Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Read Free

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

    In the received literary sense, Hawks’s life of the mind was not that of an intellectual; he did not follow intellectual pursuits, and he displayed or feigned astonishment at many of the exalted qualities some critics found in hiswork. What, then, is one to make of François Truffaut’s observation that Hawks “is one of the most intellectual filmmakers in America”? Only that Hawks had an extremely well worked out set of theories, convictions, and principles about how to make movies and was articulate enough to express them in a simple, direct manner. Hawks thought long and hard about his profession, about what worked andwhat did not, just as he might have about engineering, architecture, design or construction of any kind. Hawks knew how to take apart and reassemble cars, motorcycles, and planes. He could expertly copy any piece of furniture. His innate taste told him how to dress himself, and his advice helped his second wife become the best-dressed woman in