To the Editor:

Allen Barra’s review of Todd McCarthy’s book, “Howard Hawks,” (Book Review, July 13) contains the following piece of hyperbole: “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’ . . . one would see that most of them are from Hawks’ films.”

Putting aside the absurdity of the claim on its face--Howard Hawks, feminist liberator . . . Please!--the implication that Hawks created these characters is not only erroneous but insulting to the writers who, in fact, did create them: Billy Wilder, Leigh Brackett, Charles Lederer, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Jules Furthman.

Howard Hawks was a director, not a writer. He did not create characters. The creation of character in film is the product of a collaboration between writers, actors and directors, but it begins with the writer’s vision expressed on the blank sheet of paper. One would hope that Barra, who according to the biographical line “writes about film for several publications, including Premiere magazine,” understood this.

To claim that Howard Hawks created characters is as absurd as suggesting that Leopold Stokowski created Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or that Roman Polanski created “Macbeth.” Perhaps Barra and other film critics who systematically attribute the authorship of films to directors would finally get it if we removed their bylines and claimed that their reviews were created by the magazines that publish them.

Peter Lefcourt, Los Angeles

Allen Barra replies:

I never called Howard Hawks a “feminist liberator.” On the contrary, I stressed the paradox of a man with such a conventional view of male-female relationships featuring so many unconventional women in his films. As for who “created” the characters in Hawks’ films, we’re all aware that film is a collaborative process; clearly the “creator” of characters was the director and the writers and, for that matter, the actors themselves. But giving Wilder, Brackett, Lederer and Faulkner their due, only one person worked on all of those Howard Hawks’ classics: Howard Hawks.