Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Read Free Page A

the United States. Perhaps it was not such a great a leapfor him to be able to expertly construct, or reconstruct, a story for films, to design an inexperienced woman’s look, voice, and behavior to powerful effect on the screen, to know how a man should act in extremis. A great mystique has always surrounded film directing. Partly for that reason, Hawks aspired to the position early on, and he was incredibly fortunate to be able to achieve it and buildthe rest of his life around it. But he approached it as a job, even as it allowed him to express his poetic flair for dramatizing Hemingway’s “grace under pressure.”
    Hawks was concerned with men in action but he was not, per se, an action director. The scenes in his films of battles, flying, deep-sea fishing, logging, cattle driving, river boating, singing and dancing, pyramid building, animalchasing, auto racing, and train crashing were usually done by second-unit directors and were often noticeably divorced from the fabric of the picture. Rather, Hawks was a master of events played out within tight quarters among a handful of people in a limited period of time; despite his reputation as an outdoorsman, as a director he was most comfortable in a drawing room, an office, a home, or ahotel. These enclosed settings magnified the importance of every gesture and look, every remark, every decision, to the point where meaning, if you were looking for it, was densely packed into every moment.
    Although often conceived of as a naturalistic director because of his relatively plain, straightforward, eye-level visual approach and his affinity for Hemingway’s stripped-down narrativestorytelling technique, Hawks was actually the most stylized Hollywood director this side of Josef von Sternberg, with whom he had more in common than anyone imagined at the time. Attheir best, Hawks’s films, like Sternberg’s, conveyed a beautifully wrought philosophy of life entirely through action, embodied in characters who enact certain behavioristic rituals in a remote setting artfully detachedfrom the real world. Many critics have attempted to define this philosophy, which takes the form of a highly entertaining but nonetheless fatalistic variety of adolescent existentialism, one devoid of sentimentality, false hope, or religious reassurance. Man is the measure of all things in Hawks’s tough and sometimes bitter universe, but there is compensation to be had in friendship, unityof the group, the assertion of intelligence over dumb brute force, and the rewards of a job well done. Perhaps the critic Molly Haskell put it best when she ventured, “In Hawks, the pioneer hubris, and rashness and naïveté, of the American converges with the austere, man-centered morality of ancient Greece.” In his work, she wrote, one sees “the picture of man poised, comically or heroically, againstan antagonistic nature, a nothingness as devoid of meaning as Samuel Beckett’s, but determined nonetheless to act out his destiny, to assert mind against mindlessness.”
    That Hawks shunned deep analysis yet employed extensively developed theories in his work, that he was an outdoorsman of action and at the same time a filmmaker most at home in highly stylized interiors, that he was an autocraticelitist who nonetheless reveled in the classlessness of his characters’ group pursuits—these are just three of the paradoxes in Hawks’s character. Among the others: he was not an intellectual yet he was very intelligent (not so unusual); he possessed the wisdom of his years but remained an adolescent in his enthusiasms even in old age; he was innately conservative in his worldview yet daring andinclined to risk; he was the very definition of a modern twentieth-century man but stuck to tried-and-true formulas; he was embraced by many feminists in the 1970s for liberating his women characters from the home and placing them on the same field with men, yet he held an utterly conventional view of women’s role in his