis course of action. Father

Il9

Page 61: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 62: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

documentary on lumberjacking, the camaraderie which BarneyGlasgow (Edward Arnold) loses when he gains financial successand social position, above aIl, the saloon fight in which Barney,the Swede (Walter Brennan), and Lotta (Frances Farmer, avivacious and intelligent actress who plays mother in the first partand daughter in the second, equivalents of Coleen Gray and JoanneDru in Red River) vanquish opposition by hurling tin trays. Later,there are only two scenes 1 felt like staking my life on: (1) JoelMcCrea (Barney's son) visits Lotta Mark II in the house wherehis father has instaIled her (very Hawksian female-initiative/male­disadvantage opening, leading into a charming embryonic lovescene where mutual sympathy develops through mutual candy­making); (2) Barney confronts his proletarian prospective son­in-Iaw in the factory steam-room (very Hawksian self-respectreactions from the young man). The party at the end looked likeWyler (and presumably was). The rest ofthe film isn't particularlydistinctive-one would never guess Hawks. Beside Red River itlooks rather dull. The difference is of milieu. Come and Get It,after the first halfhour, is the only non-comedy in IIawks's outputset in American high society, and one senscs the constraint:formaI manners and sitting-rooms don't suit Hawks. III at ease, hechooses generally the safe, conventional way of doing things. Themost striking thing about the film is that it exists. Red River hadseemed something of an odd-film-out: deeply characteristic inmany ways, quite untypical in others. Typically, his films don'tgreatly violate the classical unities; Red River covers a lot of timeand ground, and the sense of graduaI accumulation through timeis alI-important. This cumulative structure is anticipated in Comeand Get lt in considerable detail.

Rio Bravo has not a single shot that is visually bcautiful; RedRiver is among the most striking of Westerns visually. The actualtexture of life (the time of day, the atmosphere) and events has athematic importance. The cattle-trek is conceived as a trial in

which external pressures are exerted on tensions within the groupand within the individuals who comprise it: we must be made

122

aware of what it feels like to be in particular physical situations,cattle stampede, river-crossing, etc. It is worth singling out oneshot: the burial of Dan Latimer (Harry Carey, jun.) after thecattle stampede, with the characters huddled round the grave inlong-shot, the epitaph spoken by Dunson (John Wayne), 'Webrought nothing into this world, and it's certain we can takenothing out', and a cloud shadow passing over the mountain in thebackground. ln the foreground of the shot are dead steer and, onthe drop-leaf of the chuck-wagon, sorne cans like those whosefalling precipitated the stampede; the camera tracks back to revealthe whip Dunson will try to use on Bunk Kenneally. There is,clearly, more in the emotional effect than can be accounted for interms of'visual' beauty, but the shot remains visually beautiful in away rare in Hawks. Red River is rooted in American history, in theestablishing of a civilisation; it is traditional in a more narrowlydefined sense than Rio Bravo, from which this 'historical' dimensionis absent.

But it lacks the concentrated density of Rio Bravo, where, work­ing in a studio with only a few actors, Hawks could encourage andorganise a natural, organic development from the basic material.There are two weakncsses in the construction of Red River as wenow have it: one, that the intriguing relationship betweenMontgomery Clift and John lreland is so little developed, is partlydue to distributors' cuts. The second, more important, is inherentin the conception of the film: Tess Millay (Joanne Dru) is intro­duced so late that the development of her relationships with thetwo men (Wayne and Clift) seems contrived.

Again, comparison with Ford is useful. During the river-crossingin Wagon Master, Ford gives us beautifully composed shots ofwagons, water, and mountains, mostly inlong-shot, with an effectof great formal beauty: the function of the long-shot seems moreto make possible the compositional beauty than to give us anaction entire (as in Hawks). On the soundtrack is a song, 'Wagonswest are rolling', beginning with the line, 'A hundred years havecome and gone since 1849'. Visually, we have the sense oflookingat a lands cape-painting; the song reminds us of the distance in

123

Page 63: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

time of the events we are watching. Nostalgia for a lost heroic pastis strong here. The compositions in Hawks's film are equallybeautiful but not nearly so 'composed'-less formaI, more fIuid.And we are put right in the middle of things: there are shots withthe camera inside a wagon as it crosses the river, making theexperience as present as possible. If Ford emphasises the pastnessof the past, Hawks makes everything vividly present: there is verylittle nostalgia in Red River.

WeIl realised as they are, the 'historical' elements are not ofprimary importance to Hawks. The central character-conflictpartly depends on them: the film traces the way in which Dunson'sruthlessness, necessary for survival in the primitive conditions inwhich the film begins, becomes obsolete as civilisation develops, sothat the more liberal oUtlook of Matthew Garth (MontgomeryClift) gains him the men's allegiance as Dunson alienates it. Butthere isn't the same organic relation between the growth-of­civilisation theme and the more personal, psychological issuesthat one finds in the best Westerns of Anthony Mann. BordenChase, who part wrote Red River, wrote most of Mann's bestWesterns; and doubtless the 'historical' elements derive from him.The psychological tensions within the leading characters of Wherethe River Bends very accurately mirror the social conHict betweencivilised values and subversive elements. The emphasis at the endof Red River is on personal triumph rather than on the saving fromstarvation of the inhabitants of Abilene, on the fulfilment of a self­imposed task.

The ending of Red River has been much criticiscd. Everythinghinges on why Dunson (John Wayne) doesn't shoot at MatthewGarth (Montgomery Clift) at the showdown. Our sympathy,unequivocally with Dunson at the beginning of the film, has beenlargely transferred to Matthew; the 'traditional' ending wouldhave Wayne, the tragic hero of formidable moral stature butfatally fIawed, killed (though not by Clift-we are, I think, surethat Matthew won't shoot), but achieving as he dies the claritythat enables him to judge himself and his actions, and leavingMatthew free for life. One feels that Hawks, in rejecting this

124

ending, broke more than the rules of the traditional Western-hebroke the rules of classical tragedy as weIl. None the less, if weattend properly to the film, we shall understand perfectly whyDunson doesn't try to shoot Matthew, though that understandingdepends on our awareness of the whole structure, from the openingsequence to the moment of decision. Here lies the magnificence ofthe ending: there is no one easily formulable reason for thedenouement but a whole complex of connected reasons. Even theword 'decision' needs modification: it is not a decision that Dunsonconsciously makes, but one that makes itseIf, with the whole filmbehind the making.

Dunson's farewell to Fen (Coleen Gray) as he leaves the wagontrain, refusing to take her, is given strong visual emphasis partlythrough big close-ups (rare in the film as a whole), partly throughthe intensity of the actress (we, like Dunson, miss her), partlythrough the hauntingly beautiful compositions showing her, inlong-shot, amid a vast and, apart from the wagon train, emptylandscape. Already an obstinate man, he refuses Fen's pleas totake her; her 'You're wrong' (and her intense conviction convincesus that he is) will be taken up again and again in the film like anecho in Walter Brcnnan's 'You was wrong, Mr Dunson.' She iskilled by Indians, and her death intensifies his obstinacy: to admitnow that he was wrong woùld be to accept responsibility for it.

Fen was to join Dunson, they were to settle down and raise afamily. On the morning after she dies, Dunson finds the boyMatthew, who becomes the son Fen would have borne him. Hegave Fen a snake-bracelet which had been his mother's; we see it,after the fifteen-year time-gap, on Matthew's wrist. It rcpresentsfor Dunson the continuity essential to his sense of purpose: heneeds (since 'we brought nothing into this worId, and it's certainwe can take nothing out') something to pass on and somebody topass it on to. The importance of son to father gets nothing like thesame emphasis in Come and Get It. Dunson's herd develops fromthe mating of Dunson's bull and Matthew's cow. The cattle aremarked with the Red River brand-the Red River being associatedboth with Fen's death and with the meeting with Matthew.

125

"

Page 64: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 65: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

'rebels') are balanced by our sense ofhis achièvement, to which theruthlessness was, up to a point, necessary. The sense of triumphat the crossing temporarily restores the solidarity by this time sogravely undermined; though this is pardy offset by our anxiety asto what is to happen to the 'quitters' who disappeared the nightbefore and whom Cherry (John lreland) has been sent to bringback. The crossing is of the Red River of the tide, where Dunsonlearnt of Fen's death, where he met Matthew, and where Dunson'sbull met Matthew's cow: its associations have their indefinable rolein the complex of reasons that makes Dunson, at the showdown,shoot at the dust and not his 'son'. The past is kept in our minds,and somewhere at the back of Dunson's: when he decides to cross,his remark ('This is as good a place as any') echoes word for wordwhat he said when he stopped at the river to await the Indians whodestroyed the wagon train and killed Fen.

We can now bring together the more concrete factors determin­

ing Dunson's decision not to kill Matthew. Dunson told the boyMatthew, at the start, that he couldn't have his initial on the branduntil he had earned it; he 'earns it'-as Dunson finally recognises-by his rebellion, which marks his final assumption of manhood,the point at which loyalty to what he feels to be right takes prece­dence over loyalty to his 'father'. But Matthew proves his love forDunson during the very act of rebellion, by saving his life: Clift'sblazing eyes and trembling han d, when he almost kills Teeler fortrying to kill Dunson, are tremendously expressive. The balanceof betrayal and loyalty here takes us back to the 'trust' on whichthe relationship was founded: 'Never trust anyone until you knowthem' Dunson told Matthew when they first met, and a minutelater gave the boy back his gun and turned his back. Events proveMatthew's decision right: the railroad does reach as far west asAbilene, the herd does get there, he has earned his initial on thebrand. Yet we are kept aware that the achievement is a jointtriumph. Matthew insists that the cheque for the catde be madeout to Dunson. As Dunson approaches Abilene, ostensibly to killMatthew, a series· of emotionally very powerful shots show himmoving through the catde massed in and around the town-his

128

cattle, there because of his initial impetus. We see him, to enter thetown, cross the railway line: Hawks, refusing to be explicit aboutthe dénouement in the dialogue, keeps us constandy aware visuallyof the emotional factors that count in it.

But none of these would count were it not for the presence ofTess. Only by reliving-if by proxy-the original experience withFen can Dunson be released from the pattern of inflexible obstinacythat his behaviour repeats: Matthew, obstinately, has left Tessbehind until things are safe, despite her protests, and Dunson isforced to recognise his son's likeness to him. (The Dunson- Tessdialogue makes the parallels between Tess and Fen too explicit:one feels the rush ta communicate a lot in a short time.) WhenDunson meets Tess, she is wearing the snake-bracelet (given herby Matthew) which Dunson once put on Fen. She and Mattheware in love. Only Dunson's fixed ruthlessness obstructs thefulfilment of his deepest need-the establishment of continuity.Why is Tess's intervention in the final fight so moving and soright? Because the whole emotional weight of the film is behind it,Fen, her death, and its importance to Dunson being as significantlypresent here in memory and association as Tess herself in the flesh.The ending carries a great sense of fulfilment. Red River may lackthe density of organisation of Rio Bravo, but it is by no means therambling and episodic work it may appear to the casual observer.

129

Page 66: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

.,llIIIll

Hatari!: capture of the rhinoceros

1

.,/ \.

~ ~~1::"~~~:::

131

relaxed atmosphere is preventing aIl these obviously pleasant andentertaining people from revealing their deeper potentialities.There is insufficient tension either within or between the charactersto sustain any deep interest in the relationships; we don't feel it asa matter of really pressing importance when Dallas (Elsa Martinelli)leaves without marrying Sean (John Wayne)-we just feel it israther a pit y, and are quite pleased when she is recaptured. Ourdegree of involvement in aIl this seems accurately to reBectHawks's. The 'danger' of the title is too exc1usively physical.

There are the hunting sequences, surely the most beautiful andexhilarating ever filmed. The camera, in the moving truck, putsus in the middle of it aIl; and we like the characters weIl enoughfor involvement in the danger and exhilaration to be more thanmerely technical. The actors did it aIl themselves, and we see this.Where aImost any other director would give us the star pulling onone end of the rope, then cut to the rhinoceros pulling on the(alleged) other end, Hawks gives us Wayne and rhinoceros in the

Hatari! (1962), Man's Pavourite Sport? (1964), Red Line 7000 (1965)

Hatari!

Often in Hawks strong superficial resemblances between filmsconceal deeper differences. If time and repeated viewings haveconfirmed Hatari!'s inferiority to Rio Bravo-it isn't the film one

would send anyone to to convince him ofHawks's greatness-theyhave also revealed a more interesting film than was at first apparent.

ln so far as it repeats earlier films Hatari! is indeed markedlyinferior. Fairly typical is the almost literal transplanting of thepiano-playing scene from Only Angels Have Wings: the man,trying to play a tune, repeatedly hits a wrong note; the girl correctshim a few times then takes over; he says to her, 'You'd better begood'; she is. The incident in the original had a particular contextthat gave it terrific tension: it followed the death of Joe, andmarked Bonnie's acceptance of the Biers' world-beneath the actionone sensed layers of emotional conBict. ln Hatari! the scene marksDaIlas's acceptance into the hunters' circ1e, and supplies anothercharming example (Dallas at the piano, Pockets on the harmonica)of intuitive communication-through-music, confirming the contactbetween the two characters that developed in the preceding scene;but one feels it has become primarily a party-piece, given foritself. This sufficiently defines the tone of the film, although itleaves much to be said about its content. There is something ofthe air of an informaI party, of long duration, at which one isnever bored, but at which one cannot fight down a sense that the

6: The Instinctive Consciousness

13°

Page 67: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

A Song is Born: the Polynesian mating-dancc

same shot. No back-projection, no stand-ins. The sense of realityadds to the beauty of many characteristic images of men carryingout with full mastery the difficult and dangerous tasks they haveundertaken, in a context of great exposed plains and vast distances.

But to see in Hatari! only amiable repetition of things donebetter, spiced with brilliant action sequences, is to miss all that isnew in the film, and all that is most important. Its relationship tothe other adventure films is obvious; that to the comedies is more

fundamental. Hawks has always been fascinated by the relationshipbetween sophisticated modern life and primitive life, whether insavages or animaIs. ln Scarfaee the gangsters are implicitlycompared to savages, with Tony Camonte introduced as an ape­like shadow on a wall. There are the animaIs in Bringing up Baby,the redskin game in Monkey Business. There is also a strikingincident in A Song is Born, not imported from Bali of Fire, wheretimid, super-civilised Professor Frisbee (Danny Kaye) teachesthe repressed spinster benefactor Miss Totten (Mary Field) a

132

Polynesian mating chant and dance, and under its influence theybegin to throw off all inhibitions. The relationship between humansand animaIs or sophisticated Westerners and savages, constitutesHatari!'s principle of composition. ln the earlier films one waschiefly aware of dislocation-of the rational and the instinctive,the civilised and the primitive, hopelessly at war. ln Hatari! onefinds serenity and harmony. ln the perfect Hawksian society thatthe hunters' world embodies, all the tensions between the attractionto the primitive-instinctive and the need for conscious control andmastery that we have found so often in Hawks's work are resolved.

The hunters of Hatari! are in continuaI physical contact withanimaIs: they hunt them for zoos, not to kilt Catching involveshandling-Sean clutches a giraffe's legs, others handle zebra andwildebeeste. Chips (Gérard Blain) and Brandy (Michèle Girardon)water the hyena with a hose, Dallas washes her baby elephants.Hundreds of monkeys are caught and handled; a tame cheetah(Sonia) moves freely among the humans; even Pockets (RedButtons), who is scared of animaIs, tries to milk a goat (whichturns out to be a ram). Certain scenes calI to mind (not veryfavourably for the film) D. H. Lawrence's characteristic use ofanimaIs to suggest the intuitive consciousness (mare and rabbit inWomen in Love, mole in Second Best, the snakein the poem Snake,etc.): Chips and Brandy's handling of the hyena, playful andrelaxed, suggests their attitude to their relationship, to theiranimal instincts.

The sense of easy-going intimacy with the animal kingdom isconfirmed by the charming parallels and contrasts between humanbeings and animaIs. During the giraffe hunt, the inexperiencedDallas (not yet fully initiated into the hunters' society) fallshelplessly around in the bumpy truck in which she has insisted onstanding to take pictures, and the editing contrasts her ungainlylurching and sprawling with the lithe, loping grace of the giraffes.Her pursuit of Sean neatly reverses his usual role of hunter. Whenthe orphaned baby elephant is found, Dallas immediately takes theplace of its mother, defending it with her life; she solves theproblem of feeding it by thinking in terms of a human baby; she

133

Page 68: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

becomes known to the natives as 'Mama Tembo', or e1ephant­mother. From then on she is constantly associated with theelephant, and the other two babies that join it, as a mother-figure.Kurt (Hardy Kruger) and Chips, both attracted to Brandy, are likeyoung bucks (Sean makès the comparison explicitly, but we havealready watched them squaring up to one another like rival stagsin the mating season). They refer to Brandy as 'our girl', go every­where together with her (partly because they don't trust eachother, partly because they like each other; they seem quite happyto share her just as, at the end of the film, they are planning tovisit a girl Chips knows in Paris: 'We go halves'); the sequenceestablishing this is followed by the escape and recapture of theostriches, the male being caught and penned whereupon thefemales both come running, neatly reversing the human re1ation­ship. Pockets's fear and distrust of animaIs is reflected in hisdifficulty in making contact with Brandy and his inability torealise that she loves him. Pockets, watching Dallas wash her'babies', says to Sean, 'She could even do it to me.' He captureshundreds of monkeys without daring to look, and wins Brandywithout realising it. At the end of the film, Dallas is 'hunted'through the town by the men converging in two vehic1es, exactlyas we have watched animaIs hunted on the plains; the reversal­pattern is completed by having the baby elephants converge on herin the hote1lobby, like truck and jeep converging on the rhinocerosin the film's opening and c1imactic hunts. The film is pervaded byan unconstrained naturalness, arising from the easy acceptance ofman's relatedness to the animaIs, from the reconciliation ofanimal instinct and human consciousness. The society of MonkeyBusiness, built on the suppression of the instincts, bears a significantnegative relationship to the ideal Hawksian society of the hunters.

One curious and striking scene deserves separate comment: thatin which Dallas takes her baby e1ephants for a wash and romp in apool awayfrom camp, and is menaced by full-grown wild e1ephants.Up to the appearance of the wild e1ephants, the sequence is anotherexample, beautiful and funny, of the animal/human correspon­dences: Sean, unknown to Dallas, follows at a distance with his gun,

135

Hatari!: Brandy, Chips and the hyena

' ..111.'1 .. '.,.··. '

••1"1"1

I,~11[1

Illil'I!:

III

!II,

"!'II

Page 69: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

•,/.. ~... ;~"

!!

./1i "

Hatari!: the initiation of Dallas

and the scene becomes a family outing with mother romping withthe kids while the father-protector (like a male animal) standsguard. (Compare the delightful domestic scene with which the filmends, where Dallas's three 'babies' clamber on to and demolishthe bridaI bed.) Where the scene adds to this ubiquitous leitmotifof humanjanimal intercourse is in the sudden awareness ofdanger-of things beyond, unassimilable into the general harmony:beyond the harmonising control of the consciousness. Theprogression here from tame baby elephants to dangerous wildadults interestingly paralle1s the progression from tame 'Baby'to wild leopard in Bringing up Baby.

Apart from the animaIs, there are the savages. Especiallyinteresting is Dallas's tribal initiation. Carried off by the Warushavillagers, blackened and bangled in preparation for the ceremonyso that she is barely recognisable, she participates in the dancegrudgingly, yet with an implicit admission of the appropriatenessof doing so, an acknowledgement of the continuity between the

136

primitive and the civilised. The scene bears a most suggestiveand complex relationship to the redskin game in Monkey Business.It is followed by the scene where Sean visits Dallas in her bedroom,where the blacking has been replaced by an even thicker applica­tion of cold cream to suggest a parallel between primitive and'civilised' ritual adornments. He can now take the initiative andkiss her-through the cream-because she is at last at a dis­advantage?-because she 'was good today'? He treats her with acharming combination of respect and ironie humour that reflectsHawks's attitude. She has lived through the day's experiences andtheir implications and remained-not without a certain sophisti­cated resentment-mistress of herself.

The characters' easy traffic with the instinctive and the primitiveis balanced by their equally easy commerce with the rational,conscious side of man's nature and the inventions and implementsthat are its products. Trucks, jeeps, radio, even rockets, areassimilated into the general harmony. Hawks's fondness forshowing people's intuitive sympathy with each other expressedthrough singing together receives one of its most striking expres­sions in the group performance of 'Whisky leave me alone' overthe intercommunications system between truck and jeep on thejoyous ride home from the hospital. The scene anticipates thejuxtaposition in Red Line 7000 of lives lived with extremeinstinctive spontaneity and aIl the supposedly dehumanisingparaphernalia of our civilisation, the world of racing-cars andtransistors. Hatari! is a celebration of man's empirical synthesisingintelligence-his ability, in ideal circumstances, to use andharmonise everything that is there, to be master of himself and hisenvironment without destroying or suppressing any essential partofhimself. Its principle ofharmony, assimilation, and balance setsoff very clearly the imbalances Hawks deals with in MonkeyBusiness and The Thing.

AlI of which explains why Hatari! is such a pleasing andenjoyable film. It must be admitted that, thematically as innarrative, it aIl hangs together rather loosely, without that sense ofpressing inner necessity that makes us feel in the presence of a

137

I!III

Il

,i!

11111

Il''1Ii,'

1

i'

111111

!'"

Page 70: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

masterpiece. It is a film that makes one wish, as Rio Bravo doesn't,that Hawks were, not perhaps a more conscious artist, but moreconsciously an artist: in Hatari! he has been content to be a relaxedentertainer, and the richness of the material leaves one feelingsomewhat dissatisfied that more wasn't done with it-a morerigorous foIlowing:through and realising of its implications. If thefunctions of the animaIs in H atari! occasionaIly caIls to mind theuse of animaIs by Lawrence, Hawks (not even here, far less inBringing up Baby!) shows little of Lawrence's intense sensitiveresponse to animaIs or to the human qualities Lawrence uses themto represent, and, given Hatari!'s theme, this constitutes a radicallimiting criticism. Bringing up Baby tended (through the wholeconception of Hepburn's part, and her relationship to the leopard)to trivialise animal nature; Hatari! doesn't exactly trivialise it, butneither does it invest it with the vividness, the energy and sensi­tivity that Lawrence communicates.

Man's Favourite Sport?Man's Favourite Sport? needs brief notice here because of itsrelationship to the films that flank it. It is to the earlier comedieswhat Hatari! is to the adventure films: there are obvious, andinferior, reminiscences, and less obvious novelties, but the degreeof success is much less. Ifthe word that sprang to mind for Hatari!was 'relaxed', the word for its successor is 'tired'. The very slowtempo draws attention to the weakness of much of the material.One guesses that Hawks's relationship with his actors was notentireIy satisfactory. Rock Hudson's performance is somewhatlaborious, and it was cruel to make him repeat the night-club scenefrom Bringing up Baby which Cary Grant brought off with suchpanache; Paula Prentiss is-as always-very good, but at times onehas the feeling that Hawks is imposing a characterisation on herinstead of working with her. Parts of the film seem in a limitingway old-fashioned: situations in which a woman can't be told thatanother woman has (quite innocently) spent the night in herfiancé's rooms would be more at home in thirties comedy.

The film has its defenders. What would they have made of it

138

had they seen it without knowing it was by Hawks? They wouldhave recognised the Hawks influence immediately, of course; butwouldn't they have dismissed the film as an inferior imitation?The high value they place on it arises from its clear thematicrelationship to Hawks's other work: there is an understandable butunhelpful tendency to confuse this with artistic achievement.

The basic conception is characteristic: a hero from a safe,civilised: and limited environment where his responsibilities existpurely on a mental-theoreticallevel (in fact, a fishing equipmentsalesman, in terms of book-learning the complete expert, who hasnever actuaIly fished), is plunged into an environment where hemust act practically, instinctively, and physicaIly (a fishingtournament). The most interesting feature of the film (in relationto Hawks's past work) is the character's development. The crucialscene in the film is the public confession, where he achieveshonesty with his acquaintances and with himself. The decision taconfess marks a development more decisive than any undergoneby the heroes of Hawks's previous comedies; as in Hatari! (thoughhere to a 1esserextent) the relaxation is partly compensated for by anew me1lowness and serenity. If at the end of the film the hero isstill (now literally) drifting, it is from choice, not mere mis-adventure.

Hatari!, Man's Favourite Sport?, and Red Line 7000 can be seenas a loose trilogy. AlI three are constructed on parallels betweenman's efforts to master something dangerous, recalcitrant and non­human (rhinoceroses, fish, racing-cars) and his efforts to cope withhis own life and his re1ationships with women. Beyond this, aIlthree are concerned (on whatever levd of conscious or subconsciousintention) with the relationship between the conscious and theinstinctive. ln this 'trilogy' Man's Favourite Sport? has an

importance beyond its intrinsic merits: it represents an inversionof the unifying theme, showing a man hopelessly at odds withboth fish (sexual symbolism?) and women, unable to come to termswith his instinctive-physical side. ln the light of this the ending(man and woman happily adrift together on the water) could betaken as representing his acceptance of himself. The paraIlels

139

Page 71: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

between women and fish pervade the film much as the humans j

animaIs comparisons pervade Hatari! but the organisation is looserstill, the incidental invention (one or two excellent scenes apart)uninspired. It looked as if Hawks would from now on rest content

amiably to repeat himself. Red Line 7000 proved this assumptionquite false.

Red Line 7000

Red Line 7000 is perhaps, in Britain at least, the most under­estimated film of the sixties. The critics more or less ignored it,the public (who hadn't heard of any of the actors) kept away.Hawks himse1f dislikes it: it is difficult to see why. It is an intenselypersonal film, based on an original Hawks story and showing in itsrealisation every mark of close involvement; Hawks's statementthat he lost interest in it is belied by every shot. It has preciselywhat its two immediate predecessors lacked: the degree of creativeintensity that prompts a consistent exactness of touch, a tautnessand economy and sense of relcvance in the total organisation. Withits coherence gocs a youthful vitality not cntirely attributable to the(on the whole) admirably energctic and rcsponsive young cast(though they doubtless proved an important stimulus). Thetension and economy in the whole cinematic complex-dialogue,acting, use of camera, editing-are untypical oflatc Hawks, thoughevery sequence is unmistakably Hawksian. ln any work of art one'sresponse to local realisation is a more reliable guide to evaluationthan a generalised sense of what the work is about. Examine anysequence of Red Line 7000, and you will find an unfailing rightnessin the direction, corresponding to Hawks's sense of what isimportant in the action at any given moment. Look, particularly,at the sequences where the MilœjGaby relationship is worked out;or at (a model of economical exposition) the early scenes betweenLaura Devon and John Robert Crawford. lndeed, the economythroughout the film is such that one feels Hawks was trying to seehow much he could leave out-or, alternatively, how much hecould pack in; seldom in a film can so much ground have beencovered in so short a time.

14°

Red Line 7000: Ned and Julie

With this rediscovered creative intensity one finds, significantly,new thematic deve1opments. The film offers new departures forHawks in aIl its major rclationships. The scene introducing NedArp (John Robert Crawford) and Julie Kazarian (Laura Devon)recalls (whilc remaining fresh and alive) many instant-sex­antagonism scenes in previous Hawks films; only here the manmanages to hold his own, and it is he, not the girl, who is sexuallyexperienced. Both Dan MeCall (James Ward) and Mike Marsh(James Caan) rdate interestingly to the John Wayne charactersin Rio Bravo and Hatari!, but in quite different ways. McCall hasthe same kind of mastery of himself and his profession (conse­quently the same ability to help the fallible) as Chance and Sean.But, with Dan, the mastery extends to his relationships withwomen. The scene in which he visits Holly Mac Gregor (Gail Hire)in the back room of Lindy's club and forces her to confront herperverse and obstructive superstition, recalls at once-in thestronger character's rigorously unsentimental treatment of the

141

Page 72: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 73: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

construction: instinct, prompted by the pressures of the moment,of the actual circumstances in which he is involved, tells him whatto do, then reason endorses, controls, modifies, elaborates. lnRed Line 7000 this relationship between instinct and empiricalintelligence is the foundation of the behaviour of most of thecharacters most of the time, out of cars as well as in. The men have

a highly developed instinctive awareness and the readiness to putinto action unhesitatingly whatever it indicates, acquired throughtheir professional efficiency. But the same is true of the women,whose connection with racing, though close, is necessarily indirect.Julie, younger sister of the team manager Pat Kazarian, treated byhim in some respects like a younger brother ('you're talking like agirl'), and an expert motor-cyclist, knows at once that Ned Arpwill be worth trying as a driver, and this is inseparable from herinstantaneous attraction to him as a man; Gaby (Marianna Hill),who adores racing, has been the mistress of a champion, and wantsto drive a racing-car herself, knows at once that she wants MikeMarsh and is prompt at improvising the means of meeting him.AlI three of the film's main relationships bcgin with an almostinstantaneous attraction, and the devclopment of each gets itsimpetus from the use by one or both partners of an empiricalintelligence that both creates and seizes opportunities. Theparalld with racing is never far below the surface of the film: 'KEEP

BRAIN in GEAR at ALL TIMES' (the slogan above the dashboardin the opening, pre-credit, shot) can well stand as its motto.

Essential to success in racing is flexibility. Each of the threerelationships contains a flaw, and in each case the flaw arises fromsome rigidity that interferes with moral or emotional flexibility,frustrates the free working of instinct and empirical intelligence. Adiagrammatically simple (but unforced and unobtrusive) statementof the progress of the film is made through two races: one is in the

middle of the film (where all three rclationships are approachingcrises), in which all three men have breakdowns or collisions. Evenhere, there is no schematic parallel between problem and break­down though one might find symbolism in Mike's near-asphyxia­tion-his neurotic sexual attitude is interfering in his relationship

144

with Gaby. ln the other race, at the end (when the basic problemsin the relationships have been resolved), all three circumvent thedifficulties they encounter on the track. With Ned Arp therigidity is his obsession with money and success, combined withhis attitude to women which is a matter of general knowledge and

particular ignorance. He has had plenty of experience with girls­where he comes from, they're the only alternative to watching TVin the evenings-but to him they are all much the same, or sortedinto rigid categories as if they were objects ('tall and short, sexyor not sexy... .'). The love scene-it consists of one long statictake, yet is intensely cinematic-in which Julie asks him how heknows when girls are sexy (longing to be told that she is) derives itspoignancy from the contrast between her openness, transparency,and vulnerability and Ned's stolid lack of response to her as an in­dividual. ln Holly MacGregor we see how an instinctive, irrationalreaction has set in an attitude which her reason can neithercorrect nor modify: three men in love with her have died, thereforeshe brings bad luck, the same will happen to the next. More isinvolved here than superstition. Lindy (Charlene Hoh) tells Hollythat she uses her sense of being the cause of men's deaths to giveherself a feeling ofher own importance, and other aspects of Holly'sbehaviour confirm this hint of perverse pride: her treatment ofDan, for example, when, after their meeting, he invites her in fora drink. It is with Mike, however, that Hawks gives us the cleareststatement of a positive instinctive impulse being impaired andfrustrated by an inflexible habituaI attitude. He sees Gaby dancingwith a controlled and flexible abandon that marvellously ex­

presses her character, is instantaneously drawn to her, then,learning she is Dan's girl, turns away in recoil to get a drink. Weassume he is annoyed because she is already attached; later,Mike reveals a neurotic revulsion at the idea of having a womanwho has been another man's-or quite simply a girl who isn't aVlrgm.

The Mike/Gaby relationship and this tension between instinctand neurosis is developed in one of the film's most beautifulsequences. Unable to make contact in conversation, they achieve

145

Page 74: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 75: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

is Mike's attempted mur der of Dan. By following through theuncontrollable impulses arising from his neuroses, Mike is forcedinto an awareness he could not otherwise have achieved. This is thefocal point of the film, resolving in one instant two of the threerelationship problems. The race sequence derives its intensity notonly from the direct physical impact-staggering as this is-andits concentrated economy (it is scarcely above a minute in duration),but also from its context. Not just Dan's life is at stake, but thelives of three other people. Red Line 7000 involves the spectatormore intensely than Hatari!, because the relationships it presentsmatter so much more than those in the earlier film.

Logically, the resolution should be tragic: Dan killed, the livesof Holly (reconfirmed in her morbid superstition), Mike, andGaby in ruins. That it isn't depends on sheer chance. Far frombeing a weakness, this recognition of the limitations of man'smastery over circumstances is the film's final strength. ln RioBravo when Dean Martin pours the whisky back into the bottle'without spilling a drop', he is able to do so, we can say, because ofhis own basic strength, and because it has been revived anddeveloped through his relationship with Chance; but aIl thiswould have gone for nothing if the' Alamo' music hadn't started upat the precise second. Similarly, Mike and Holly are cured becausethey have progressed, through the relationships with partners whoare healthy, 'open', and flexible, to the point at which cure ispossible; but whether there is cure or irremediable disaster dependsfinally on Dan's surviving the crash. The survival is near­miraculous: the images tell us that, unlike Wildcat Jones, thecomic-strip superman of Holly's song (whom she associates withDan as she sings it-the song ironically anticipates the film'sclimax), Dan could have done litde to affect the outcome of thecrash. This is not a complacency-inducing Happy End: thespectator, along with the characters, is left with too great a senseof precariousness. The film ends with a race in which aIl threeheroes overcome the difficulties they encounter; but the last shotis of a blazing car which the women, starded, leap to their feet tosee. 1t isn't the car of one of the characters we know, but the image

148

fixes in our minds the sense that it might have been any of them ...and may be, in the next race.

The main dénouement leaves the Ned/Julie relationship stillto be resolved: one's first reaction is a feeling of anti-climax, whichseems confirmed by the cursory resolution that follows. But theunsatisfactoriness is dramatically valid: the failure is in therelationship, not the film. The fact that the Ned/Julie relationshipis so little integrated in the main action is not really the structuralfault it at first appears. The other twOrelationships are paralle1: inboth, a strong, mature partner (Dan, Gaby) helps someone whosedevelopment has been arrested (Holly, Mike); the threads ofplot continually interweave. The Ned/Julie relationship offers acontrast, and Hawks keeps it separate. Here, both partners areimmature; Ned's failure to see Julie as she is provokes acorrespondingly inflexible attitude (tenacious devotion and self­sacrifice) in her, held in defiance of the discernible facts and so thereverse of empirical (see the scene where she cornes to ask Lindyfor a job). ln the hospital scene we see a tentative compromiseachieved, but no more. Where the other relationships are resolved,this is patched up. The resolution of the Mike/Gaby relationshipis set in the pouring rain-there is release and purification. TheNed/Julie compromise is reached in a sombre hospital room withrain pouring down outside: the atmosphere is heavy and oppressive,and any suggestion of release in the action is qualified by Ned'simmediate inflexible insistence (with Julie in his arms) on his needto continue driving-his obsession with fame and money remainslargely untouched. The film's last shots ofhim, driving with a hookinstead of a left hand, with evident strain and handicap, offer a

good image (given the constant racing/relationships comparison)of how his life will be lived.

One particularly interesting feature of Red Line 7000 is theworld in which it is set. It is, characteristically, a world apart, yetit bears a remarkably close relation to certain of the more 'advanced'

aspects of modern civilisation. The action of the film is played outagainst a background of machines, transistor radios, pop music,and brand names: the sense of impermanence characteristic of the

149

Page 76: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

adventure films (for instance, Only Angels Have Wings) is herelinked to the impermanence about us. Only Hawks, perhaps,among great artists-with his· 'primitive' qualities, and his lack ofinterest in tradition-could face that impermanence in so positivea spirit of acceptance; that he can do so suggests both his strengthand his limitations. After the slightly old-fashioned quality ofMan's Pavourite Sport?, Red Line 7000 cornes across as an intenselymodern film: its principle of precariousness and impermanencerelates right back to Only Angels Have Wings, yet at the same timeis very much of the sixties. Much of the film's excitement derivesfrom its surprising juxtaposition of mechanised civilisation andintense instinctive vitality-the vitality, as in Only Angels HaveWings, deriving partly from the sense of impermanence, and itsresultant tension and exhilaration.

ln dealing thus with the groundwork of Red Line 7000, one isnot claiming any profundity for the extractable moral-metaphysicalideas, which are quite' simple and straightforward, though neverstupid or trivial. Hawks is an artist, not a 'thinker'; the fact thatnothing in Red Line 7000 is incompatible with the idea that themoral-metaphysical basis was quite unconscious is simply themeasure of how completely he is an anist. AU the 'meaning' ofthe film is implicit in the action, never imposed on il. There is noobtrusive symbolism, the camera is at no point used to force apoint of view on the spectator. Hawks is perhaps too completelyan artist for many critics to see that he is one at aU: they needsorne symbols and 'striking' camera-angles and overt moral pointstlourished at them before they think they're seeing anythingsignificant. The greatness of Hawks's films lies not in the extractablemoral viewpoint itself, but in the intensity with which it is felt andrealised in concrete terms.

15°

NOTE

The History of Red Line 7000 in Britain

Red Line 7000 opened in London with a minimum of advance publicityand ran for a fortnight at the Plaza, Piccadilly Circus, playing ta almostdeserted houses. lt was then taken off and shelved for somemonths, at theend of which time it was put out on release, severely mutilated, in adouble bill with Cornel Wilde's The Naked Prey. As it seems likely thatno complete prints now exist in Britain it seems worth tabulating this actof vandalism in detail.

The cuts are as follows:

1. The introductiori of Holly MacGregor. The men go from the carpark to Mike's fiat, and find the door open and pop music blaring forth;they look at each other with expressions of distaste Oim's funeral is justover), then go in to find Holly unconscious on the bed, either drunk orin a state of emotional exhaustion or both.

2. The trial of Ned Arp as a driver: the fact that he has been given animperfect car was originally established before the test. As the sequencenow stands, most of the suspense is destroyed.

3. The first meeting of Mike and Gaby. ln the film as it stands there isa mysterious reference to this in the scene where they now appear to bemeeting for the tirst time.

4. Most of the charming scene where Dan invites Holly in for a drinkand she and Gaby speak French tagether (which he can't understand).The case with which relationships between the three develop is veryimportant.

5. The who1e scene of the showdown between Holly and Dan in theshaded back room of Lindy's club. The later scene where Dan visitsHolly when she is painting now looks absurdly abrupt and unmotivated;the scene is among the most important-and most dramatic-in the film.

6. The prelude to Gaby's and Mike's nocturnal drive, where they sitin Mike's car singingtogether to the car radio.

7. The who1e scene of Pat Kazarian's visit to Ned the morning afterit b~comes clear that Ned has abandoned Julie. Pat denounces himbitterly; Ned remains defiant.

8. Julie's visit to the club ta ask Lindy and Holly for a job. Veryimportant for the development of Julie's character.

151

Page 77: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

7: Down the Valley of the Shadow

El Dorado (1966)

El Dorado is, at the moment, the most difficult of Hawks's filmsto come to terms with. Its relationship to Rio Bravo poses a numberof difficulties, and commonly provokes two reactions: the criticwho doesn't rate Hawks particularly high but likes Rio Bravo weIlenough (it is a difficult film to dislike), sees the similarities anddecides that the new film is more or less the same and just as good;the critic whose admiration for Hawks and especially for Rio Bravois intense, sees the similarities and writes El Dorado off as anartistic disaster. Both views are, 1 now feel, quite wrong, thoughthe second was an early reaction of my own.

El Dorado is not as great a film as Rio Bravo; indeed, consideredin isolation from the rest of Hawks's work (an almost impossiblething to do), it is not a great film at aIL The difficulty for the criticarises not only from the fact that the superficial resemblances toRio Bravo, though so close, are misleading; there is also the factthat, although everything important in El Dorado is new, it is inmany ways dependent on the earlier film for its significance. It isprecisely our awareness of its differences from Rio Bravo thatmatters.

That it is not entirely satisfying considered as a self-sufficiententity is in various ways confirmed if we place it beside Rio Bravo:its relatively loose, and in sorne respects contrived, organisationbecomes immediately apparent in relation to its great forerunner'stightness and naturalness. Rio Bravo grows organically out of

152

Dude's alcoholism; the alcoholism of J. P. Harrah (RobertMitchum) is brought in arbitrarily because Hawks lost faith in thescript he started with and decided to do Rio Bravo again. One canonly guess at the reasons for this decision. Both Hawks's owndescription of the original script (taken from Harry Brown's novelThe Stars in their Courses) as Greek tragedy, and the part of itthat survives in the finished film (the episode of the boy's suicide)suggest that he was here toying with the idea of doing something(for him) comp1etely new. One doesn't know to what extentcommercial considerations influenced him, but the fact that bothMan's Pavourite Sport? and Red Line 7000 (the latter ofwhich, atleast, broke new ground for Hawks) did badly at the box-office,whereas Rio Bravo has proved among his most popular films, maybe significant. An artist, however firmly established, working in acommercial medium, can only allow himself a limited number ofbox-office disasters before it becomes difficult to find backing; and,beyond that, there is the popular artist's understandab1e desire toplease his audiences and go on pleasing them. At the same time,that complete unpretentiousness which is Hawks's greateststrength and greatest limitation-which gives his films theirunselfconscious spontaneity, and prevents him from thinking ofthem in ways that go beyond the principle of 'having fun'-mayhave acted as an automatic veto. A Greek tragedy directed byHoward Hawks sounds a rather absurd contradiction in terms; yetthe episode of the suicide and its aftermath is so poignant in itsbareness and its stoical grief that one can't help regretting the filmHawks didn't make, and wondering what it might have been.

One can start from certain obvious ways in which El Dorado,even at points of greatest similarity, differs from Rio Bravo: itpushes to conspicuous extremes two features that in the earlier filmare so perfectly integrated in the tone that one is hardly aware ofthem as isolatab1e characteristics: humour and violence. On theone hand, there is a marked broadening of the comedy: things likethe 'cure' for Mitchum's alcoholism, and James Caan's imitationof a Chinaman, are more farcical and more grotesque than anythingin Rio Bravo. On the other hand, the violence is carried much

153

,

Page 78: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

further than in the earlier film. At times, this tendency to carrythings to excess is attributab1e to Hawks's awareness that he isrepeating himself and his consequent concern to elaborate onfamiIiar incidents in case they go dead on him: consider, forexample, what becomes in El Dorado of the incidents in Rio Bravowhere Wayne strikes a lying enemy in the face with a gun, andwhere Dean Martin, after much pressure has been brought to bearon him, has a bath.

There is also in El Dorado a new, and very insistent, emphasison pain: Luke Macdonald, shot in the stomach, commits suicidebecause he can't bear the pain; Joey Macdonald (Michele Carey)shoots Cole Thornton (Wayne) in the side, the bullet lodges upagainst his spine, and he is periodically doubled up in agony andsemi-paralysed; Harrah strikes Bart Jason hard across the face witha gun-barrel; Thornton, forcing a gunman out through a door to

154

face an ambush meant for him, shoots him first in the shoulder,then in the leg; NeIse Macleod (Christopher George) is shotseveral times by Thornton before he dies. ln aIl these instances,pain is not merely implicit in the action, it is emphasised by theway it is presented. The humour and the pain are on the wholequite separate (the exceptions mainly involve the use of JamesCaan's shotgun); there is nothing in El Dorado like the scene of thefinger-amputation in The Big Sky. There, a potentiaIly painful scenewas played as riotous farce, with Kirk Douglas and his friendscrawling round the camp-fire to search for the discarded bit offinger in accordance with the old Indian (or Polynesian-TigerShark-or Chinese-Barbary Coast) superstition that you can'tget to heaven unless you're whole, and Hawks used pain, as heuses other forms of physical experience, to promote an intensespontaneous sympathy between people. The pain in El Dorado,starting from the loneIy, terrified boy who shoots himself, isolatespeople rather than drawing them together.

Beside the austerity and rigour of Rio Bravo, El Dorado seems acolourful, even flamboyant film: there are the extremes of violenceand comedy, there are such picturesque details as James Caan'sshotgun and Arthur Hunnicutt's bugle and bow-and-arrow; thereis the gun-battle in the church, with beIls repeatedly rung by beingshot at, the altar blasted, bodies falling down the bell-ropes (withone shot-camera underneath, looking up-that, apart from itsintrinsicaIly startling quality, comes as a great shock in a Hawksfilm). For aU the colour, however, the big set-pieces come offrather badly if one compares them with their counterparts in RioBravo. The build-up of the sequence where Wayne and MitchumfoIlow a wounded man into a saloon, for example, has little of thesustained tension of the blood-in-the-beer scene in the earIier film.It is not just a matter of the construction and handling of thesequence: underlying its reIativeIy perfunctory effect-for aIl thecolourful invention of jangling piano and extravagant spIinters inthe barman's hand, and the comparativeIy extreme violence-isthe fact that we never take Mitchum's a1coholism as seriously asDude's. The final battle shows the discrepancy even more

155

,

,

~

Page 79: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

strikingly. ln an obvious attempt to outdo the dynamite fight atthe end of Rio Bravo, Hawks here throws in everything-China­man imitation, bow-and-arrow, shotgun, bugle-and although itis all great fun, one is very much aware of the contrivance, afterthe spontaneous naturalness of the other film. One can see all this

as an attempt to repeat and outdo Rio Bravo, and hence decisivelyrecapture a public Hawks may have felt in danger of losing.

Yet there is a way in which it all makes artistic sense-though itis not quite the sense of a self-sufficient work. Hawks is now in hissevemies. W. B. Yeats was a few years younger when he wrote

An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress.

The words and imagery suggest at once the need to recapture achildlike, unselfconscious spomaneity, and the contradictory factthat with advancing age attempts to do so will have to be more andmore deliberate. ln El Dorado Hawks is 'singing louder'; there isexactly that balance of recaptured spontaneity and the contra­dictory sense of deliberateness that Yeats's lines define. And whenone realises this, one realises the real subject of the film-a subjectvirtually all-pervading, yet never stated explicitly: age.

It comes nearest to explicit statement in the opening exchangebetween Thornton and Harrah. Thornton reaches towards hisgun; Harrah warns him off. Thornton: '1 just wanted to see ifyou'dslowed up any.' Harrah: 'Not that much.' Just before that, Harrah,gun levelled, entered the room where Thornton was washing, andThornton failed to be aware of him until he spoke. Fear of failingpowers, and the desire to compensate for them, pervades the entirefilm. Despite its superficial appearance of having been motivatedby box-office considerations, El Dorado is an intensely personalfilm. Hawks's work since Rio Bravo has been widely regarded asevidence of failing powers. The determined boisterousness of ElDorado's manner is clearly reflected in its content. The emphasis

156

El Dorado: J. P. Harrah and Co\c Thornton

throughout is on physical deterioration, not always directlyrelated to age, but becoming virtually a metaphor for il. Wayne'sattacks of paralysis are the most obvious example: he is seenclutching his side after any exertion, and Hawks makes a greatpoint of his helplessness on the two occasions of actual collapse(see his frantic and ignominious struggling to get under a rockwhen he hcars a horseman coming). The treatment of Mitchum'salcoholism seems so superficial beside that of Dude's largelybecause it is conceived almost entirely in physical terms. ln RioBravo Hawks used Dude's lack of physical control-his tremblinghands, etc.-consistently to express a spiritual condition; in ElDorado the emphasis is far more on the outward signs of physicaldegeneration for their own sake: Harrah's unshaven and blearyface, the size of his paunch, his stomach-clutching. The 'cure' isbasically physical, too, not moral as in Rio Bravo, where there isno equivalent for Mississippi's horrifie concoction of gunpowderand mustard. The end of the film has Wayne and Mitchum both on

157

1

Page 80: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

crutches. It is not the first time Hawks has treated the subject ofage and its problems-one thinks immediately of ThomasMitchell's failing eyesight in Only Angels Have Wings, of HarryCarey in Air Force, of Stumpy in Rio Bravo-but it is the first timeit has been the centre, indeed, the co-ordinating principle, of aHawks film.

Let us consider the violence of El Dorado in a bit more detai!.Again, comparison with earlier work is revealing. The momentwhere Harrah beats Bart Jason in the face with his rifle, close as itis to the saloon scene of Rio Bravo, is closer still to the moment inTa Have and Have Not where Bogart beats Dan Seymour: thereis in common not only the beating but the temptation to kill (thetrembling hand-'You're a lucky man'-one can also adduce theMatthew/Teeler incident in Red River). Action and dialogue areso close as to be almost identical; the difference-a very importantone-lies in the motivation of the violence. ln Ta Have and HaveNot one feels a perfect correspondence between provocation andresponse. ln El Dorado the provocation is still there, but it is muchless extreme; when one has allowed for it, one still feels somethingto be accounted for, in the pressures sensed behind the violence.The 'something' is surely age, or physical deterioration: theviolence, extreme, almost gratuitous, comes across (whether or notthis was the intention-it can be explained quite simply in termsoffashion, Westerns being so much more violent nowadays) as anover-compensation for a vulnerability scarcely found in earlierHawks heroes. One finds much the same discrepancy betweenprovocation and response if one compares the scene whereThornton drives the gunman out to get shot with its original atthe end of The Big Sleep. Thornton's sudden paralytic collapsemakes the vulnerability clear (and looks very like a stroke or aheart-attack). The same principle underlies the showdown withNelse Macleod. Nelse is scarcely a 'villain': he is another prof es­sional, in the employ of the wrong side, and treated by Wayne(and Hawks) with some respect and sympathy. His death, with itsattendant shame at being defeated by a man who lacks the use ofhis gun-hand, has considerable pathos; it is unpleasantly messy;

158

and it is the result of a deliberate trick-the only means by whichWayne can win, giving the references to 'professional courtesy' adecidedly ironic quality.

The episode of Luke MacDonald's suicide remains somewhatseparate in tone from the rest of the film, but is in many respectsa perfectly acceptable prologue. It introduces, with great force, thefact of mortality, and its attendant facts of pain and guilt, pointingforward to the consistently messy, morally impure, or dubiousviolence later in the film. The innocence of the victim (the latervictims of violence are mostly, as it were, professional men who gointo things with their eyes open) adds greatly to the intensity ofthe incident. The scene where Thornton carries Luke's body backto his family is one of the finest examples in Hawks's work of thatunderstating of tragedy that has always been one of its character­istics. The sense of irrevocability is beautifully conveyed.

There are other means in the film of implicitly stressing theheroes' age. There is the curious, seemingly irrelevant, meetingbetween Wayne and Draper-Sheriff ofthe town Wayne travels to-the sole purpose of which is to offer an alternative to Wayne'swandering-gunfighter existence: Draper, after a doubtful past,has settled in civilisation, and comparing his life with Wayne's webecome more aware of the latter's age. The first appearance ofMaudie (Charlene Holt) suggests, significantly, that we are to'read' the film as Rio-Bravo-ten-years-Iater: Wayne helped herwhen her gambler-husband got killed, she tells Mitchum, therebyrelating herselfimmediately to Feathers. She is not, however, at alllike Feathers: it is much more possible to think of her as a wife inthe traditional sense-mainstay of home, raiser offamily, cook andhousekeeper, etc.-and the film ends with the implication thatWayne is about to retire from his profession and settle down withher. But that is not where the emphasis lies: it is notable that thereis no final scene for Wayne and Maudie, to correspond to theending of Rio Bravo-just, a somewhat perfunctory statement.Indeed, relationships in El Dorado count for surprisingly little.Wayne and Mitchum seem much more separate and isolated thanWayne and Martin (partly, of course, because Harrah is a much

159

Page 81: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

1

1

1

III

III

Il

1

1'1

Il',1Il

1

'II

Il

1

!I)

Il

less dependent character than Dude; and as usual one cannotseparate the characters from the stars here); the men-womenrelationships, though both have great charm, never develop veryfar. ln El Dorado one feels the men-especially the older men-asstanding out in isolation against the darkness. Darkness dominatesthe film. From Thornton's return to El Dorado onwards, there arescarcely any daytime scenes, and what there are are mostlyindoors: one's impression is of perpetuaI night, and the feel of thewhole film is affected by this. The lighting of the night scenes,what is more, seems specially designed to bring out a silvery,almost icy quality, particularly in the faces. The darkness surround­ing Hawks's world, that l emphasised in discussing Only AngelsHave Wings, is here felt to be closing in, and its relation to theheroes' age is obvious.

There is no comfort or qualification. The Edgar Allan Poe poemfrom which the film takes its title might seem to offer sorne, withits theme of the idealistic search for 'El Dorado' by a 'gallantknight', but its function in the film seerps mainly to point bycontrast the absence of any El Dorado in the characters' lives-ortheir hopes. As Wayne says when Mississippi quotes the poem andtells him he's always liked it, , "Ride, boldly ride"? But it don'tturn out that way.' And there is no sign, here or e1sewhere inHawks, of any religious consolation. The gun-battle in the churchdoes not strike one exactly as blasphemous, because the termsuggests a de1iberate affront to religion. Here one feels that thechurch is being used simply as a fine dramatic setting for a gunfight,the shattering of the altar (by the lzeroes'bullets) coming across aspart of the general uninhibitedness with which the scene is broughtoff rather than as an attempt to shock religious susceptibilities. Thisimplies, it seems to me, a far more total rejection of Christianitythan blasphemy could ever be; it simply means nothing to Hawks,and he has not the slightest qualms about using a church as, inRio Bravo, he uses a farm shed.

Towards the end of the film, when Wayne, despite extremephysical handicaps, is preparing for the final showdown, Missis­sippi quotes more of the poem:

160

And when his strengthFailed him at length,He met a pilgrim shadow,'Shadow,' said he,'Where can it be,This land of El Dorado?'

'Over the mountains of the moon,Down the valley of the shadow,Ride, boldly ride,'The Shade replied,'If you search for El Dorado.'

Clearly, the 'pilgrim shadow' is as far from finding El Dorado asthe knight: there is no El Dorado, the film suggests, either in lifeor in death; there is only the search.

It is profoundly characteristic of Hawks that this film, of whichthe above account suggests that the keynote should be a blackdespair, should be among his gayest and funniest works; though theblack despair is there too, not very far below the boisteroussurface. The tension between black background and gay fore~

ground, in fact, has never before been so extreme. l pointed out, inOnly Angels Have Wings, the emotional effect of Grant singing the'Peanut Vendor' in the immediate context of Joe's death, the songbecoming a joyous shout of defiance. The gaiety of El Dorado haspreclsely this heroic quality; but it is one thing to show a characterdoing this in a relatively 'young' work, and quite another to do ityourself in your seventies.

The laughter of El Dorado-a spontaneity deliberately re­captured, but none the less genuine for that-calls to mind lateYeats, where one finds a similar co-existence of desperation andheroic gaiety. One thinks, for instance, of the gaiety of LapisLazuli, with its explicitly stoical quality. ln Yeats, of course, thereis a perspective one must not look for in Hawks-a perspectivegiven by his feeling for tradition, and for the lost civilisations ofthe past: Hawks's laughter is heartier, less affected by bitterness,

161

Page 82: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 83: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

1

Il

!I

!

III

!I!

1'1

1

:11

III

!'

'1

encyclopedia (Bal! of Fire). He respects posltlve achievement and theintelligence and struggle behind it. Indeed, the intelligence and thestruggle are more important than the achievement, valued more as theirconcrete embodiment than for itself. Equally important is the sense ofinterdependence in group activity. The supreme example of theseinterests is the rebuilding of the Mary Ann in Air Force. Even in Land ofthe Pharaohs, where what is in question is enforced slave labour, theprimary response is of admiration for corporate struggle; Hawks shows thework beginning as an act of communal faith-only later does whipsupersede work-song.

There is not much more to salvage: sorne moments expressing a loathingof totalitarianism and its attendant brutalities: the opening triumphalmarch, with its crude reds and blues garish against the soft grey-yellowsof the desert, the mechanical tread of the soldiers over the strewn flowers;the degradation of the slaves building the labyrinth, tongues tom out toprevent them from revealing its secrets, yet abasing themselves before thePharaoh, showing abject gratitude at his promise of 'pleasures', the totalloss of the individual's self-respect.

Hawks 'didn't know how a Pharaoh talked': the few moments worthsalvaging consist of general effects, only incidentally related to thenarrative. The characters' interchange is so stilted (on whatever level ofrealism or convention) as to make detailed commentary superfluous. Thefilm as a whole is of value only as a waming to rigid adherents of theauteur theory, who assume that a film which is thematical~y characteristicis thereby important. One is entitled to take as evidence of an artist'squalities and interests only work in which he was clearly involved on apersonallevel, and there is little sign of such involvement in Land of thePharaohs. Various points might have been interesting: the Joan Collinscharacter, overtly presented as evil, might have rclated to the aggrcssivewomen in other Hawks films, but in terms of concrete realisation thecharacter is a string of clichés. Where Land of the Pharaohs is useful isin the negative definition it gives of Hawks's genius: the demonstration(when one places it beside his successes) that his art lives, not on thelevel of ideas or themes, but in the flesh-and-blood proccss of mise-en­scène, where characters and actors become fused. ln theory it ought to beone of Hawks's most important films; but Hawks is the least theoreticalof major directors.

Sergeant York

The reasons for the acclamation of Sergeant York in 1941 are obvious:its hero, a real-life figure who had captured or killed hundreds of Germansin the First World War while retaining his naïve idealism and remainingat heart a pacifist, seemed ta reconcile the most contradictory moral

164

impulses. But the film has retained an underground reputation and thereasons for this are more inreresting. Firstly, an aura of respectabiIityhangs around the subject: its truth, in outline at least, is vouched for, andits leading character has all the finest virtues of nobility, sincerity,simplicity, heroism: no other Hawks film has so intrinsically respectablea basis (significantly, it was the only time Hawks has ever been insultedwith an Oscar nomination). Secondly, it deals explicitly with importantmoral issues: the rival claims of religious conviction and patriotic duty. lnthis it is unique in Hawks's work: the moral implications of his films areimplicit in the action, not dealt with as 'issues'. ln fact, it is precisely thesefactors that work consistently against the film's artistic success. One feelsHawks continually hampered by having to 'stick to the facts'; an intuitiveartist, he is ill-equipped to handle big issues explicitly on any but asuperficial1evel.

ln certain sequences the film springs to life. Alvin's struggle to get themoney ta buy a piece of 'Bottom Land'-soil more fertile than the rockyhillside ground he forces his plough through-the acquisition of whichhe believes to be a necessary preliminary to winning Gracie Williams­reveals the essential quality of the Hawks hero: Alvin has set himself atask, and its accomplishment becomes a matter of self-respect. After theturkey-shoot, where he wins the necessary money only to find that theland has already becn sold to a rival, Gracie calls to him as he goes off invengeful desperation, 'Oh Alvin, it don't make no difference'; to whichAlvin replies, 'It do to me': the original aim of winning Gracie has beenreplaced by the need ta meet the challenge ta his self-respect. It is thefilm's most characteristic moment. The scenes of work and effortculminating in the turkey-shoot have an intensity and beauty that leaveone in no doubt as to the genuineness of Hawks's response, here, to hismaterial. The relationship between York and his mother, based onmutual respect, almost wordless, is realised beautifully and most economi­cally. Alvin cornes home after a drinking spree. He stands on the thresholdand his mother throws a bucket of water over him. They sit at table, sheoffers him salt, they smile at each other. Scarcely a word is spoken; thewhole relationship is suggested through action, gesture, expression:Alvin's submission to his mother, not dependent or unmanly, derivingfrom respect for her position and her self; the mother's attitude to herson, not indulging, but understanding him, knowing him sufficiently forwhat he is not to be unduly affected by what he does.

The sense of community life is very carefully conveyed. Hawks is farmore successful here than with the society life of Come and Get It orthe court of Pharaoh (the oruy other examples in the adventure filmsof established communities). Yet paradoxically, in this most 'realist' ofHawks's films one is most uncomfortably aware of the falsifications of

165

,

Page 84: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 85: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

Il1

,1

1

Il

I!Il'

l'

Il

'What beautiful photogmphy! What splendid compositions!' occur to oneas a first reaction. The externality of the realisation reveals itself mostdetrimenta11y in the treatment of religion. The religion depicted is simpleand naïve-the presentation of the preacher-storekeeper (Walter Brennan),its chief spokesman, places it quite adequately. It is given a convincinglyearthy, rural flavour, expressed in homely parables about finding sows andploughing round rocks. But if we never feel that we are being asked toaccept it, we also never feel that Hawks is particularly engaged by it;Alvin's pacifism, and the religious grounds for it, get only perfunctorytreatment, a crippling weakness, as they are inescapably central to thefilm's subject. The 'Primitive' beauty of the scene where Alvin reads theHistory of the United States and revelation coincides with sunrise,striking in the simplicity and strength of its imagery, cornes across as ameans of evading inward treatment of Alvin's predicament. The effectsof religion on Alvin-his 'Christian' self-abasement before the men whorobbed him (mora11y, if not lega11y)of his promised 'Bottom Land'-goright against the spirit of Hawks's work, yetHawks (handicapped nodoubt by the facts, and with the real Alvin York still alive) seems not tohave had the courage to oppose them firmly: Gracie's spirited attackon Alvin for being unnatura11y and distastefu11y 'noble' carriessorne weight, but gets lost sight of in the film as a whole. Sorne criticssee it as the tragedy of a man decorated for going against his beliefs:the idea is implicit in the material, but it never reaches adequaterealisation. Hawks himself in interviews seems somewhat uncertainabout it.

The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep is not exactly a failure, but its success exists within theseverest limitations, and the Current widespread admiration for it is worthconsideration.

On its first appearance it was attacked for violence and amorality. ltsreputation has grown out of a11proportion to its achievement because ofthose very qualities that aroused hostility in the forties: violence, cynicism,tough attitudes, 'black' humour are fashionable now, and so is Bogart.Curiously, the real qualities of The Big Sleep seem largely to have beenoverlooked, by attackers and adulators alike.

The question of style and method is crucial. On it depends the greatdifference between Hawks's film and Chandler's book (which it fo11owspretty dosely in terms of narrative). The book is narrated in the firstperson by Marlowe, and the reader is restricted throughout-a limitationso confining as to undermine any daims to serious attention made forChandler-to Marlowe's slick and crude sensibility, which nothing in thebook 'places'. We are compe11ed to see a11the characters in Marlowe's

168

terms, and in the language of a cynical arrested adolescent, insistingtiresomely on its own smartness.

At no point and in no way does Hawks attempt a visual equivalent forthis style. Nor does he imprison us in Marlowe's consciousness. RobertMontgomery tried to do just that in Lady in the Lake, by using subjectivecamera technique throughout, with Montgomery himself, as Marlowe,only visible when looking in a mirror but in theory present a11the time.ln theory the spectator became Marlowe/Montgomery. A moment'sreflection should have exposed the fa11acies,but it's one of those Brightldeas that a minor talent tends to get hold of and refuse to let go. Far fromincreasing the sense of spectator-participation the subjective techniquewas alienating because awkwardly obtrusive. Hitchcock, who commonly en­courages audience-identification, never uses subjective techniques in thisblatantly literal way. When we look in a mirror, it is not Robert Mont­gomery's face that looks back; when characters fix us with their eyes andspeak straight at us from the screen, apparently expecting us to answer, ourreaction is acute selfconsciousness, and we become immediately awarethat, whoever we arc, we are not Philip Marlowe. When at one point in thefilm a character punches us (or the camera) in the face, the effect, if crude,is perhaps defensible in communicating Marlowe's surprise: we jump. Butwe jump even higher later when a character is thrusting his face at us in fulldose~up through a car window and a fist, theoretica11y our own, suddenlyrises up from the bottom of the screen and punches it on the nose.

Yet even if the subjective technique worked, the result would neces­sarily be inferior to The Big Sleep. For Hawks, unlike Chandler andMontgomery, releases us from Marlowe's consciousness, presentingaction and characters (Marlowe induded) with his customary objectivity.Ir is truc that every scene begins and ends with Bogart, that we knowonly what he knows; but we are not forced to see as he sees. Besides, whatwe have is not so much Bogart acting Marlowe as Marlowe becomingBogart. The ideal Marlowe-from the point of view of fidelity to theoriginal-is Dick Powell in Edward Dmytryk's Farewell my Lovely:Powell has exactly the slickness and boyishness, the tough superficiality,of Chandler's Marlowe. lncarnated by Bogart, the character achieves asympathy and a maturity he never had in the books; placing the smart,cynical remarks as they arc never placed by Chandler, making them muchless than the expression of the whole man.

Dmytryk repeatedly seeks visual equivalents for Chandler's prose.When Marlowe is knocked out, the comment cornes, 'A black pool openedat my feet; l dived in', and the screen fills with ink. Dmytryk's style tendstowards T eutonic heaviness, with echoes of German Expressionism in thelighting and special effects, at odds with the Chand1erian slickness withoutbecoming a meaningful comment on it. The openness of Hawks's film-

169

1,:1

Page 86: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

Il11

il

the cool, objective, classical style, editing and camera-movement strictlyfunctional-never oppresses the spectator.

A somewhat negative reason for admiring the film. What, morepositively, are the characteristics that transform the atmosphere ofChandler's novel into the subtly different atmosphere of the film? Ir seemsperverse to say it of a film either praised or denounced for its blacknessand savagery, a film containing seven (1 think) murders and variousincidental brutalities; but they are chanu and tenderness. Their presenceis partly identical with that of Humphrey Bogart, but not entirelyexplained by it. The film gives us repeatedly, and the book almost never,a sense of positive, sympathetic relationships; in the book the charactersmerely adopt varyingly 'tough' attitudes towards cach other. The mutualaffection and respect that develop so naturally between Marlowe andGeneral Sternwood in the opening sequence is barely hinted at in thebook, which also offers no equivalent for the tenderness, so simplyexpressed, between Bogart and the girl in the bookshop (Dorothy Malone).Above aIl there is the Bogart-Bacall relationship, where, though thedialogue (much of it original Chandler) remains tough and cynical, theacting conveys a mutual sympathetic awareness. The altogether charmingand funny little scene where they telephone the police then try to convincewhoever is on the other end that he was phoning them looks like one ofthose collaborative inspirations of director and players that just grew.

It is also illuminating to set Hawks's film beside Huston's MalteseFalcon. Huston's film is more singlc-minded, the plot clearer: faithfultranslation of Hammett's novel. Hawks's film is more open. Huston is sodetermined to explain the plot that there is an inordinate amount of talk:more, even, than in The Big Sleep. The treatment of plot in Hawks's filmis casual. Hardly anyone can follow it, including apparently Hawks, whomaintains that he still doesn't know who committed one of the murders.The film follows Chandler's plot fairly closely until the book's lastchapter, then suddenly opts for a different killer. To have Bacall tum outto be the killer would certainly have gone against the whole spirit of thefilm, but the last-minute switch doesn't make for clarity. Isn't thisindifference to plot evidence of Hawks's strength rather than weakness?One respects him for conceiving the film primarily in terms of the Bogart­Bacall relationship, and of Eogart's moral relationship to the back­ground and general atmosphere. While Hammett is superior to Chandler,Hawks is superior to Huston. Eut the Chandler-Hammett atmosphere istoo stifling for Hawks to breathe in happily: he lets in what fresh air he can.

Gentlemen PreJer Blondes

Hawks's out-and-out admirers think particularly highly of GentlemenPreJer Blondes. They are, perhaps, blinded to its shortcomings by their

17°

pleasure in recognising the Hawks flavour-a common danger for anyoneimmersed in an artist's work. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is distinctivewithout being particularly distinguished: many characteristics of Hawksiancomedy are present in a raw state, never fusing into a satisfactory unity.The film lacks any firm positive centre that could give its various elementsperspective and make them meaningful.

The brittle, petty humour of Anita Loos's book is incompatible withHawks's robust and generous comic sense. The material came 10 Hawksvia a Broadway adaptation, already broadened; much of it is thin andbanal. Hawks makes it work intermittently by pushing the vulgarityinherent in the character of Lorelei Lee to extremes and allowing it todetermine the style. The staging of 'Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend',with glaring clashes of cerise and scarlet, crude stereotyping of movementand gesture, ghastly human chandeliers and candelabra, expresses thedehumanising effect of Lorelei's money-based, money-obsessed outlook,human beings reduced to abjects.

Hawks, in an interview, indicated the film's central weakness, apparentlywithout realising it. 'Ir was a complete caricature, a travesty on sex. Itdidn't have normal sex. Jane Russell was supposed ta represent sanity.'This self-contradiction is reflected in the Russell character throughout.Hawks conceived her partly as an erotic parallel to Lorelei (MarilynMonroe): Dorothy collects and devours men for sex as Lorelei for money.This gives us sorne of the film's sharpest moments, and suggests what itmight have been if Hawks had reshaped his material more ruthlessly: agrotesque modern morality, a reductio ad absurdum of the contemporaryvalues of money and erotie experience pursued as ends in themselves.The best sequence in the film is the staging of 'Ain't there Anyone Herefor Love?' in the ship's gymnasium, with Jane Russell surrounded by theOlympics team tao self-absorbed in body-building exercises to notice her.Blank faces and mechanical movements suggest men become machines:the sequence paraUels the 'Diamonds' number.

The conception of Dorothy as erotic tigress makes it impossible to takeher also as 'representing sanity'; her love scenes with private detectiveMalone (Elliott Reid), based on commonplace material and playedfairly straight, meant to 'place' the relationship of Lorelei and hergrotesquely ineffectual millionaire 'lover' (Tommy Noonan), succeedonly in being faintly embarrassing. The function of the Russell characterchanges arbitrarily, and the spectator cannot adjust. Malone seems littlemore virile than Lorelei's helpless victim, and again one senses confusedintentions. The characteristic humiliations imposed on Malone at thehands of the two women (in the film's one really funny scene he is soakedwith water, stripped of his trous ers, dressed in a feathery negligée, andpushed out into the ship's corridor) quite overshadow any innate dignity

171

Page 87: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 88: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

relationship to (hence our reading of) Shakespeare's plays, forexample, unless we fossilise them as museum exhibits (the ultimatedistortion), cannot possibly be the same as that of an Elizabethan, orof spectators in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.

My own work, and the position underlying it, have evolvedconsiderably sin ce the mid-60s when the book was written-a

development provoked partly by professional challenges (notably thework of Screen and the wider critical movement of which Screen is one

representative), partly by changes in my personallife (notably my'coming out' as gay). 1 now see Hawks's films fram a different per­spective (in which Gay Liberation and Feminism have major raIes);accordingly, the films change, reveal new aspects, new implications,new uses. This is not, 1 think, to distort the films, to twist them taparticular ends. ln a sense, any interpretation distorts, sin ce noreading can escape particular personalfcultural emphasis. Butsemiology has confirmed what the more intelligent traditionalcriticism has always observed: that a given work of art, or a givenartist, does not have a single, finite meaning that can be fixed for aIl

time, but is the point of intersection of a multiplicity of imeractingcodes, hence capable of surrendering a range of meanings, the choiceof which will be determined by the requirements of the situationwithin which work or artist is perccived.

Hawks and Hollywood 1deology

By the term 'Hollywood ideology' 1 wish to con vey the set ofassumptions which classical Hollywood cinema tends overall to

reproduce and reinforce. 1 do not mean to suggest that it correspondsclosely to the ways in which individual Americans live and think or to

the ways in which individual films actually work (if the latter weretrue, one would not need to bother oneself with Hollywood beyondthe sort of cursory blanket dismissal favoured by intellectuals prior tothe 50s) . .j3ut it is clear enough that Hollywood has part-created, anddone much to perpetuate, a body of myth (in the sense in which

Barthes uses the term in Mythologies) which one must feel has played adominant role in our culture, shaping our values, assumptions andaspirations.

174

The simplest embodiment of this ideology is the Hays Office Code,a set of rules explicitly elaborated to protect the American Way ofLife. The need for such a code itself testifies cloquently to the con­tinuai conflict in the Hollywood cinema between the dominant

ideology and the powerful impulses driving to its subversion, which

go far bevond the attempts to gel away with being 'naughty' to whichconventional film historians and aficionados of Mac West tend toreduce them. The basic principles can be put quite simply: capitalism,

the right to ownership; the home, the family, the monogamouscouple; patriarchy, with man as adventurerfpioneerfbuilderfbread­winner, woman as wifefmotherfeducatorfccntre of civilisation (the'feminine' sensibilityÎ; the 'decent' containment of sexualityflovewithin this structure, its permitted manifestations governed by the

foregoing principles and deviation from them punished; the generalsense that ail problems can be resolved within the system-that,

although it may be in need of a bit of reform and improvement hereand there, the system is fundamentally good (natural, trueÎ andradical change inappropriate. (Indeed, one of the main functions ofthis ideology is, hy 'naturalising' cultural assumptions, to renderalternatives Iiterally unthinkable.)

This ideo\ogy is challenged implicitly across the whole spectrum of

the 1lollywood cinema, most ohviollsly in certain genres (for example,

film noirÎ or in the work of certain directors (for example, Sirk);thollgh it must he said that this ohviollsness was not apparent toaudiences when the films were made. Crucial here is the concept of'entertainment', that extraordinary two-edged weapon of the capital­ist establishment. Entertainment is the means wherehy the exploited

are kept happy and unaware; it is also (because, by ddinition, nottaken seriously-'it's only entertainment' is a phrase commonly usedto render any further discussion sllperfluous and even foolish) themeans whereby in disguised fonns, like Freudian dreams evading the'ccnsor' in slcep, the most subversive impulses can find expression in

an apparently harmless or insignificant form.The interest of I-Iawks's work-frum the general ideas and attitudes

abstractable from it, down to the vivid detail of performance that giveshis best films their inexhaustible freshness-derives from its

175

Page 89: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

ambiguous relationship to the dominant Hollywood ideology. Safelycontained within the 'entertainment' format, and invariably discussedby their director in terms of character and action with very liulethematic (let alone ideological) awareness, the films maintain thisambiguity on every level. Consider the relationship of the male groupsof the adventure films to established capitalist society. Dependentupon, and supportive of, that society, the groups actually embodyvalues which are either irrelevant or antagonistic to it. The mail-planefliers of On~v Angels Have Wings, the sheriff and deputies of RioBravo, the animal catchers of H aiari!, aIl nominally serve the interestsof society, yet are never motivated by that aim, which is relegated tathe status of pretext. The values the films celebra te-a sort of

primitive existentialism rooted in notions of self-respect, personalintegrity, intuitive recognition and loyalty between individuals (theaccount expounded in this book seems to me still to stand up )-renderirrelevant the accumulation of wealth and the development ofcivilisation.

Most striking-and so much commented on that it is unnecessaryta do more than glance at it here-is the film's treatment of the wholemonogamyjfamilyjhome syndrome, conspicuous mainly for itsabsence. Almost no Hawks film is centred on a stable marriagerelationship; the one obvious exception (Monkey Business) is con­cerned, characteristically, with the release of ail the impulses which'stability' represses. Children in the Hawks world are wizened liulegrotesques (George Winslow in M onkey Business and (;entlemen PreferBlondes is the definitive embodiment) who seem to have sprung fromnowhere: one scarcely imagines them having parents or family back­grounds. Hawks was always content to work within the established

genres, and the narrative structures of the films are thereforedetermined overall by the ideological system the genres variouslyembody: they move inevitably towards the establishment of themonogamous heterosexual couple. The strength and conviction ofsuch generic resolutions, however, are everywhere undermined bythe pervasive sense of impermanence that characterises Hawks'sworld. This conflict sometimes produces ftaws in the films' narrativecoherence, a danger that even Rio Bravo (still in my opinion Hawks's

176

masterpiece, the definitive e1aboration ofhis 'world') does not escape.The final John Wayne/Angie Dickinson scene in that film is curiouslyredundant: the tension it appears to be resolving was resolved muchearlier in the film. What the logic of the narrative demands is a further

development of the relationship; Hawks, unable ta imagine this,

produces only repetition. Interestingly, the corresponding scene in ElDorado, resolving the Wayne/Charlene HoIt relationship, is simplyabsent, a curious and troubling hiatus in the narrative (troubling, that

is, in terms of the expectations Hollywood narrative traditionallysatisfies). ln the Hawks universe there is no past (except as anunfortunate experience to be got over and forgotten) and no future

(everyone may be dead by tomorrow); life is lived, spontaneously andexhilaratingly, in the present.

The concept seems to me perfectly realised in the ending of To Haveand Have Nol. Earlier in the film, Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael) is

composing a song at the piano while talking with Lauren Bacall abouther relationship with Bogart; he has the melody but can't think of thewords. His line to Bacall, 'Maybe it's better this way', is subsequently

incorporated (with slight variation) in the song-text: the song, 'HowLittle We Know', later performed by Bacall in Bogart's presence,becomes a statement about their relationship. When, at the end of the

film, Cricket asks Bacall whether she's still happy, her reply ('Whatdo you think?') provokes him to a jazz version of the tune whichaccompanies her famous hip-wiggling walk out into the fog and thetotal uncertainty of the future. Any generic guarantce of permanencefor the couple is decisively undercut: 'Maybe it's just for a day ,

H awks's WomenThe characteristics of the Hawks Woman have been thoroughlydcfined, and there is no need to recapitulate them here; no one,

presumably, will now wish to enrol her in the Feminist cause. Thewomen in Hawks's films, for aIl their vividness and idiosyncrasy, are

dearly conceived from the male viewpoint: one wou Id not wish tadaim that women find a 'voice' in the films that is not male­detcrmined. This is as true of the one Hawks film centred on women,Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as of the rest: Marilyn Monroe and Jane

177

Page 90: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

Russell are there very clearly the embodiments of contrasted yetcomplementary male fantasies. The force of This generalisation isevident in the absence of female friendships or alliances in Hawks's

work. Women, on the contrary, are conceived as rivaIs for the male,hence as his subordinates, their meaning given only in relation to him.One notes the instant antagonisms between Jean Arthur and RitaHayworth in Only Angels Have Wings, Lauren Bacall and DoloresMoran in Ta Have and Have Not, Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe

in M onkey Business. The great exception, apart from Gentlemen PreferBlondes, is Red Line 7000, with its Gail Hire/Charlene Holt partner­ship, their support of Laura Devon, and especially, the delightfulscene in which Gail Hire and Marianna Hill discover an instantrapport although they are rivaIs for the same man, and exclude himfrom their conviviality of speaking French to each other. But the

continuing delight of that film (my high estimate of which still stands,despite widespread opposition) is partly in its promise of entirely newdevelopments in Hawks's thematic concerns, unfortunately notrealised in his two subsequent films.

If Hawks's presentation of women certainly does not escapedetermination by the dominant sexist ideology, the Feministtendency simply to dismiss it on those grounds seems somewhat

hasty. The Feminist animus against Hawks cornes out perhaps in thegross distortions of Laura Mulvey's article in .)'creen, 'Narrative Form

and Visual Pleasure', in which she offers the fÔllowing remarkableaccount of Ta Have and Have Not:

' ... the film opens with the woman as object of the combined gazeof spectator and aIl the male protagonists in the film. But as thenarrative progresses she falls in love with the main maleprotagonist and becomes his property, losing her ou tward

glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuality, her show-girlconnotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone.'

That Lauren Bacall does not appear in the film for the first ten minutesis perhaps a minor quibble. What is more important is that her

'show-girl' attributes only become prominent as the film progresses:though she sings casually and 'improvisationally' with Hoagy

178

Carmichael earlier, her maih number occurs about twenty minutesbefore the end, and her final exit very clearly emphasises the

'show-girl' characteristics. Her submission to the male has ta be seenin the context of the Hawksian uncertainty: it is clearly provisional.

Despite the extreme freedom of the adaptation, it is instructive tocompare Ta Have and Have Not with its source, the Hemingwaynove!. It is tempting ta use the novel and the film ta develop a thesisabout the increasing richness of the popular cinema during the firsthalf of the twentieth century and the corresponding impoverishmentof 'serious' literature. Though such a thesis can scarcely stand on the

comparison of one novel with one film, the juxtaposition beautifullyexemplifies the differences, in our age, between solitary, alienated artand communal, integrated art. It is a matter of more th an a simpledistinction, the fact that just one person writes a novel while a number

of people-director, screenwriter, actars, technicians-collaborateon a film. By its popular nature, the Hollywood film is subject to acomplex network of social/cultural determinants beyond theanalysable contributions of individuals, becoming, though notunequivocally, the expression of a culture.

This is not ta suggest that Hemingway's book, because the work ofa so-called 'serious' novelist, escapes ideological derermination.

Though ostensibly an outspokenly anti-Establishment 'protest' work,it is more impoverished and constrained by ideological determinationthan Hawks's film-to be more precise, impoverished by the failure ofits efforts to escape ideological determination. Ir seems ta me analmost completely unprofitable work. On the one hand, its 'social

protest' seriousness denies the reader what has traditionally been themost essential profit from art, if also the most dangerous: spontaneous

delight, the kind of response Hawks's film evokes whenever it isshown. Such delight is itself complex: partly a satisfaction in being

given what we want (which may be merely what we have been taughtto want), but partly a delight in surprise, or a delight arising out of thetension between the familiar and the unexpected, the creative use of

conventions; it is also, at its best, a delight in freely functioningcreativity (another dangerous, but 1 still believe indispensableconcept). Hemingway's creativity in his meagre (not just in length)

179

Page 91: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

novel doesn't seem to function very freely. While denying us delight,the book falls everywhere into the simplest ideological traps. Anattack on the capitalist social set-up, it can envisage no systematicalternative, in fact negating the possibility of imagining one (see itstreatment of Communists and revolutionaries), and celebra tes an

independent outsider who se admirableness depends on his remainingjust that. As all rich people are decadent and miserable (i.e. eitherpromiscuous or impotent), and Harry and Marie are so healthy (i.e.faithful and strongly sexed), the secret moral is clearly that poverty is

better for you.As for the presentation of women, Feminists may not be exactly

falling over themselves to applaud Hawks's treatment of LaurenRacall in the movie, but Hemingway's Marie must be one of theall-time sexist archetypes: a female character conceived exclusively asa medium for the worship of male potency, her attitude ta Harry beingone of simple adoration, apart from which she has no function in thebook and no independent existence, even (or especiaIly) after Harry'sdeath. The book's morbid preoccupation with impotence on the onehand and the fantasies of super-sexuality embodied in Harry Morganon the other goes with our sense of Hemingway's isolation and clearlydetermines the presentation of Marie (Altman caught the wholesyndrome very weIl in the Sterling Hayden character of The LongGoodbye, confessedly based on Hemingway). It is the Hawksiancontext, similarly, that makes possible the Marie of the film (or 'Slim',as she quickly becomes), her comparative independence centred onwhat Mulvey calls her 'show-girl' attributes, which allow her ameasure of self-assertion (albeit as entertainer for a male audience).

Her relationship with Hoagy Carmichael (built, as so often withHawks, on a shared song-see The Big Sk.v, Rio Bravo, Red Line7000) is important here, a relationship of equality and creativity.Hemingway's Marie has no meaning after Harry's death; Hawks's is awoman who will always be able to take care of herse If, whatever

happens to her man.With Hawks's women, the principle of ambiguity again operates.

The clearest way to establish This is ta extend the now standardcomparison with women in the films of Ford. The Fordian world view

180

provides Woman with an entirely logical and central role: she is wifeand mother, at once the validation for the man's building of civil­isation and the guarantee of its continuance; she is essential to thetransmission of values from past to future. A sequence of scenes earlyin Young Mr Lincoln exemplifies This precisely. Lincoln, still a humble

shopkeeper, encounters a family who want to trade with him: theimage of the covered wagon led by the father, with the two sons insidepresided over by the mother, is itself an archetypal Fordian image oforder and family. The mother mentions an old barrel which 'might beworth fifty cents'; the father rccalls that it's full of books, which

belonged ta his grandfather. From this Lincoln inherits the book ofthe l,aw (B1ackstone's Commentaries)--the Law of patriarchy whichthe mother, significantly, is debarred from reading; her function hasbeen to preserve the books in pcrfect condition, not to understandthem. There follows the scene with Ann Rutledge, a scene rich in the

myths of our culrure. Bcfore Ann appears, Lincoln, amid the multi­rudinous signifiers of natural fertility, has translated the legal rightsand wrongs of Blackstone (the basis of Western capitalism, in effect)into universal Right and Wrong: a marvellously concise example ofthe naruralisation of ideological assumptions. lt is Ann's fllnction notto teach but to inspire: she exemplifles the myth of the 'great womanbehind every great man', urging Lincoln (who alone possesses know­

Icdge) to 'make something of himsclf. Abruptly, Ann is dead, but iceis breaking up on the swift-liowing river and Lincoln brings the first

spring flowers to her grave. It is her continuing influence that drivesLincoln on, his allegiance to her memory (as also to the mcmory ofhismother, who is 'resurrected' in Mrs Clay) being crucially important.

lIawks's anirude to women, Iike l'ord's, cannot be separated fromhis attitude to death, to society, to tradition. With the Fordian address

to the grave (repeated in My Darling Clementine and She Wore a YellowRibbon) compare the famous steak scene of Only Angels Have Wings

('Who's .Toc?'). With Ford's insistence on the furure developing out ofthe past, a past which must always be revered, commemorated intransmitted rirual, compare the Hawksian insistence on Iife in the

present. One might, 1 think, daim that Ford's work embodies thetradition al concept of the woman's role under patriarchy at its

181

Page 92: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

noblest, finest, most respectable. ln Hawks's world that role has no

possible place: woman is unnecessary, either as a pretext for thebuilding of civilisation or as its preserver and transmitter. Hawks'smale groups are clearly patriarchal (the leader is actually addressed as'Poppa' in, for example, On~v AngeL, Have Wings and Rio Hravo), hutthey lack a crucial constituent of traditional (or Fordian) patriarchy,the notion of inheritance which gives woman her function. There liesthe enormous interest of Hawks's women: they arc anomalous and

threatening, but there. The much-noted attempt to tllrn them intomen never quite works: they remain, ohstinately, men/women,demanding a recognition somewhat diffcrent from that exchangedbetween the males; they arc a permanent prohlem, as they scarcely arein Ford.

Hawks's cinema, in other words, if it never offcrs any positiveapproach 10wards establishing a new female consciollsness, raises theproblem of the woman's mie as it is raised nowhere else in classicalcinema, by removing or rendering irrelevant the role which thewoman traditionally fills. 1 think il is this, as much as the desire on

Hawks's part 10 provide male fantasy-figures, which may accollnl forthe remarkable and (whatever ideological lIneasiness one may t'cel)

perpetually fresh aliveness of so many actTesses' performances in hisfilms: the assertion of life, the refusal to he confined in the lraditional

role, repeatedly undermines the gencric patterns of resolution.

Male RelalionshipsThe interest which Hawks's work can he argued 10have for Feminism

is exactly paralleled by its interest for Gay Liheration. Again, there isno question whatever of the films producing a clear-cut positive imageof gay relationships that could be felt to have direct political force;again, the operative word must be 'amhiguity'; yet again, within theclassical Hollywood context, the films raise questions, open up

possi bili ties.Many cri tics have sensed the presence of a gay sub-text running

right through Hawks's output. Its presence would, of course, havebeen vehemently denied by Hawks himself, though he was able 10describe two of his films (A Girl in Every Port, The Big Sky) as 'a love

182

story between twO men'. A practice common to so many recent 'malebonding' films (e.g. California Split, Midnight Cowboy, ScarecrOW)whereby the possible homosexual implications of the heroes' relation­

ships are disowned by being projected on 10an effeminate, ridiculousor vicious minor character, is fully anticipated in Fig Leaves. A Girl in

Every Port stands out as the one film in which a close male relationshipis finally confirmed, the girl (Louise Brooks) being dismissed from thefilm. Eisewhere, the progress is 10wards a heterosexual resolution

(The Big Sky, Red River, Rio Bravo, El Dorado) or the death of one ofthe men (Dawn Patrol, Thomas Mitchell in Only Angels Have Wings).There are numerous striking examples of homosexual symbolism inHawks's films, of which the most overt is perhaps the MontgomeryClift/John Ireland shooting contest in Red River (a sceneunfortunately eut from the British release prints), for which the menexchange guns, with clear mu tuaI admiration (Ireland subsequently

gives as his reason for joining the cattle drive the hope that he may getClift's gun some day). The way Hawks plays with, then rejects,homosexual attraction is neatly epitomised in a tiny, characteristicmoment in The Thmg, difficult to convey in words because it dependsentirely on the way twO men look at, and smile at, each other: themoment where the sergeant (Dewey Martin) manoeuvres the captain

(Kenneth Tobey) into shortening the watches over the monster in theice and says, '1 think you're right, Captain'. The looks exchanged andthe smilc of mu tuaI affection arc both intimate and held; then the

captain looks across at the woman Nicky (who has a male name andwears trousers), and crosses the room 10 join her.

One also notes the procession of young men (particularlY in11awks's later work) who have the appearance of gay male icons andwhose role invariably involves a close intimacy with the hero, carryingthe constant (if constantly submerged) impression ofbeing a potentialalternative 10 the woman: Montgomery Clift in Red River, DeweyMartin in The Big Sky and The Thing, Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo,

James Caan in hl Dorado.

ReversaisThe sexual relationships in Hawks's work have finally 10be seen in the

183

Page 93: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

context of its most curious and consistent phenomenon, the obsessionwith reversaI-patterns. It is a commonplace of Hawks criticism thathis en tire work is structured on reversaI: the opposition between theadventure films and the comedies, however one reads it. The

opposition is not as neat or complete as is sometimes suggested: it issynthesised, for example, in Rio Bravo, the elements of Hawksian

comedy (notably the scenes involving Angie Dickinson) beingsuccessfully integrated within the 'adventure' framework. Further,certain films reverse the reversaI, so to speak, their auteur structure

relating them to their generic opposites: thus ,)'car{ace belongs withthe comedies and His Girl Fridav with the adventure films (the malegroup isolated from yet attached to society, the hero in control

throughout). The opposition holds good in general, however; one wayof defining it is to consider the notion of chaos that is everywhere nearthe surface of I-Iawks's world. ln the adventure films, centred on the

male group, chaos is out thcrc (the Andes mountains, the jungles of thePacific islands, the Arcric wastes); the master motif (literal ormetaphoric) is the small circle of light amid the surrounding darkness.ln the comedies, set inside estahlished society, chaos erupts l'romwithin. It carries quite different connotations in the two situations: in

the ad venture films it is a threat held at hay by the values of the group(self-respect, loyalty, spontaneous aff~ction and sharing); in thecomedies what is threatened (the estahlished social order) is not

valued, and the eruption of chaos hecomes liherating and positive.It is in the comedies (or the lighter adventure films like The ThmR

and H atari!) that reversaI-patterns are most prominent and central(though not of course restricted to them). Children and adults are

reversed in The Ransom o{ Red Chief (the child dominating theadults), Gentlemen Prefà Blondes (as Hawks himself put it, the childwas the only adult on the ship) and, supremely, Monkev Business,where adults Iiterally hecome children (in hehaviour if not

appearance). Primitive and civilised are reversed in Monkev Business(Cary Grant as Red Indian) and, intricately, in Hatari!, where ElsaMartinelli's initiation into the Warusha tribe, her skin hlackened, is

followed by the scene where she is covered in her 'civilised' warpaint,cold cream. Hatari! also reverses animaIs and humans, with

184

Martinelli becoming the 'mother' of three baby elephants; the film

opens with truck and jeep converging on a rhinoceros on the veld andends (almost) with the elephants converging on the woman in a

supermarket. Most curiously, The Thing, with its 'intellectual caffot',reverses human and vegetahle. Ali these reversais are manifestationsof the chaos that the civilised order suppresses; apart from the humant

vegetable reversai in The Thing, ail are regarded at least ambivalently,with good humour; most carry strong positive connotations. Analternative word for reversai here is 'interchangeability'.

The master reversai-pattern, and surely the key ta this

phenomenon in Hawks, is of course that of male and female. ln FigLeaves there is a mock-courtship scene in which one of the men playsthe woman's role. Men wear women's clothes in Bringing up Baby, 1Was a Male War Bride, Monkey Business, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

and, almost, l~io Bravo (the red bloomers held up against JohnWayne). ln The Big Sk.v a huge Frenchman pretends to be a woman ina dance on the ship's deck. ln His Girl Friday Rosalind Russell

literally plays the 'man's role'. Women wear masculine clothes in 1Was a Male War Bride, The Thing and Hatari!; according to Hawks

(Wide AnRle, Summer 1976), he gave von Sternberg the idea ofdressing Dietrich in men's clothes for her first stage appearance inMorocco, including, embryonically, the exchange with a woman in theaudience-a scene rich in bisexual connotations. A distinction needsto he made here. Consistently in the films it is funny for men to dressas women, but attractive and enhancing for women to dress as men;the men are in drag, the women in work-clothes or uniform. Never­theless, the implication of interchangeability or role reversai is clearlythere.

One less obvious but highly suggestive example is worth registeringin detail: the interchangeability of Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo and

James Caan in El Dorado. Both are travelling people, and gamblers;both are given the same little bit of business with a pack of cards; bothare identified by idiosyncratic clothing (Caan's hat, Dickinson's

feathers); both stay on (in the long-standing tradition of Hawksheroines-cf. Only Angels Have Wings and 1'0 Have and Have Not)

after Wayne has dismissed them; both simultaneously attract and

185

Page 94: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf

exasperate him; both have the same line, '1 always make you mad,don't !?'. That Caan, rather than Charlene Holt, is the film's replace­ment for Dickinson and almost becomes the love-interest may help toaccount for the absence of the expected, really obligatory, JohnWayne/Charlene Holt resolution at the end, especially as the Caancharacter's heterosexual relationship is also left unconfirmed. One has

the sense that Hawks was sim ply unable ta close the film; he pullsback on the 'safe' buddy-relationship of Wayne and Mitchum.

ln Hawks's world everything is potentially reversible or inter­changeable; that is the real meaning of the chaos so ambivalentlyviewed, through the dual perspective of the adventure films and thecomedies. The central, though always suppressed or disguised, driveof his work overall is towards the ultimate in interchangeability,bisexuality-the final breakdown of the established social order, therelease, at once terrifying and exhilarating, of what society mostfundamentally represses.

Classicism and Containment

There is a brief sequence in The Thing, showing the flight back to base

from the location where the flying saucer has been inadvertentlydestroyed and the monster dug out of the ice. A shot establishing thesituation-a general view of the plane's interior-is followed by asequence of five shots which is perfectly symmetrical in structure.Shots 1 and 5 show the captain and navigator in the cockpit, thecamera filming them from the front; shots 2 and 4 are the reverse of

these, looking from inside the plane into the cockpit, as the mendiscuss the nature and significance of the creature in the ice. The

central, pivotai, shot shows the block of ice, the husky dogs uneasyaround it. The sequence begins with light banter between the men,and ends with a joke involving the repetition of the long number of abulletin. The banter and the joke contain the brief, central moment ofterror, providing a means of either denying or distancing the threat ofthe unknown ('chaos').

The sequence can be taken as the epitome of Hawks's classicism,which is both the classicism of Hollywood (invisible technique,symmetry, orderly and logical narrative, economy of means) and anattitude to life. Classicism is Hawks's means of containing the chaos to

186

which his work points, and which the comedies ambiva1entlycelebrate.

The Rio Bravo song sequence can stand as the perfect enactment of

the working of this classicism/containment in relation to male love orattraction in Hawks's work. The first song ('My rifle, my pony and

me') opens with a close-up of Dean Martin, singing unaccompanied,as ifhe were alone; when the camera draws back to reveal the presenceof the other men, the song develops inta a 'love duet' for Martin and

Ricky Nelson. The editing excludes both Walter Brennan and Wayneduring this, concentrating attention on the intimate exchange oflooksbetween the two--those looks of mutual admiration and affection thatrecur throughout Hawks's work. When the song ends, Stumpy/Brennan demands ' ... something 1can join in' , and we have the folk

song 'Cindy' with its communal refrain: the potentially 'dangerous'love-relationship is contained, and redefined, by the integration ofthe couple in the group, the sequence moving tGa final group shot thatunites the three men and Wayne, paternally looking on.

What 1have called 'containment' Andrew Britton calls 'repression':one'sfinal attitude tG Hawks may well depend on the distinctionbetween the two terms. 1don't think one has any right to demand thatan anist's work reflect or reinforce one's own ideology; one wantsrather to dcfine the relationship between them. Hawks's work is both

progressive and conservative, at once opening up possibilities of'chaos' and formally containing them. Ir cannot be claimed thatHawks's work embodies a viable alternative to established Westernculture, but it would be quite unreasonable to demand that it should:such a project has never been a necessary function of art. What it

rcpresents is an inexhaustibly fascinating and suggestive intervention,which raises the most fundamental questions about the nature of ourculture and the ideological assumptions that structure it. Apparently

safely contained within Hollywood Classicism and the 'entertain­ment' syndrome, its implications throw everything open, put

everything into question.

(This essay owes much to the influence of Andrew Britton and Richard Dyer, thoughboth would probably disagree with its conclusions.)

187

Page 95: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf
Page 96: Howard Hawks (Robin Wood 1981).pdf