To Have and Have Not

To Have and Have Not feels like the dead center of the Hawksian universe, even more than the other two films that Robin Wood bracketed with it as “the Hawks trilogy,” Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo. Uninflected by either the will to power that seizes control of the Hollywood machinery in Angels or the craftsman’s desire to regain lost prestige with the perfect object of Rio Bravo, To Have and Have Not simply is, much as Bogart simply appears, without provenance, in the film’s elegant first shot. The 1940s were Hawks’ oyster – he had eleven consecutive box-office hits from 1939 to 1951 – and To Have and Have Not was the pearl at the center, a work undertaken in and executed with as much comfort and confidence as an industry director is ever likely to muster.

Which is not to say that the film is beyond reproach. For a masterpiece, it takes an unusual amount of time to hit its stride, as if Hawks needed to put all its elements in place and bang them around a little before getting comfortable enough to use them unselfconsciously. Scavenging in both Hemingway’s source novel and Casablanca, Hawks and his writers Jules Furthman and William Faulkner are obliged to retool the bits and pieces that they salvage in order to fit them into the director’s world view. Rather characteristically for Hawks, the scene that seems most accurately drawn from Hemingway’s novel, in which Harry Morgan (Bogart) takes an unsavory paying customer, Johnson (Walter Sande), on a fishing cruise, isn’t entirely satisfactory: Johnson is too easy to dislike, Morgan gives us too much of the simple pleasure of witty contempt. In general, the film’s establishing scenes rely heavily on the wish-fulfillment of Morgan talking tough to power, with at least one important scene, the interrogation of Morgan and Slim (Lauren Bacall) by Vichy Martinique’s menacing Sûreté, distorted by giving us this pleasure. Perhaps the most interesting problem with the material is Slim’s elephant-in-the room gotta-be prostitution, which is pushed away not only because the times required it, but also because Hawks is more interested in acquiring a hot rebel girl for his band of outsiders than he is in either enforcing or undermining a social norm. On the Casablanca side, the bluntness of Morgan’s refusal to get involved in the Vichy-Free French conflict announces itself as a genre convention and evolves into a wink to the audience, without ever being taken seriously as psychology (“I don’t know…maybe because I like you, maybe because I don’t like them”). The process of adaptation for Hawks often, perhaps always, mandates a breaking-in period, with the author’s vision first imperfectly assimilated, then simply overridden. One detects here a bit of internal conflict between Hawks’ self-image as a Hollywood craftsman whose job is to put an acquired property on screen, and the innate willfulness of an unreconstructed artist.

The most fascinating ambiguity in To Have and Have Not is crystallized when Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael) consoles Slim after Morgan has bid her farewell: “Maybe it's better this way, Slim...You haven't known him very long. He's a funny guy.” The statement is unusual, coming from a friend and ally. Morgan is depicted throughout the film as being outside of society’s jurisdiction, a guy who’s “handled quite a lot of gunshot wounds.” The putative central theme of commitment to The Cause is enacted by Hawks and Bogart as an issue of character extremity rather than moral exigency: a number of sympathetic characters plead with Morgan for his help and are turned away with no social accommodation for friendship, shrugging and shaking their heads. Beyond this, Morgan’s acts of aggression and rebellion against authority could easily be interpreted as a ledger of antisocial behavior, even by the individualist standards of fictional heroism. When Morgan insists that the wounded Free French emissary de Bursac (Walter Molnar) be left lying on the deck of Morgan’s boat (“I don’t want him bleeding over my cushions”), or when he threatens to shoot unarmed Sûreté men (“You’re going to get it anyway” - evoking a protest from his allies), it’s clear that, on some level, the film posits Morgan as trespassing against the inscribed audience’s moral standards.

And yet the case for Morgan as antihero is severely compromised by how consistently Hawks uses the character to fulfill his and our wishes. Morgan’s insolence and rebellion relieves our fear that power will be taken away from our identification figure; and his antisocial instincts are often expressed too wittily and with too much composure for us not to respond favorably. From the beginning, each of Morgan’s potential transgressions is integrated into his appealing sense of power and intelligence, making it difficult for us to claim any distance from him - “He’s a funny guy” may be the only moment where we are invited to contemplate Morgan’s strangeness without sharing in his authority. The inevitable result - that the film itself comes to partake of Morgan’s transgressive spirit - suits Hawks just fine. A rebellion against empathy always bubbles under the surface of his movies, and Morgan’s semi-outlaw status gives Hawks the opportunity to charge To Have and Have Not with the thrill of breaking commandments. Its electrifying climactic image, of Morgan shooting through a wooden table to kill a Sûreté agent, pays us off for the duplicity and hiding that we have had to endure throughout the film, and leads directly to Morgan’s only-theoretically uncomfortable act of torturing the remaining Sûreté men in order to reclaim hostages and gain safe passage. The film’s rush of energy at this casting off of inhibitions (“You're both going to take a beating till someone uses that phone. That means one of you is going to take a beating for nothing”) is a definitive rebuttal to the surface schema of an antisocial figure brought into line with the audience’s values.  

To Have and Have Not has no peer among Hawks’ films in the quantity of its dense, atmospheric settings. Hawks’ way with a studio set is a more diffuse application of the principle that governs his approach to acting: he starts with the attractive artifice of studio recreation, then adds detail and immediacy until the environmental load feels a notch more realistic than the setup. The first images of the film, on the docks of Fort de France, are a fine example: the effect of realism out of artifice is obtained not only with good set design, real water, and clever blocking of extras, but also with the way that Morgan materializes in mid-frame on the fade-in, too busy to give the film time to establish anything. Of course, Hawks always invests heavily in the ambiance of bars and nightclubs: here primarily the hotel club run by Morgan’s pal Frenchy (Marcel Dalio), which first becomes vivid to us as Cricket’s band, the drummer folding his newspaper just in time to come in on brushes, invites Slim to guest on vocals on “Am I Blue,” while Morgan looks on from his table behind a barricade of liquor, coffee and cigarettes. But Hawks has just as much fun with the frenetic drum-driven atmosphere of the crowded little bar where Morgan and Slim stop off to recover their composure after their close call at the hands of the Sûreté. As the plot engages, Hawks strings together imaginative artificial settings with an almost Sternbergian density: the early morning meeting with the remnants of the Free French resistance in a Creole shack, with slanting light through the shades and chickens clucking in the front yard; the tense mission to retrieve the de Bursacs, the relentless hum of the boat motor sustaining the sense of danger in Morgan’s subdued demeanor; the superb bullet-extraction scene, all high-key lighting and surgical process; the morning after the all-nighter, with Slim and Cricket holding the fort in the deserted cafe.

The film’s untrumpable trick is, of course, the legendarily effective love story between Bogart and Bacall. Identifying Slim as an adventuress rather than a prostitute removes the interesting prospect of putting the love alliance definitively outside the bounds of societal acceptance, but Hawks no doubt preferred his time-honored fallback position of erecting a wall of bad reputation between the lovers (“One look and you decided just what you wanted to think about me” - a sentiment reprised in Rio Bravo) and then bringing the wall down with raw sexual attraction. The key Morgan-Slim scenes take place in the enclosures of their shadowy hotel rooms, where even the Production Code seems unable to reach them as they perform mating rituals using a stolen wallet as prop, or linger over the sensuality of Morgan’s all-nighter beard abrading Slim’s cheek. The protracted play between the lovers stretches out the film’s structure daringly, with the two ping-ponging back and forth between rooms and conversation topics as long as they and Hawks feel like it - but Hawks will generally sacrifice a shapely narrative line for one more good scene or bit of business, and not many viewers have minded over the years.

Hoagy Carmichael, launching a nice little side career here as a supporting actor, is the first musician to take a substantial role in a Hawks film (though Gene Krupa had a memorable specialty act a few years earlier in Ball of Fire), and Hawks profits from the authentic casting, letting Carmichael illustrate the songwriting process by performing a discarded (but lovely) early draft of “How Little We Know” with completely different lyrics and mood. Lending his music to the cause of Hawks’ playful reflexivity, Cricket announces his ability to step outside the diegesis early on, scoring the discovery of Johnson’s body with ironically maudlin music: “Cut it out, Cricket,” says Morgan, trying to repress a grin. Morgan will later whistle the “How Little We Know” theme on his boat - a musical-comedy trope at the beginning of one of the film’s darkest scenes - and, when the action is over and Hawks needs an eight-bars-and-out ending, he has Cricket answer Slim’s final interrogatory line of dialogue - “What do you think?” - with a jazzed-up version of the same theme, cueing the audience to reach for their coats.

A Girl in Every Port

A Girl in Every Port commands attention as the first Hawks film in which the filmmaker asserts the personality that we know from his later work. It’s not Hawks first completely successful film: Paid to Love, one year earlier, offered Hawks a Lubitsch-like story and genre that he was able to use as a springboard for continuous invention. But A Girl in Every Port feels to the modern audience less like a genre film than like a fantasia sprung from Hawks’ unconscious.

The film probably seems more weirdly personal today than it did to audiences of the time. Contemporary viewers would have noted the film's considerable debt to the success of the 1926 What Price Glory? (also starring Victor McLaglen), another story of two tough guys whose friendship takes precedence over the women for which they compete. Certainly Hawks dials up the “love story between two men” angle (Hawks’ phrase) by having his male protagonists enact a number of the dramatic conventions of love stories. (Robin Wood long ago noted Hawks’ willingness to give the same dialogue or situations to both men and women in different movies.) Yet, without being able to provide citations, I have the impression that cinema culture was, more then than in recent decades, permeated with a sense that the heterosexual love story was a concession to the commercial, and that reducing or eliminating the feminine aspect was a mark of integrity. Perhaps Hawks was able to hide his polymorphous perversity in plain sight. In any case, no contemporary review that I’ve read is fazed by the fervor of the protagonists’ friendship. (Here’s a review from Screenland that’s of particular sociological interest.)

For the modern viewer, the Hawksian tropes pile up quickly. McLaglen pulls on Robert Armstrong’s finger after fistfights to put it back in joint, as Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin would do in The Big Sky; McLaglen lights cigarettes for Armstrong, as, to pick one celebrated instance, Bacall would for Bogart in To Have and Have Not. Like Hardy Kruger and Gerard Blain in Hatari!, McLaglen is “broke out all over in monkey bites” – Hawks’ strange slang for being in love. Louise Brooks takes Armstrong’s pants so he can’t dress, as Monroe and Russell do to Tommy Noonan in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Intriguingly, Hawks wrote a script a little before his death for a loose remake of A Girl in Every Port called When It’s Hot, Play It Cool, a comedy about world-traveling oil-riggers with protagonists named Spike and Bill, after the heroes of the original. Hard to imagine the material playing as smoothly for audiences in 1977 as in 1928.

One of the pleasures of A Girl in Every Port is seeing Hawks successfully take on the silent tradition of physical comedy. The first half of the film is essentially one bar fight or drinking scene after another, and where a Walsh or a Wellman would let show some of their identification with the emotional intensity of the physical life, Hawks gravitates naturally to a Keaton-like comic distance. His typical reliance on long shots with a margin of space around the human figure lends itself well to physical comedy, and the roughneck subject matter encourages in him a comic cruelty that is perhaps closer to Arbuckle than Keaton. One funny bit of business has Spike (McLaglen) slamming into a cop as he flees a jealous husband: he picks the cop up off the ground, but impatiently lets him drop to the pavement when he sees that the man has been knocked out by the impact. A more elaborate comedy routine, based upon the use of extreme long shots, has Spike and Bill (Armstrong), who are looking for a place to fight, accidentally and unexpectedly walk off a pier and into the ocean. It turns out that Spike can’t swim, and Bill expends considerable effort to save him, after which the two bond over cigarettes. When a cop wanders by, the new friends’ only thought is to contrive a ruse to push the cop into the water, after which they walk away happily in long shot, the possibility of the man drowning not on their minds or on Hawks’s.

Despite the number of Hawksian signifiers in A Girl in Every Port, it still belongs to the period of Hawks’ career in which he made use of preexisting character structures instead of creating films around the kind of character relationships that he favored. Sometimes this relative lack of control over the story leads Hawks into barren terrain, most notably at the climax, where Spike’s pop-eyed, expressionist anguish as he learns the truth about his love affair with the circus performer Mam’selle Godiva (Brooks) is far away from any aspect of people with which Hawks can engage. (A sentimental scene in which Spike and Bill are deflected from an erotic mission by the pathetic story of the woman’s young, orphaned son is equally uncongenial material for Hawks, but in this case he acquits himself as well as can be hoped for.) But often enough the slight mismatch between Hawks’ usual interests and the story archetypes demonstrates pleasantly that Hawks’ imaginative approach to characterization is not restricted to the pet configurations that he would repeat throughout his career. Brooks’ character, functioning in the scenario purely as a gold-digger, is reimagined as a self-possessed and self-aware presence, communicating with small and decidedly unvillainous glances and knowing smiles. Her relationship with Bill, her former lover, is pitched somewhere between story-based antagonism and behavioral collusion, as if Hawks preferred to bring her over to our side by letting her in on the joke of pretending she’s a bad guy. A more unusual (for Hawks) but quite affecting idea is the depiction of Bill as an overgrown, amoral child vying for Spike’s somewhat more diversified attention. Armstrong, considerably smaller than the massive McLaglen, has a rather inexpressive face that is turned to the film’s advantage, as he often resembles an adolescent hoping for affection or punishment from an idolized older boy. At the film’s emotional climax, Bill lies unconscious on a barroom floor, his arms splayed and twisted like a rag doll, reproaching the vengeful Spike with the childlike innocence of his martyrdom.

Air Force: Museum of the Moving Image, October 19, 2013

My piece on Howard Hawks' Air Force, playing this Saturday in the Museum of the Moving Image's Hawks retrospective, is now up at the MUBI Notebook.

Rio Bravo

Generally regarded as a career peak for Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo is both the culmination of the Hawksian action ethos and the gateway to Hawks’ relaxed late period. In his ground-breaking 1968 book on Hawks, Robin Wood identified a post facto trilogy - Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, and Rio Bravo - that forms the backbone of Hawks’ oeuvre. Though Wood described the films as loose remakes of each other, their plots aren’t very similar. On the surface, what they have in common is a lot of recycled dialogue and bits of business. Below that, all three films are centered on idealized characters whose state of being is not at risk. Because they themselves are not put up as the stakes for the drama, the drama is subtly devalued. More important to the film’s effect is a performance space, carved out from the plot, where these heroes and their group of allies and comrades can enjoy themselves when they are not dealing with story issues. Though that space corresponds to real locations – in Rio Bravo, the jail and the hotel – it’s really more of a space within the fiction, in that events there enjoy some degree of independence from story concerns.

In addition to being the capstone of this central trilogy, Rio Bravo also bears a relationship to the five films that Hawks would make in the final decade of his career. Rio Bravo was a substantial commercial success, after a dodgy period in the early 50s when Hawks wondered how to position himself with regard to a changing industry. Speaking to Peter Bogdanovich, Hawks described the lesson he took away from Rio Bravo: “I also decided that audiences were getting tired of plots and, as you know, Rio Bravo and Hatari! have very little in the way of plot – more characterization and the fun of just telling a story. And it worked out very well. People seem to like it better than the other way.” Certainly Hatari!, Hawks’ next film, pushed the boundaries of how little narrative structure a Hollywood film could get away with. Here the performance space expands to become the film’s dominant feature: it’s the lightly-borne plot that is hemmed in by walls of behavioral pleasure. The genie would not go back into the bottle: though none of Hawks’ later films were quite as daring as Hatari! about discarding narrative, all of them liberate performance from story to a large extent, and wind up feeling like documentaries of actors hanging out on sets.

But, though one understands why Hawks thinks of Rio Bravo as a film of characterization, its plot is more prominent and functional than Hawks lets on. In fact, if Rio Bravo stands out in Hawks’ filmography, I’d say it’s because it adds to Hawks’ more familiar virtues a distinctive command of storytelling, organizing small events within overarching story movements so adroitly that the viewer has few opportunities to check his or her wristwatch during the film’s 141 minutes.

Here’s an example of how Hawks uses the jail/hotel axis and the characters’ motifs to sustain actions for long stretches of time. The night of the story’s second day starts with Dude fighting the DTs in the jail, prompting Chance to take him out for “a turn around the town.” (The last sentence, like those to follow, represents a fully developed and leisurely paced scene.) The walk gives rise to a number of small events (a few false alarms, a confrontation with a Burdett henchman) and, in the fullness of time, carries Chance and Dude to the busy hotel bar, where Chance has a long talk with his friend Pat Wheeler about the futility of offering help to the lawmen, ending with Wheeler’s employee Colorado opting for “minding my own business.” Chance’s attention shifts to a card game in a corner of the room, and he follows Feathers upstairs as she leaves the game, leading to a confrontation in which Feathers is accused of cheating. Colorado interrupts their talk to propose that “the man in the checkered vest,” not Feathers, was the cheat in the card game, and everyone goes downstairs to watch Colorado expose the perpetrator. Chance and Feathers have one more conversation, partially resolving their conflict, before Chance and Dude finally leave the hotel – only to see Wheeler gunned down on the street. The pursuit of Wheeler’s killer begins, first with Chance charging into a barn from which the killer manages to escape, and then with the famous saloon confrontation, itself a graded dramatic module in which the alcoholic Dude, seemingly heading for public humiliation, shoots the killer out of the rafters with angelic grace, setting the stage for Chance’s vengeful, act-closing warning to the Burdett men. In a lengthy postscript to the night’s action, the heroes talk over their exploit in the jail, with Dude’s inability to roll his own cigarettes signifying his continued psychic vulnerability; finally Chance goes to sleep at the hotel, where he has a late-night talk with Feathers in which he makes peace by offering to call in the sheriff’s flyers that identify her as a criminal’s accomplice. Only here does the action that began with Dude’s DTs in the jail, nearly 35 minutes of screen time earlier, come to rest.

This long continuous development of a single action is not unique in Rio Bravo. Perhaps an even better example occurs on Day Four, in which a jail-to-hotel-to-jail movement that encompasses both the flowerpot-throw gunfight and Dude’s uncanny redemption from alcoholism is honeycombed with ancillary conversations in which Dude, Feathers and Colorado are pushed along a step or two in their journey to membership in the Hawksian commune. One wonders which of the script collaborators was principally responsible for the film’s intricate, difficult plotting, or how this job of work fell out of Hawks’ memory. In any case, the pleasure of watching Rio Bravo is slightly different from (and, I would say, slightly greater than) that of any other Hawks film, thanks to the intertwining of Hawks’ ambient, behavioral vision and this framework of deceptively compelling storytelling.

More than any Hawks film I can remember, Rio Bravo is keyed to characters watching each other, to cross-cutting on glances. Chance and Stumpy watching Dude's withdrawal symptoms in the jail; Dude watching from across the street as Chance’s authority forces a Burdett henchman to retreat; Feathers wincing as Chance pulls a chair from under a bad guy; Chance monitoring Dude’s performance in the precarious saloon confrontation with Burdett’s men; the glances of amazement as Dude pours the whiskey back into the bottle – in all cases the cross-cutting feels primary rather than secondary, a way of creating a film about relationships rather than exploits. Robin Wood, noting that Chance is a moral leader but dependent on his cohort’s help at every turn, and that his virtue seems to exclude him from the communal song sequence, suggested that Hawks was problematizing the image of the self-sufficient hero. But I'd say that Hawks was never deeply invested in the notion of self-sufficiency. He uses it as part of the thematic structure of films like Only Angels Have Wings and To Have and Have Not, but Hawks is always inclined to start his movies from a foundation of such genre-defined cultural associations, and the solitary inclinations of Geoff Carter and Harry Morgan are more story premises than sources of artistic inspiration. (Don Siegel would be a counterexample of an artist whose exciting ideas generally form around the mystery and mythology of solitary figures.) Hawks’ greatest enthusiasm is reserved for the web of personal connections that his characters happily weave around themselves. That Rio Bravo contains no substantial struggle between self-sufficiency and communal life feels less like a new tack for Hawks than a step in the process of purification and de-genre-fication that was to become marked in Hawks’ late period.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Hawks fans have always been divided on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: some rate it high, others have trouble seeing much of Hawks' personality in it. It's difficult to find a similar film for purposes of comparison, which is the first hint that Hawks didn't simply fill out a genre form. The closest I can come is the Mansfield-Tashlin collaborations The Girl Can't Help It (1956) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957): films in which a new-to-market sex symbol plays a sex symbol, presumably a studio strategy to enhance the value of a brand name. All three films share an awareness that they are not only deriving comedy from the subject of the women's extreme effect on those around them, but also presenting the women for the audience's delectation.

Tastefulness is hardly an option here, but Hawks manages to combine audacity with analytical intelligence. The film's amazing opening shot sets the bar high: with no opening credits, Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) and Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell), in bright red sequined gowns, emerge from behind a blue curtain and begin their first song before a second of screen time has elapsed. Any story that follows must be subordinated to this startling abstract manifestation of hypertrophied femininity and clashing primary colors. As the women maneuver their way through a world of staring, wolf-whistling men, Hawks and screenwriter Charles Lederer (who apparently inherited little plot from the revue-like 1949 Fields/Loos Broadway play) take advantage of the project's parodistic tone to dodge or deflect the moral issue of gold digging, and preserve an amoral perspective right up to the outrageous ending, which scores Lorelei and Dorothy's double wedding with the gold-digging anthem "Two Girls from Little Rock."

The intrinsic exaggeration of Monroe's acting style makes it difficult to perceive that Hawks has engineered yet another of his comedies in which a powerful solipsist (Lorelei) is juxtaposed with an exasperated representative of the reality principle (Dorothy). This time the pair are allies instead of opponents (as opposed to, for instance, the teamings in Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday), but Dorothy's function is primarily to establish a realistic baseline from which Lorelei's departures from normality can be measured. Not that nearly everyone else in the film doesn't help build this baseline by butting his or her head against Lorelei's serene obliviousness - but Hawks likes to keep a character around the set that he would enjoy hanging out with.

Monroe's girly persona, which we enjoy associating with stupidity, is here inflected to accommodate Lorelei's mastery of every situation. As splashlessly competent as a Hawks action hero, she is only the more effective for being ignorant of, or unconcerned with, society's moral codes. From the early scene in which she uses Sherlock Holmes-like logic to suss out the gift she is about to receive from her beau Gus (Tommy Noonan), Lorelei is on top of every situation, whether exploiting a maître d's exploitation of her shipboard popularity, or planning a multi-pronged assault on the detective Malone (Elliott Reid) who is hired to get the goods on her. In the end she bests Gus's disapproving father (Taylor Holmes) in an old-fashioned intellectual debate on the gold-digging ethic, after laying out the case in admirably extreme terms: "I don't want to marry him for his money - I want to marry him for your money." Playing up the usual style gap between Monroe's acting and everyone else's, and playing down her often-cited vulnerability, Hawks oversees a remarkable comic performance, with terrific line readings like beat poetry ("Sometimes Mr. Esmond finds it very difficult to say no to me") and bits of business that hint at a bizarre inner life (confronted for the first time with a diamond tiara, Lorelei can barely restrain her hands from pouncing inappropriately; after the tiara's departure, she happily improvises a scenario of future possession, using a napkin ring encircled by a necklace as a stand-in).

Hawks claimed to have had no interest in directing the film's two big musical numbers, "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" and "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," and apparently was not even on the set when Jack Cole shot them. (Presumably he had something to do with conceiving the numbers; and "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" was written for the movie by Hawks' friend Hoagy Carmichael, along with Harold Adamson.) But all the smaller numbers - "Two Girls from Little Rock," "Bye Bye Baby," "When Love Goes Wrong," and the courtroom reprise of "Diamonds" - are executed on the pleasingly intimate scale that Hawks uses for any group recreation. All four of these songs feature spectators clapping to lay down a back beat for the performer; the players provide verbal cues and gesture to each other to signal musical transitions, creating a mood of real-time collaboration, much as in the "Drum Boogie" number from Ball of Fire or the Bacall-Carmichael piano rehearsals from To Have and Have Not. In "Bye Bye Baby," Hawks uses an economical fast pan to pass from the Olympic girlfriends' four-part harmony verse to Russell's solo verse; when Lorelei and Gus sneak away to another room and take the tempo down to romantic ballad, Dorothy and the athletes spot her from the doorway, signal each other to prepare an intervention, then pound out a beat on the door frame to swing the song again. The film's musical highlight, "When Love Goes Wrong" (another Carmichael/Adamson composition), is a digressive mini-story in itself, with the women's dejected mood dissipating gradually during the song and dance, and a circle of friendly Parisians bonding so effectively with Lorelei and Dorothy that the last verse slows and quiets down for a melancholy farewell as the women's taxi pulls away.

A few unexciting scenes crop up as the film marks time between the big "Diamonds" number and the finale. Still, Gentlemen is too good to be relegated to the margins of Hawks' career. Our difficulty in coming to terms with Monroe's distinctive comic talent (odd that we are tempted to regard such a stylized performer as an authentic sexpot struggling with the rudiments of craft) impedes us from regarding Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as we do other Hawks films, where genre material and performances are purified, pushed to extremes, and mixed liberally with the director's distinctive ideas about what should and shouldn't be called entertainment. Coming as early in her starring career as it does, Gentlemen is generally regarded as a defining film for Monroe; if it is less rarely recognized as her finest moment - well, that's more or less par for the course for Hawks-directed performances.

I Was a Male War Bride

Many have noted that Howard Hawks' comedies are often based on the disorientation and humiliation of the protagonist. It's less frequently noted that, having created this unhappy state of affairs, Hawks and his writers add to the films an equal and opposite character-based reaction: the stymied male protagonist becomes single-mindedly concerned with restoring his lost dignity, and at least intermittently attains a certain stature by his reactions to the disintegrating situation.

The earliest instance of this self-rectifying comic behavior is probably found in Twentieth Century: not in the matching solipsism of the protagonists, but in Oscar Jaffe's hapless sidekick Oliver (Walter Connolly), who rises from his submissive position and grabs Jaffe by the lapels (while stuttering in fear the whole time) in a last doomed attempt to restore the rule of sanity. David Huxley (Cary Grant) in Bringing Up Baby, and his close relative Roger Willoughby (Rock Hudson) in Man's Favorite Sport, are prime examples of this Hawksian comic paradigm: increasingly victimized and disempowered by the "screwball" genre and by solipsistic female forces of nature, they respond with an angry but self-aware appraisal of their plight that slips easily into sarcastic humor. The sex change of His Girl Friday modifies the formula - Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) is not as humiliated as her male counterparts, and therefore does not have to reclaim as much lost dignity - but Hildy too feels the need to restore some of her power with a continual scathing commentary on the Walter Burns-inspired chaos that has overtaken her life. The key aspect of this paradigm is that the comic perspective attained by the disempowered characters results in them grabbing many of the funniest lines in the films, and the audience is invited to laugh with their perspective and not merely at their disempowerment.

Hawks seems to be gratifying different levels of his psyche at the same time with this model. Part of him obviously gravitates toward extremes of humiliation and disempowerment that are unusual even by the regressed standards of comedy; and yet he also gets considerable pleasure from allowing his beleaguered characters to battle back with all the dignity of one of his action heroes. On reflection, the unusual thing about this bifurcation is not that Hawks contains opposing internal psychological forces - which amounts to a basic observation about human nature in general - but that he can so easily express his psychology on multiple levels without departing from tested commercial filmmaking practice.

I Was a Male War Bride is the purest incarnation of this Hawksian dichotomy. Unlike all the films cited above, it largely eschews "screwball" comedy and familiar conventions of farce: most of its humor stems from the characters' distinctively Hawksian reactions to the most disempowering scenario that Hawks and his writers (Charles Lederer and Hagar Wilde, working from a script by Leonard Spigelgass that was based on the autobiographical magazine serial of Dr. Roger R. Charlier) could concoct. A hit at the time of its release (Todd McCarthy reports that it tied with The Snake Pit as the third biggest film of 1949, after Jolson Sings Again and Pinky), its dialogue often drowned out by audience laughter even today, War Bride is nonetheless as weirdly and sublimely personal a film as anything the art houses can offer.

Largely shot in postwar Germany ("No other comedy, surely, has looked so drab," wrote Robin Wood) and partaking slightly of the pseudo-documentary vibe in vogue at Fox at the time, War Bride divides into two sections: the first a vision of love fueled by conflict and hostility; the second about the individual at the mercy of wartime bureaucracy. Both struggles create terrible problems for French officer Henri Rochard (Cary Grant), but, despite the continuity that his reactions impose, the movie's two halves do not integrate seamlessly from a thematic point of view. Hawks, always smart about people, instinctively compensates by keeping the focus in the second half on the now-united but still volatile couple, who could be forgiven for collapsing under the strain imposed on them by Public Law 271. Sometimes Rochard and Lt. Catherine Gates (Ann Sheridan, wonderful) exhibit a convincing enmity that transforms into love as smoothly as a gear change - as when Catherine learns that her Army pal Jack (William Neff) has intentionally held up her marriage paperwork, and slams him on the head with a metal tray without the slightest recollection that she had talking breakup five seconds earlier. Other times the couple take turns breaking down under the ordeal, with one able to provide comfort and humor for the other until the next crisis switches their roles. From a real-life perspective, one can legitimately wonder whether a love so deeply rooted in sex warfare can last for long without blowing up; but Hawks is no more interested in the sociology of a good marriage than he is in condemning the Army bureaucracy for the prolonged torture it inflicts on his heroes.

Rochard immediately projects a self-possession that is identifiably Hawksian, and that runs somewhat counter to comedy conventions. His early triumphs over confusion - such as his repeated demonstrations of perfect colloquial English in the face of American assumptions to the contrary ("See you in church," he replies to Jack's stilted French farewell) - are pulled off with a deadpan aplomb that doesn't desert Rochard in moments of embarrassment. Confronted by a curious WAC as he lingers mistakenly by the ladies' room door, he keeps a straight face and beats a leisurely retreat; later, when Catherine catches him eyeing a passing woman, he holds his ground without a beat of apology. Catherine's description of Rochard as a wolf is borne out by his behavior throughout the film's first half: no matter how hostile his relations with Catherine, he declines no opportunity for physical contact with her, feigning nonchalance effectively, yet advancing with grim resolve. (I can't think of many other comedies that have depicted sexual desire devoid of romance or the pretense thereof.) Hawks prefers not to disturb Rochard's poise by undermining his authority, even when loss of authority is the default comic reaction. Near the end of the first half, Hawks brokers an interesting power negotiation: Catherine's refusal to free Rochard from the clutches of the German police is the cruelest prank in the film; unwilling to let the offense vanish into the flow of comic incident, Hawks and the writers require an overt, unprecedented demonstration of submission from Catherine to balance the scales and allow the romantic sparring to continue.

But the most extraordinary depiction of the Hawksian instinct for self-rectification is saved for the film's second half. Each of Rochard's angry outbursts against the bureaucracy that neuters his marriage and leaves him homeless quickly yields to a controlled sarcasm that is a form of mastery. Left speechless by the marching orders that make specific provisions to destroy his wedding night ("This would never happen in the French army!"), Rochard recovers sufficiently to console his tearful bride before shuffling off to sleep in the bathtub, his automatic assurances gradually turning sarcastic as Catherine slips out of earshot: "It's all right…I'll be quite comfortable…I'll just turn on the cold water." Appalled to learn that Public Law 271 requires him to assume female status, he still manages a smooth exit at scene's end: "Brides first, please." After a while, he is no longer fazed by confused functionaries telling him that the paperwork he had filled out is intended for his wife - "According to the US Army I am my wife" - or even by being rousted from the only bed he has successfully negotiated for - "You will note that I have not taken off my clothes in anticipation of that." In the end his ritualized emasculation becomes a game to be played well: "It's a very natural mistake, you're not the first to have made it."

I Was a Male War Bride can be seen as Hawks' first solo flight, a move away from the genre formats that were always central to his art, and a venture into a looser realm where the projection of the filmmaker's personality takes center stage. Something in the air in the 1945-1950 period was encouraging established Hollywood filmmakers to step out in front of their films and assume the mantle of authorship; unlike some of them, Hawks did not sacrifice his grip on the box office with his self-assertion, at least not until the 50s. Still, the confident foregrounding of the Hawksian ethos in Male War Bride is in some ways closer to the ambient pleasures of late films like Hatari! and Man's Favorite Sport than to Hawks' earlier comedies and action films.

Only Angels Have Wings

Only Angels Have Wings is an annunciation: already a major director, Howard Hawks here becomes a definition of cinema. And yet Angels is not radically different from previous Hawks films, nor a model of seamless perfection.

One's first thought might be that Hawks benefitted from an evocative visual plan, courtesy of Lionel Banks' art design and Joseph Walker's dazzling, Oscar-nominated cinematography. But Hawks exploits that plan with a directorial freedom greater than he had previously permitted himself. More than ever before in his work, we experience the set as an actors' hangout, a place to linger over drinks, to come together in musical interludes, to catnap while waiting for the mail plane to return.

Hawks always liked to send strong genre signals, in order to increase the frisson when acting and action play out quicker, quieter, more informally than the genre backdrop leads us to expect. And the beginning of Angels is a genre pileup of major proportions. The traffic and bric-a-brac of the port of Barranca are swirled together with lively non-stop south-of-the-border music, and main characters are introduced gradually as the party travels from the streets into the Dutchman's lively restaurant/hotel/airport. Hawks and his screenwriters (Jules Furthman gets the credit, but a host of others participated, including Anne Wigton, who seems to have devised the basic story concept) introduce the love story and the comic relief early, but instinctively hold off on the film's really distinctive elements until its first set piece, the tense team effort to guide Joe Souther's plane home. The extraordinary impact of this scene depends upon Hawks discarding genre trappings a bit at a time, stripping the set and the performances of adornments, leaving us exposed to darkness and fog. The peak moment is when airline boss Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) impatiently orders that the musicians in the café stop playing: the order is passed along in the background, and after a few seconds the movie's chief genre signifier drops off the sound track, leaving ominous silence.

Only Angels Have Wings has an unusual structure that bodes well for Hawks' future career. The film's first and last thirds are devoted to lengthy, well-orchestrated dramatic interludes, centered on action and suspense while weaving in other story threads. No doubt Hawks' most dazzling coup is the Joe Souther interlude, with its surprising and understated expansion of the character of Kid (Thomas Mitchell), Geoff's second-in-command, who reveals both an unusual skill at tracking Joe's plane and an uncanny symbiosis with Geoff. If the biplane flight at the climax is inevitably less evocative and suspenseful, it takes us closer to the film's emotional center, with wild-eyed Thomas Mitchell and pulled-in Richard Barthelmess shoved together in a tiny cockpit, neither one revealing all his mystery, different acting styles checking each other out, competing archetypes of Hawksian existentialism.

Between these two integrated dramatic interludes, the film's middle third, alternating between chit-chat at the Dutchman's and adventures in the flying trade, is more meandering and lighter on plot than any previous Hawks passage. Yet this looser middle section points the way into Hawks' future: it contains the highest concentration of uninhibited behavioral play, the reflexive fun-on-a-movie-set that Hawks would hang onto after he had stripped away every other component of his style. Geoff and Kid wrestling for possession of Kid's double-headed coin, or Geoff patting the Dutchman's head while talking baby talk to him, belongs to a non-narrative, almost Warhol-like layer of the Hawks universe that can be regarded as either foreground or background, depending on where we focus our eyes.

As Hawks' directorial personality flowers in Angels, so do his idiosyncrasies. Love interest Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur) perhaps suffers from the competing subplots that flourish in this relaxed environment, to the point where she has to draw a gun on Geoff at the climax to regain lost dramatic stature. The odd character dynamic between Geoff and the disgraced Kilgallen (Barthelmess) - Geoff has great empathy for Kilgallen's plight, yet treats him with contempt to his face - will surface again in later Hawks films, where it will sometimes be mysteriously labeled as a form of therapy. Angels also sees Hawks beginning to convert his world view into an ethos, with both Bonnie and Kilgallen's wife Judy (Rita Hayworth) forced to capitulate to Geoff's ideas of right and wrong. Some viewers may be fazed by the full revelation of Hawks' personality - and yet this is what we have to deal with when an artist becomes so confident and so comprehensive that the cinema becomes subordinate to him instead of the other way around.

The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep is a great film – and yet it exposes so many potential problems with the Hawksian process. As a rule, genre is a painted backdrop in Hawks' films, a set of comfortable signifiers that create audience expectations with which Hawks and his actors can then play. The detective genre is a good candidate for the Hawks treatment, based as it is on the perceptual divide between the protagonist and the environment that he or she must navigate and interpret. It's easy to translate this perceptual divide into a Hawksian map of the project: the world that Philip Marlowe explores will become so many genre trappings, and Marlowe himself will move against that cinema-bound world with a lightness and informality that will make him seem more real by contrast.

In fact, the genre is so appropriate for Hawks that it pushes him to a posture that almost resembles parody at times. With so much of the film universe marked off as genre signification, and the protagonist left alone on stage center, the Hawksian urge to have fun can sometimes seem frivolous and even contemptuous. Rarely have the goofy scenes in Hawks films seemed so purely goofy: Marlowe playing a prissy book collector in Geiger's bookstore, or Marlowe and Vivian Sternwood bedeviling a policeman over the telephone, strike me as too strenuous and inorganic a form of reflexive fun. The running theme of Marlowe being irresistible to a stream of beautiful female supporting characters and bit players, likely a send-up of the male fantasy associated with the genre, doesn't come across as much less of a fantasy than what it's sending up. Even the film's opening scenes in the Sternwood mansion play a little too much like a trip to the funhouse: the general's monologue is too literary and scene-setting to let the character breathe; and each of the Sternwood daughters is little more at this point than a genre exhibit that gives Marlowe a chance to show his wit and detachment. (This is not to deny the Hawksian beauties of this opening section: not just the appealing underplaying of Marlowe sweating in the general's hothouse, but also the wonderful reverse tracking shot of Marlowe entering the mansion, framed in that ineffable Hawksian style that conveys both a movie set and an intelligence sizing it up.)

I think the best way to understand the film's greatness is to ask the question, "What causes Marlowe to get personally involved in the case?" For his early detachment gives way to fierce emotionality by the last act. Marlowe forcing Eddie Mars out to face his own gunmen is a driven man; and just before that is the startling concept of Marlowe's hands trembling in fear as he loads his gun in preparation for Mars' arrival.

I don't believe there is a single sufficient answer to that question. Here are some of the components of Marlowe's response.

1) To a large extent, Marlowe is motivated by a spirit of inquiry. This is a reflexive motivation, one that belongs primarily to the film audience, and for which Marlowe acts as our agent. But Hawks is adept at blurring the line between the fictional impulse and character motivation. The film really takes off with the long scene of Marlowe arriving just too late at the Geiger house and finding an array of clues: a corpse, a hopped-up Carmen Sternwood, a concealed camera. Marlowe moves freely about the set like a video game avatar, laying out the available facts for our inspection; Hawks enjoys his time in the house, declines to compress the time it takes for Marlowe to wander the room or search for evidence. The scene is about Marlowe investigating more than it is about the results of the investigation.

One of my favorite scenes in the film is, on the face of it, purely informational: detective Bernie Ohls stops by Marlowe's apartment at 2 am to tell him that Owen Taylor's car was found in the ocean. Marlowe volunteers to accompany Ohls to the crime scene; and asks Ohls a few factual questions as he retrieves his hat and coat: "How's the weather?…What time did that call come in?…What kind of a car did you say that was?" It would have been commonplace for a genre film to fade out as soon as Marlowe's departure was established. The ten or fifteen seconds that Hawks tacks onto the end of the scene are quite relaxed, with Marlowe moving off microphone as he walks to an adjoining room. On the one hand, it's as if Marlowe is using the few moments before "Cut!" to strengthen our grasp on the plot; on the other hand, the rhythm of the scene is peculiarly independent of the story's momentum. Hawks is playing in the space between the fascination of the fiction and the process of creating it.

By the time we get to the familiar pause at the middle of the traditional detective story – then the case is completely closed, I hope this amount is satisfactory, we're very grateful to you. Mr. Marlowe– Hawks feels no need to show Marlowe hesitating over the too-pat solution. Having exposed Marlowe's role as master of the fictional process, Hawks isn't tempted to play a game that he has already tipped us off to. Marlowe goes forward because we want him to, or because he wants to – the difference is hard for us to make out.

2) The Big Sleep is, among other things, a love story, and a rather good one. And Marlowe's object of desire, Vivian Sternwood, is somehow beholden to Eddie Mars, and can't escape his clutches without Marlowe's intervention. Marlowe cites this motivation on a few occasions: "I'm beginning to like another one of the Sternwoods."

From a plot point of view, this motivation is sufficient to explain Marlowe's emotional involvement. But Hawks and his writers are canny enough to know that the love story is not important enough to dominate the film, that the general tone of genre awareness militates against Marlowe falling too hard. Characteristically, Hawks turns this structural prohibition to his advantage, letting Marlowe and Vivian Sternwood drift together calmly and inevitably, dialing down the destabilizing aspects of the relationship (including Vivian's repeated acts on Eddie Mars' behalf) and emphasizing the lovers' quiet, mutual pleasure. The film's final, gentle joke – "What's wrong with you?"- is another way of saying "You may have looked like a plot problem on paper, but you never really were."

3) Interestingly, a much less important character – Jonesy, the penny-ante hood who sacrifices himself for his unworthy lover Agnes – is also cited in the script several times as a reason that Marlowe is determined to take Eddie Mars out of action. Jonesy is treated much more brutally by Mars than is Vivian; and yet it's an indication of how much the love story is muted that this minor character can compete with Vivian on Marlowe's hierarchy of motivations.

There is a reflexive angle here that boosts Jonesy's importance. He didn't just die: he died with Marlowe standing helplessly by in the next room. Marlowe's powerlessness during this incident is clearly a goad to him, as Marlowe himself states. It's a motivation that we, the audience, understand well: the hero is our power, our vehicle to traverse the narrative; any check on his power has dire consequences for our pleasure. So Marlowe's desire for revenge doesn't have to be explained too carefully in terms of his character, as we feel the slight along with him. The subject comes up again as Marlowe loads his gun with trembling hands in the film's penultimate scene: he tells Vivian, "Mars has been ahead of me all the way, way ahead." The pleasure of the genre depends on Marlowe reversing that trend.

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Marlowe's various motivations are skillfully meshed. There is enough character-based motivation to let us parse the film on purely internal evidence. And yet the energy that drives Marlowe to ever greater levels of involvement doesn't completely feel like a result of the characterization. In Hawks' films, the balance between the pleasure of fiction – the direct bond between the filmmakers and the audience – and the internal imperatives of the depicted world is a carefully managed trick, almost a matter of sleight of hand. You could call this blend inorganic; and perhaps it can be justified only as an acknowledgement, and a gentle underlining, of the intrinsically inorganic nature of art.

Hatari!

The late Stuart Byron once wrote that even John Simon would understand the greatness of Hatari! were he forced to see it ten times. And, after my fifth viewing on Saturday night, I must say that I’m starting to come around to the film's considerable charms.

In a way, Hatari! throws up more obstacles for the Hawksian than for the lay viewer. Hawks’ penchant for recycling familiar dialogue and situations from his previous films starts to take on a ritualized, automatic quality at this point in his career. And the careful interweaving of events that was so impressive in Rio Bravo has given way in the space of one film to the most naked, barely motivated setups, as if Hawks no longer cared a whit about hiding behind the curtain or pretending that events are motivated by forces within the film universe.

Maybe I’ve just gotten used to this stuff, maybe it doesn't bother me so much at this point in my life, I don’t know. Anyway, I come here to praise Hatari!, not to bury it. What struck me most forcibly on this viewing is that, in place of the genre mechanisms that he formerly used as backdrop and jumping-off point, Hawks riffs off of a downright Bazinian conflation of fiction and documentary. Hawks had often revealed in the past his interest in process, in taking a bit of extra screen time to show how things work. (The night before my Hatari! screening, I saw the less distinguished Land of the Pharoahs, the main point of interest of which is watching Hawks and art director Alexandre Trauner practically build a real pyramid over the course of the movie.) But never before or after would Hawks devote so much effort to documenting a real activity – capturing wild animals – or suggesting that the actors playing the hunters were actually performing the job on screen. The characters who climb into specially designed land vehicles and head out on the plains of Tanganyika in search of game are doing exactly the same things as the film crew. Even the most credulous viewer will grasp that Hatari! is its own making-of documentary, a film about the fun of being an actor sent to Africa to camp out and chase animals.

John Wayne’s character, Sean Mercer (maybe Hawks and his writers were thinking of Sean Thornton, Wayne’s character in The Quiet Man – in El Dorado, Hawks would give Wayne the name Cole Thornton) swings toward the harsh side of Wayne’s familiar Hawksian persona. Is this because Wayne could not hide his irascible nature under the duress of wrestling rhinos to the ground? It looks like cinema-vérité when Wayne shoves Valentin de Vargas away during a particularly arduous capture, saying “We don’t need help here.” In any case, this edge of cruelty carries over to Wayne’s inhibited romance with Elsa Martinelli: one notably humiliating verbal skirmish, in front of a group of hunters, leaves Martinelli crestfallen. In reaction to Wayne’s less socialized behavior, the pressure that the group places on him to consummate the romance is correspondingly more direct and angry than in other Hawks films: not since Red River has Wayne come in for such contempt from his Hawksian cohort.

Martinelli, an appealing actress who plays her character, Dallas, a little more daft and wide-eyed than most Hawks heroines, also follows an atypical Hawksian character arc. Dallas is probably closest in conception to Jean Arthur’s Bonnie Lee in Only Angels Have Wings, in that she is largely marginalized by the neglect of the male protagonist, and can assert herself only through the self-defeating gesture of departing in tears. But something interesting happens to this Hawksian archetype in Hatari!: she finds an identity of her own, as a surrogate mother to animals. Biology asserts itself in a way that is unusual for Hawks: not only does Martinelli exhibit a maternal instinct rarely depicted in his films, but she also descends the food chain and joins the animal kingdom. Falling back on her own resources as romance disappoints her, she is absorbed into nature in the course of her maternal duties, covered in mud, water, paint, oblivious to human interaction. And, just as strangely, her transformation increases her appeal to her hesitant lover and to the group in general. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Martinelli gives her baby elephants a bath in a nearby lake while Wayne secretly follows with his gun to protect her, looking on with obvious admiration. Hawks does not seem uncomfortable with this exaggeration of traditional sex roles, though his career as a whole more often illustrates his pleasure in men and women crossing the gender divide.

One of the best scenes in Hatari! (which is constructed in an unusually modular fashion – it would not have been hard to relocate or excise scenes in the editing room) is a peculiar variation on a bit of blocking that Hawks used two decades earlier. After his capture of 500 monkeys using a rocket and a fishnet, Red Buttons’ Pockets haunts the compound’s common room, drunk and maudlin, asking the other hunters to tell him the story of his triumph over and over again. Wayne and Hardy Kruger are absorbed in a card game, but know that Buttons has earned the right to disturb their recreation, and so do their best to humor him while they play, describing the majestic rise of the rocket as if reading him a bedtime story. I flashed on the completely different scene in His Girl Friday in which the reporters in the news room alternately ignore Molly Malone and taunt her with throwaway wisecracks while they play cards. In both cases, the card players are confronted with a larger-than-life character: Buttons and Molly Malone are out of a different and more expansive movie, emoting theatrically and gesticulating wildly. And in both cases, the card players react with swallowed-up naturalism, muttering about the game under their breath, clearly establishing themselves on a behavioral level that is quieter, faster, more unstressed than the one occupied by their stylized interlocutors. Starting with dissimilar character dynamics and story objectives, Hawks exhibits the same instinct to create a gap between levels of abstraction, and to exploit that gap to heighten the illusion of realism.

Late Hawks: Anthology Film Archives, June 4 through 15, 2008

Anthology Film Archives' much-anticipated Late Hawks series began yesterday, and continues through June 15. An article I wrote on the series is up at the new Moving Image Source site.

His Girl Friday

I have a long-standing pet theory about Hawks' comedies that I'm starting to question. The theory is that the comedies contain two different kinds of characters, pitched at different levels of abstraction: one more plausible and naturalistic, the other more stylized and exaggerated. And that the films document the perplexity of the more naturalistic characters as they are confronted by refugees from a different and wilder movie.

One reason the theory is appealing is that Hawks' dramas clearly depend for their effect on the manipulation of multiple levels of realism. Hawks creates genre-based expectations using story, decor, secondary characters, etc., and then encourages the lead actors to play the movie faster, smaller, more casually than the setup leads us to expect.

I recently revisited His Girl Friday, no doubt the greatest Hawks comedy, for the first time in decades. (I watched it eleven times between 1973 and 1985, then gave it a long rest.) His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby (which I saw not too long ago) are the comedies that best support my old theory. But now I'm not so sure that the concept holds up.

Obviously Hildy Johnson would be the more scaled-down, psychologically readable character in my schema, and Walter Burns would be the creature from the House of Fiction. But, even in the first big duel between Walter and Hildy in Walter's office, one notices a great deal of choreography: stylized, balletic moves that seem designed to show off artifice. Hildy slips out of Walter's grasp with split-second timing; Walter knows when Hildy will throw that pillow at him, and at what angle. Surely there's a sense in which Hildy and Walter inhabit the same plane of abstraction, not different planes. Both actors play-act openly; and our pleasure comes from watching and sharing their delight in having pulled it off, or sometimes their amusement at not quite pulling it off.

Bruce Baldwin, Hildy's suitor, is really only slightly more plausible a lover than the absurd Miss Swallow in Bringing Up Baby. If we divide the film into opposing aesthetic principles, one more realist and one more fantastic, then Bruce has to follow Hildy into the more realist sector, and we must then account for her bizarre desire to settle down with this "paragon," who no less than Walter beckons Hildy into the realm of burlesque.

Instead of trying to justify such a bifurcation, it makes more sense to me now to view Hawks' comedies more in the way that I view his dramas. In other words, less in terms of one set of actors opposed to another, and more in terms of the actors working and playing together, opening up a gap between themselves and their genre-identified environment, and amusing themselves by acknowledging that gap.

Still, somehow there is a difference between the comedies and the dramas: all Hawks commentators have puzzled over it. It occurs to me that most adventure-based genres don't interfere very much with Hawks' desire to create the kind of idealized characters he enjoys. He evokes genre mostly with background elements and introductory passages; his actors perform their genre duties while both having fun and projecting Hawks' idea of what he'd like people to be. Whereas comedy, at least to the extent that it comes with genre coding, seems to require that actors behave in an eccentric or outrageous manner. This is a potential issue, because Hawks likes his characters to embody his ideals.

In my post on Bringing Up Baby, I talked about how the film seems to be split in two by these impulses: the need to create clear genre signals with goofy characters; and the desire to enjoy the company of ideal characters. I believe that this tension is what gave rise in my mind to the idea that Hawks' comedies are built around the formal conceit of the collision of characters from different kinds of movies.

Judging from interviews, His Girl Friday seems to have been a conscious effort on Hawks' part to tone down the unreality of the comic hijinks in Baby. The tensions within the earlier film have been reduced, or at least made less conspicuous. Modern audiences can admire and emphathize with Hildy Johnson in a way that they cannot with David Huxley.

There's a quietly stunning moment in His Girl Friday where Hawks shoots the works on two brief closeups of Hildy, eating lunch with Bruce and getting off a few wisecracks at Walter's expense: "He comes by it naturally - his grandfather was a snake." The background of the restaurant is suddenly dense: dark shadows overhead, bit players in motion, cigarette smoke. Hildy is eating her food, enjoying the ambience. The shots would work perfectly in a Hawks drama - in fact they look a bit like Only Angels Have Wings, the other Hawks film shot by Joseph Walker - and take their place with the many other idyllic interludes in bars and cafes in Hawks's work, evoking the pleasures of social intercourse. Bringing Up Baby couldn't have accommodated such images - it isn't drama-friendly enough.

But the comedy-vs.-drama tensions of the earlier film haven't been eliminated altogether. Hawks and his writers (credited Charles Lederer, uncredited Ben Hecht and Morrie Ryskind, maybe others) devised a two-part structure in an attempt to balance the film's comic and dramatic needs. In the first section of the film, Hildy is firm in her desire to leave the newspaper business behind, and the film slowly sets up the pleasure-giving mechanism of the Earl Williams case. There is lots of fast dialogue and good comic business in these early scenes, but there are also daringly slow, pregnant passages: not only the celebrated scene where Hildy interviews Earl (precisely pitched between cynicism and empathy, readable either way), but also the remarkable, very long dead spot after the reporters torment Molly Malone, with bad conscience killing dialogue, leaving only the sparse ambience of the news room to fill the movie until Hildy's return.

The first section ends with the Earl Williams prison break and Hildy's instinctive reenlistment as an investigative reporter. This scene, invested with considerable weight by Hawks' framing and decoupage (Hawks holds a medium shot of Hildy as the news room goes wild, then tracks behind her as she casts her lot with the newspaper life), takes much of the suspense out of Hildy's dramatic arc. She will continue to resist her fate after this, but the filmmakers won't take her nearly as seriously. The second section of the film is a comic elaboration of the consequences of Hildy's backslide, and a mere coda from the point of view of dramatic development. Walter Burns, who has heretofore lurked in the film's margins, seizes center stage, now that the preeminence of his world view has been established; and Hildy begins to function as little more than one of his imps. As if to confirm the ascendency of the Walter principle, the second half is punctuated with as many affronts to decency as Hawks and the writers can fit in. The ending, with Hildy once again disappointed and humiliated, is probably best understood in terms of this current of nihilistic comedy: the tour that Hildy has signed up for is a lot of fun (in fact, it's where all the fun in the film is), but she cannot expect justice and dignity there.

It's an odd place for a Hawks hero to wind up, and there are moments along the way where the ego-negating farce isn't a perfect fit for the level-headed gal who sat in that dreamy restaurant. The question is not so much whether she would fall for the devil again, but whether she would keep the plot spinning by putting up token resistance after her fall.

Does this difficulty in reconciling characterization with the principles of farce constitute an imperfection? It feels that way at times. Do I wish the imperfection were eliminated? I don't think so. Without the introduction of farce, Hawks wouldn't have a logical path that he can follow to the point of chaos. Maybe the spots where the two aesthetic planes don't quite meet are the price we pay for the excitement generated by bringing them together.

David Bordwell recently posted an interesting account of His Girl Friday's critical standing over the decades.

Scarface: MOMA, December 16, 2007

It's always been hard for me to have an informal relationship with Scarface, because its legend looms so large in my filmgoing life. (I am talking about the original 1932 version. I will never get used to having to make that clear, just as some religious people probably bristle to think that "Madonna" might no longer mean the Virgin Mary to everyone.) When I began reading film literature, commentators often cited it as the greatest work of Howard Hawks, who has always seemed to me the greatest director in cinema history. (These days, I believe that it's more common for critics to give honors to other Hawks movies - Rio Bravo especially.) It was unavailable for screening for decades, like other films owned by Howard Hughes, and could be seen only at clandestine 16mm screenings until the 80s. And, once seen and assimilated into the canon, it became a touchstone, a key test case for what might be termed moralistic criticism. Every time I wonder whether a movie is getting too much pleasure from the exercise of power or violence, my thought process makes an obligatory stop: "But what about Scarface? What does this movie do that Scarface doesn't do?"

All Hawks' films work off of a genre background that creates expectations about how formally, how quickly, how emphatically scenes will play. And then the execution happens more casually and rapidly than expected, creating an illusion of realism, and releasing energy. Depending on the genre, different aspects of Hawks movies can become part of the genre background; and in Scarface I have the feeling that whole chunks of the movie, even scenes with important characters, exist primarily to establish its genre credentials. Despite an amusing reflexive bit in the first shot - in which a janitor bats impatiently at the elaborate Sternberg-like decor, trying to clear the set for Hawksian use - Scarface doesn't truly announce its Hawksian intentions until the violence starts flowing freely. But then the film knocks us back in our seats: not with especially graphic violence, but with the speed and frequency of the mayhem, and also with the directness of its presentation of such frightening material.

The exhilarating effect is hard to deny. What does Hawks do to prevent our celebrating the violence? I'm not really sure that he does anything. Certainly he does not spare us Tony Camonte's cruelty, or hide his crudeness and unattractive qualities. Neither is he much interested in condemning him, despite the studio's many distracting attempts to placate the Hays Office by inserting socially responsible commentary. One feels that Camonte interests Hawks the most as a character in the scenes where he plays parent and teacher to his team of hoodlums, revealing a childlike nature that is comically inadequate to grasping moral issues, and that makes him, if anything, more sympathetic to the audience.

One notes that the thrill of the violence doesn't prevent the film from making an honest account of human suffering. For instance, there is no sense of reversal or contradiction when a brutal shooting scene ends with a barrel of beer rolling into a basement apartment and presumably killing one of its offscreen inhabitants (we hear the wailing of a woman as the scene ends). In general, it doesn't seem that we need to identify with Camonte or his men to appreciate the violent scenes: in fact, the audience probably wouldn't mind much if one of our monster/protagonists met his end amid the sensory overload.

But the joy of combat is represented as well as its human cost. The most exciting and perfectly realized scene in the film, in which Camonte and his minion Rinaldo score a machine gun from the gang who is attacking the restaurant in which they are eating, is very similar in tone to the final shootout with the Burdett gang at the end of Rio Bravo - our excitement at the onscreen violence is intentionally conflated with Camonte and Rinaldo's adrenaline rush from being under fire. The fact that the protagonists are lawmen in Rio Bravo and ruthless gangsters in Scarface does not seem to be a key factor.

The conclusion I draw is that Scarface gets away with giving us enormous pleasure from unspeakable actions because it promotes in us a sense of intellectual and emotional mobility. It does not have to romanticize violence or violent people to get its effects; it does not have to create a narrative that denies us one perspective or another on the violence. In this context, our thrilled response to killing registers simply, a fact among other facts.

You probably won't read this in time, but Scarface screens again at MOMA on Sunday (tomorrow), December 16 at 2 pm.

Bringing Up Baby

I saw Bringing Up Baby 12 times in my first 15 years of film-buffery, and then let 20 years go by before my13th viewing last week. My first impression this time around is that there are two films in there, fighting with each other.

1. One film is about play: play with genre, play on the set. The first scene, in the museum, pushes the "screwball" aspect of screwball comedy so far that it becomes almost nightmarish. Characters like Huxley's fiancee exist only to amuse us with how far comic conventions can be pushed; and Huxley himself is at this point no more than a wink that Cary Grant and Hawks are giving to the audience. Every time the film threatens to wind down, Hawks finds some old vaudevillian to strut and fret through some well-honed bit of business; like Huxley, they tend to mix up the names of their own characters and the ones they are addressing, as if the problems of the set and the problems of the fiction were the same. When the plot depends on a coincidence, Hawks has the actors throw it in our faces. The nakedness of the contrivance is a source of humor in itself - as, for instance, when assorted human and animal characters march in single file into the jailhouse for the climax.


2. The other film is about people. Hawks here introduces us to his distinctive take on the comedy of power and powerlessness: he likes pushing the protagonist's loss of control into the realm of humiliation, and then, in a compensatory gesture of equal force, he shifts the focus to the humbled protagonist's recovery of his dignity and power - sometimes via detachment, sometimes via exasperation. In the other corner, Susan Vance is explictly amoral, in rebellion against every rule society is selling - and extremely feminine, her strategems couched in the language of girlish seduction, her threat coded as the threat of femininity. Somehow Bringing Up Baby seems more explicitly about sex than other screwball comedies: partly because the focus remains squarely on the boy-girl thing, and partly because Hawks pushes Susan's antisocial qualities so far that it's easy to imagine her breaking the Hays Code as well.

The two films seem to fight with each other because they have different agendas for Huxley, who is a complete nincompoop in the genre-play movie, and a plausible, if displaced, Hawksian hero in the character-based one. One feels the pull even in the presentation of supporting characters: for every Catlett or Ruggles who underlines the screwiness of the film's premise, there's a Hawksian delivery boy murmuring "Don't let it throw you" as he makes his exit.

I don't think this conceptual conflict is a particular virtue. But the film is simply dazzling in the scope of its comic inspiration. Hawks' repertoire of comic modes seems unlimited: he gets laughs with shock cuts and by holding on to master shots, with classical cutting and by withholding the classical cut, with well-staged physical humor and with offscreen sound gags. The film seems improvised to a large extent, but not quite in the style of other improvised films: it's as if Hawks shot and cut the film to enhance the actors' efficiency and mental quickness. Hepburn in particular riffs with Robin Williams-like density.

As is his wont, Hawks pushes the project's comic concept to logical extremes, and Susan's feminine energy leads inevitably to apocalypse in the final scene. (It could be noted in passing that Hawks was happy to build his next comedy, His Girl Friday, around runaway masculinity.) The exaggeration of the movie's chaotic tendencies could be seen as another aspect of genre play, but I prefer to see it as Hawks creating a suitably existential setting for the rather poignant dilemma of his displaced hero.

The Thing from Another World: MOMA, June 17

My first mission as a young cinephile was to absorb the filmography of Howard Hawks; as a result, I often find that I've practically memorized a Hawks film, yet haven't gotten around to revisiting it in decades. It can be a lot of fun to bring one's more mature sensibility to bear on a film that's part of one's DNA.

I saw The Thing from Another World last week at MOMA for the first time in 21 years, and found it even more brilliant and organic than before. This time around, I was struck by how political the film was, and how completely the politics were a function of form. Hawks and his scriptwriters (Charles Lederer and the uncredited Ben Hecht) conceive the movie as a struggle for supremacy between two genres: the fairly new 50s sci-fi genre, and the adventure/action genre that his protagonists improvise. In the movie's rendering, the sci-fi genre is intrinsically liberal: the scientists are consumed with the wonder of extraterrestrial life, think only of making a mutually enriching contact. But the protagonists are soldiers whose instincts, even before the Thing's agenda is clear, are conservative: assume the worst, be armed, head off catastrophe. The struggle between genres is not just a nuance: scenes are built around the collision between different styles of acting, different ideas about where the plot should go. (The genre conflict peaks in the hilarious scene where Carrington, the head scientist, declaims in theatrical terms the urgent need to keep the Thing alive, only to be hustled unceremously out of the frame when commanding officer Hendry mutters under his breath, "Get him out of here.")

The film's stand is unambiguous: the conservatives have the correct opinion in every dispute, the conservatives win in the end and can afford to be generous to the defeated liberals. One cannot legitimately call the film fascist. Not only does Hendry talk a good game about not enjoying giving orders, but the film demonstrates its openness in action, most concretely in the very funny plot thread in which soldier Dewey Martin, who comes up with most of the film's good ideas, eventually stops waiting for Hendry to rubber-stamp his decisions, with Hendry's approval. The film enjoys deflating the cult of authority.

More than any director I can think of, Hawks depends on genre for his effects, needs to play against an established genre backdrop. He devotes a fraction of his cinematic resources to building up genre presence, but the bulk of his resources to executing dialogue and action in a casual style that explodes the genre mood, releases the potential energy in the genre abstraction. Todd McCarthy's bio of Hawks mentions that RKO was puzzled about why a powerful director like Hawks wanted to waste time on a cheap sci-fi thriller. I'm not surprised at all: I can imagine Hawks thinking, "Cool! A new genre to play with!"

Godard (or was it Truffaut?) once called Hawks the most intelligent of American directors. It seems like an odd comment at first: Hawks certainly does not give the most intelligent interviews among American directors. But The Thing illustrates the point beautifully: Hawks felt empowered to construct an entire movie around a series of problems that are solved on-screen, quickly and without fuss.

The Thing will screen again at MOMA on Sunday, June 17 at 3 pm.