Deep Shallow Enigma

Howard Winchester Hawks wasn’t simply the man critics around the world would call the greatest film director of all time. In an industry in which fortune is fickle and filmmakers peak and flop overnight, Hawks endured. He tackled every genre and mastered them all.

During one remarkable four-year span, Hawks made “To Have and Have Not” (1944), “The Big Sleep” (1946) and “Red River” (1948), films that changed the way Americans thought about movies. Yet they were all so different that it’s doubtful many viewers (or critics, for that matter) were aware that the same man made all three.

A filmmaker of such varied skills also affected the outcome of a game played by my friends and me while waiting for our Film 101 course to start. We’d ask: “What was the best private eye movie ever made?” and “What was the best gangster film?” And so on till we had covered every genre from westerns to science fiction to screwball comedy. Then we’d vote and total up the score. The final list usually included these titles:

Best gangster film: “The Godfather,” “The Godfather II,” “Scarface” (the original).

Best private eye film: “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Big Sleep.”

Best western: “Red River,” “My Darling Clementine,” “Rio Bravo.”

Best screwball comedy: “Bringing Up Baby,” “The Lady Eve.”

Best comedy: “Duck Soup,” “His Girl Friday,” “A Night at the Opera.”

Best science fiction: “The Thing” (the original). (We could never decide if “2001” qualified.)

Six categories, 13 titles; six of the films belong to Hawks, who also directed our list’s fourth-best Hollywood musical, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” And what’s amazing is that the list doesn’t even include “The Dawn Patrol,” “Twentieth Century,” “Only Angels Have Wings,” “Ball of Fire,” “To Have and Have Not,” “I Was a Male War Bride” and “Monkey Business.” For that matter, it doesn’t include what was probably Hawks’ biggest success, “Sergeant York,” now one of the least popular of his major films.

These titles represent half of Hawks’ output in the sound era. He made just 40 films, eight of them silent; fewer than John Ford, William Wyler, Alfred Hitchcock or any other prominent director of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s. His golden period began in 1938 with “Bringing Up Baby” (though it wasn’t acknowledged as a great film till many years later) and, depending on your taste, this period ran till “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” in 1953. No other director of Hollywood’s great age--indeed, no other director in any country at any period--had such a 15-year period of critical and box office success. How is it possible that a director with such a string of popular successes, a filmmaker who inspired a shelf of critical works, has never had a biography?

“Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood,” the new biography by Variety film critic Todd McCarthy, plugs an enormous gap while answering that question. For one thing, the critical establishment was late in coming to Hawks. He had less technique and less recognizable style than any of his contemporaries, so it took critics years, even decades, to catch up to him (he was nominated for just one Oscar, for “Sergeant York”). “I just run the camera at the actors,” he told a French interviewer, “and they make up all these things about me.” His versatility worked against him; most of the great directors in this period could handle different kinds of films, but Hawks hopped from genre to genre so frequently that he never became identified with any one of them the way, say, John Ford was identified with westerns. Ford made more than westerns, of course, but he made enough over one period to be identified with them.

There was another reason why no previous Hawks biography has been written: The man was a compulsive liar or, in the kinder phrase of photographer Robert Capa, a “mythomaniac.” Of course, as Capa said, there are two kinds of mythomaniacs: “The ones who are that way because they have never done anything and the ones who have done so much they can never be satisfied with anything.” Hawks was of the second kind; he did so much and told so many whoppers about what he did that no one tried to find out the truth or, for that matter, to find out if Hawks believed his own tales. By the time film scholars did, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne and most of the great stars Hawks worked with were gone.

McCarthy has done a spectacular detective job on Hawks’ life and legend, weaving through the error-pocked maze he left in his wake, mining the remaining links to him (including Angie Dickinson, Jane Russell, the late Robert Mitchum and one of Hawks’ ex-wives, Slim Keith), as well as Hawks’ own papers and the legal files of numerous studios. The result is an in-depth examination of a shallow man, a friend of both William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, who yet “. . . steered clear of anything that smacked of the highbrow, the literary, or the intellectual.” In an industry whose hierarchy was comprised largely of Jews, Hawks lapsed into anti-Semitic slurs (invariably during arguments with one of his producers), yet he was a lifelong friend of the writer Ben Hecht, a committed Zionist. He sided with numerous Hollywood rightists yet, according to his son, “Dad didn’t like people who were in politics.” One gets the impression that the only thing that kept Hawks from being completely odious was a simple lack of emotional commitment to his own prejudices.

*

Certainly his personal life reflected a lack of emotional commitment to just about anything except his work. All three of Hawks’ marriages drifted while he spent much of his free time browsing through fashion magazines looking for young, slender, well-groomed females he could mold. He responded only to this type; Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, like all flagrantly sexy actresses, did not do a thing for him. Obsessed as he was with the idea of being a Svengali to beautiful, aspiring actresses, sex was never a big part of his life. “Even at the height of our courtship,” said Slim Keith, “he was a tentative partner. Sex was simply a physical need that had no relation to the person he was with.” Except for his youngest son, Hawks scarcely acknowledged his children and had little to do with their lives. His work reflected his attitudes; there are scarcely any marriages in Hawks’ films and almost no families.

The real mystery at the heart of Howard Hawks’ life and work is how a man with so conventional a view of women and sexual relationships could have had such an impact on the sexual attitudes of the generation that followed. More than any filmmaker, perhaps as much as any novelist or social philosopher of his generation, Howard Hawks liberated American women to the possibilities of life in the second half of the 20th century. If one were to list the most spirited, unconventional female characters in classic American films--Barbara Stanwyck in “Ball of Fire,” Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday,” Lauren Bacall in “To Have and Have Not,” Angie Dickinson in “Rio Bravo,” even Katharine Hepburn who, after all, initiates most of the action in “Bringing Up Baby”--one would see that most of them are from Hawks’ films. (There is an essay to be written somewhere on the influence Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson had on a generation of American female journalists.)

McCarthy cuts through this seeming paradox: “Hawks’ oeuvre does not represent an autobiography; rather, it constitutes a massive self-projection, a portrait of his fantasy of himself as a great flier, racer, soldier, explorer, pioneer of industry, detective, criminal, lover, hunter and sheriff. All these purposeful men of action served as good characters for the movies, but they were also ideal vehicles for Hawks to explore his own notions of excellence.” If Hawks created mythical projections of himself, he also created women to match those men. That his own life didn’t measure up to his characters, or that he never found the right woman, does not matter. He enriched our own lives with the ones he imagined.

If McCarthy’s thick, rich biography has one flaw, it is over-intellectualized in places, a quality that Hawks himself deplored. By dragging in the tired old auteur theory of filmmaking, particularly the personality of the director being a criterion of value, McCarthy adds nothing to the enjoyment of Hawks’ work. We are interested in Hawks’ personality only because his movies are so enjoyable. Why should we bother to search for signs of Hawks’ personality in clunkers like “The Big Sky,” “Man’s Favorite Sport?,” “Red Line 7000” and “Rio Lobo”? Who cares what aspects of Hawks’ personality they illustrate, particularly when, outside of his skills as a filmmaker, Hawks seems to have had so little personality?

The great achievement of “Howard Hawks” is that it chronicles in vivid detail how perhaps the last great popular artist in movies worked. We have artists making films today, and God knows we have popular directors, but we have no more popular artists in films--at least none that have yet given indication of Hawks’ depth or staying power. Steven Spielberg is perhaps the only filmmaker today who fits into this category, but is his batting average with the critics or the box office as consistent as Hawks’? G.K. Chesterton wrote of Dickens that “he did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted.” Howard Hawks may have been the last man in films about whom we could say the same thing.