A Kettle of Hawks
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In the essay that accompanies our release of Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Michael Sragow notes that few remember that James Agee was an early champion of Howard Hawks. Writing in 1948, more than twenty years after Hawks began making his first silent features for Fox, Agee noted that Hawks was seldom mentioned in discussions of “real artists in picture-making,” even though he was “one of the most individual and independent directors in the business. Even when he has a vapid chore to do, he gives it character; when a picture really interests him, he gives it enough character to blast you out of your seat.”
The quote is clipped from a rave for Red River (1948) that didn’t make the final cut of Agee on Film, a two-volume collection first published in 1958 and 1960. So it’s the critics at Cahiers du cinéma, particularly Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, who are usually credited with giving rise to the notion that “this seeming paradigm of the Hollywood professional,” as Geoffrey O’Brien puts it, “might be a deeply, indeed obsessively, personal creator.”
From today through April 9, the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles is presenting A Kettle of Hawks: 12 Films from Howard Hawks, a sampler of highlights from a career that produced more than three dozen features over the course of more than forty years. Part of the reason a full appreciation of Hawks was so long in coming is that, as the Cinematheque points out, he “couldn’t be pigeonholed.” He worked for every major Hollywood studio and mastered just about every genre: the gangster movie (Scarface, 1932), noir (The Big Sleep, 1946), the western (Red River), science fiction (The Thing from Another World, 1951), and of course, screwball comedy.
Bringing Up Baby (1938), one of the greatest screwballs ever made, “seems almost like the genre’s feral stepchild,” writes Sheila O’Malley. “The film doesn’t just go off leash; it questions the concept of leashes altogether.” In the mile-a-minute His Girl Friday (1940), newspaper editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) aims to reel his ex-wife, reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), not only back into his life but back into the office. His Girl Friday is “the most bracingly adult screwball comedy (and romance) of them all,” writes Farran Smith Nehme. Hawks and screenwriter Charles Lederer “found a fresh spin on the remarriage comedy, making the question not how the wandering spouse will find her way home but how she’ll get back to work.”
The late Peter Bogdanovich, whose What’s Up, Doc? (1972) is a winningly adoring homage to Bringing Up Baby, introduced his interview with Hawks—the longest in his 1997 collection Who the Devil Made It—with, of course, a few personal anecdotes but also with snippets of praise from Manny Farber and Orson Welles. But it was Rivette, argued Bogdanovich, who “nailed it”: “If Hawks incarnates the classic American cinema, if he has brought nobility to every genre, then it is because, in each case, he has found that particular genre’s essential quality and grandeur, and blended his personal themes with those the American tradition had already enriched and made profound.”
So what were those personal themes? Hawks’s films are “the epitome of apparently unostentatious, unpretentious Hollywood product,” writes O’Brien, “and it was only in retrospect that the persistent underlying motifs came into clear view: the stoic resistance to every appeal to tear-jerking grandiosity, the hard-boiled sparring that was the preferred mode of courtship, the cult of professional skill as something to hang on to in a world that might otherwise prove meaningless.”
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