The Crowd Roars

[This is a contribution to the Early Hawks Blog-a-thon hosted right here at Only The Cinema. It will run from January 12 to January 23, 2009.]

How do you manage to bring together Howard Hawks, James Cagney, fast race cars and hot women, and still make a lousy picture? Against all odds, The Crowd Roars pulls off this unlikely feat, as Hawks desperately tries to find something of worth in this pallid racing melodrama. Part of the problem is the hero, the thoroughly unlikable stock car driver Joe Greer (Cagney), a nasty, arrogant, misogynistic drunk who neglects his long-time girlfriend Lee (Ann Dvorak), hypocritically implying that she's a tramp and a loose woman because she sleeps with him without being married. Joe's the kind of guy who always wants a woman around, but then won't marry her because she's so easy, and the pre-Code script pulls few punches in establishing the seedy parameters of Joe and Lee's relationship.

This openness is somewhat refreshing, as is the early indication of Lee's growing disgust with this arrangement, especially since Joe has decided that she's not good enough even to bring home to his family. But the script soon enough dispenses with Lee's hard streak, turning her into just another weepy, long-suffering girl who just wants to be by her man's side, even if he treats her with open contempt. Dvorak has a silent star's charisma, and an ability to say everything she needs to with her thin dark eyebrows and the flashing intensity of her stare; whenever she has to speak, however, her shrill melodramatics threaten to break glass for miles around, and her teary pushover routine quickly gets tiresome. You can tell what the film thinks of women in general when Joan Blondell arrives on the scene, as Lee's no-nonsense gal-pal Anne, spouting tough talk about rotten men and engaging in brazen sexual manipulation just for the fun of it. Soon enough, though, she's just as weepy and downtrodden as her friend, head over heels in love with Joe's forgettable twerp of a brother, Eddie (Eric Linden, seemingly wearing as much lipstick as the ladies in the film). It's obvious enough by this point that the women's only role here is to cry over their men and, as usual for a Hawks film, to come between them.


Except that, in this case, when Lee and Anne plot to break apart the two brothers, even Hawks can't work up his usual enthusiasm for the brotherly camaraderie they're supposedly disrupting. Eddie is a lame cipher, and Joe, even as played by the naturally charismatic Cagney, is just a jerk with a terminally low opinion of "dames" and an overprotective streak for his brother that, if Hawks had cared to, could easily have been developed into a weird homoerotic tension. The film cares so little for its supposed dramatic arc that, in the oddly clipped and rushed final ten minutes of the film, the brothers' reunion and reconciliation — the scene that would have to be the thematic center of the film — actually happens offscreen. The film is strangely paced, often dragging in its largely redundant early sections and then accelerating into an incoherent blur for the finale, completely eliding seemingly crucial scenes during the course of the final race. The editing is often crisp and blunt, and the time line is frequently confused, skipping over what must be quite long periods of time with hardly a hint that it's even happened.

So the film has a rough foundation to overcome, and its demand that audiences respond to and root for the increasingly nasty Joe — who even winds up getting his best friend killed in a race — doesn't help matters. It's not like Eddie is much of an alternative, of course, and in fact the film suffers from a total vacuum of real lead presence. For a time, it even looks like Hawks has resigned himself to making the girls his leads instead, and the early scenes between Lee and Anne are some of the film's best non-racing sequences. By focusing on the lives of the women while the men are off doing their manly pursuits, these brief scenes deconstruct and comment on the typical Hawksian male bonding picture: instead of seeing the men racing and winning prizes and facing death, we see the women sitting alone, receiving terse telegraphs that keep putting them off. It's a neat reversal of the usual Hawks genre picture, a focus on the forgotten, left-behind women for a change, though it unfortunately doesn't last very long.


A more typically Hawksian pleasure is to be found in the film's high-impact racing scenes. The rear projection race track footage is much more distracting than the similarly crude techniques used in The Dawn Patrol a few years earlier. It may just be that the aerial rear projection, with its big stretches of featureless cloudy sky, is much easier to fake than the race track milieu. But Cagney and Linden just wind up looking vaguely silly sitting in front of these rear-projected shots of the track, their goggled heads shaking from side to side. Even so, Hawks manages to make the racing scenes energetic and viscerally exciting by cutting fast, minimizing the rear projection's distraction by blowing smoke and dust across the frame, and splicing in substantial footage of real races. The semi-documentary racing sequences have all the verve and high-octane punchiness missing from the rest of the film: Hawks cuts between high angle overviews of the track and closer views that capture a few cars jockeying for position. At several points, he even crouches down into a low angle perspective where the speeding cars seem to be looming overhead. And the frank, abrupt way he films the car crashes, or the horrifying death of one driver in a ball of fire, accentuate the feeling of tension and encroaching mortality that so often hovers over Hawks' male groups, whether they're pilots at war, criminals in prison, or race car drivers.

These racing scenes are the film's whole raison d'être, and for the most part they're the only scenes in the film that really feel like Hawks. There's an economy and precision to these scenes, particularly in the way Hawks inserts close-ups of a spinning wheel or a foot pressing down on a pedal, purely technical details that enhance the gritty realism so characteristic of Hawks' depictions of men at work. This quality is almost entirely missing in the slack melodrama that makes up the rest of the picture, and if there are occasional other scenes that show some spark of vitality, there are few that live up to the brilliant, exciting final scene, which seems to promise a rowdier, wilder, more fun movie following "the end." The last sequence follows an ambulance carrying wounded race car drivers away from the track, and the patients begin urging the ambulance staff to drive faster, to cut corners, to pass the other ambulance. It's a blast, and Cagney comes alive as he never does anywhere else in the film, gleefully sticking his bandaged head out the back of the ambulance to sneer at those left in his wake. Hawks should've cut everything else and made this the first scene of a much better film.

The Criminal Code

[This is a contribution to the Early Hawks Blog-a-thon hosted right here at Only The Cinema. It will run from January 12 to January 23, 2009.]

Howard Hawks' second sound film was The Criminal Code, a hard-edged prison drama about the promising young Bob Graham (Phillips Holmes), who finds his life detours onto a very different path after a nightclub fight leaves another man dead. Graham comes before the tough, monosyllabic D.A. Mark Brady (Walter Huston), who is not nearly as sympathetic as he is practical: there's an election coming up, and even if he knows that the death was an accident and could be classified as self-defense, he feels the pressure to go for a murder charge instead. Graham winds up with ten years in jail, the passage of time slowly eating away at him until Brady, with his political career not panning out as planned, is reassigned as the prison's new warden. It's a taut psychological drama, focused not so much on concrete action as on the philosophical and emotional undercurrents involved in this story. Brady's idea of justice as a D.A. is "an eye for an eye," which he insists is the foundation of the legal system. "Somebody's gotta pay" when a crime is committed, he says, an expression that implies it doesn't really matter who pays. So the film is actually about the redemption of both its leads: Graham, crushed by his years in prison, must learn to be a honest, decent man again, while Brady, faced with the consequences of his sometimes laissez faire judicial philosophy, must rethink his concepts of justice and fairness.

It's a relatively simple narrative then, and Hawks is saddled with a screenplay that often seems to be padding its length in order to obscure this basic simplicity. Once the action moves to the prison, it pretty much stays there, and there are often long, drawn-out dialogue scenes in which nothing much happens, simply to pass some time. The static setting and uneventful plotting especially become tiresome in any of the scenes between Graham and Brady's daughter Mary (Constance Cummings), who predictably falls in love with the young convict who's trying to reform. It doesn't help that Graham, as sketched by the uneven Holmes, isn't much of a character. Holmes acquires some much-needed grit in the scenes where Graham, transformed by his years in prison, becomes hard and short-tempered, or else lapses into a zombie-like walking sleep. But his idea of playing a normal, decent guy is to drain every trace of bite or personality out of this poor shell, leaving a gaping hole of charisma and actorly presence in the screen.

To a large extent, this hole is filled by Walter Huston. Huston is a magnetic presence, an overpowering actor who dominates any scene he's in; he frequently seems to be acting in another, better movie from the rest of the cast. No matter what the tortured, melodramatic dialogue might be, Huston manages to make it sound magnificent, brilliant, emotionally charged: listening to him is inspiring and exciting even if the actual words he's saying would be dead on the page, as they sometimes are here. He even manages to invest the depths of his character into Brady's habitual repetition of the monosyllabic "yeah," an all-purpose bit of verbiage that he spits out as punctuation, a challenge, a sign of resignation, a question, an indication of thought, and only occasionally as an actual affirmation. The actor uses his character's general taciturnity to his advantage: as shaped by Huston, Brady comes across as a man with a sharp intellect who thinks before he speaks, so his few explosions into impassioned speechifying are endowed with a greater profundity than they would have if this preachy verbalizing was his norm.


But if Huston dominates the film, chewing through its uneven script like the cigar he frequently chomps, Hawks must also be credited with infusing life into the corners of the film, sketching details and nuances around the edges of Huston's performance. Hawks most obviously comes alive in the film's opening scene, which follows a couple of cops who can't stop arguing about a game of cards even long enough to go investigate a murder. It's a hilarious bit of business, achieved with the frenetic, overlapping soundtrack that would later be known as one of Hawks' most characteristic touches. The cops' running argument is carried through from a scene by the telephone, where they get the call to head out to the nightclub, to a sped-up sequence where the car arrives at the club, to the actual investigation itself, even reappearing on the fringes of several subsequent scenes as Graham is brought before the D.A. for the first time. It's so great — and so out of tune with the rest of this rather dour film — that one inevitably wonders if Hawks spontaneously added the whole bit himself, just to liven things up.

Hawks' touch is also felt in the scene where Brady, while being shaved by one of the prison barbers, engages the man in idle conversation, during the course of which he learns that he was the one who sent this barber to prison, and that the crime was slitting a man's throat. As the barber runs his razor along Huston's exposed neck for the last time, Hawks focuses on Huston's upturned head, one of his eyes visible from this angle, staring off to the side with restrained concern. The film even boasts the prison version of the typical Hawksian mourning sequence, when Graham learns by telegram that his mother has just died. His cellmates pass the telegram around, glancing at it disinterestedly, then attempt to defuse their friend's inevitable breakdown by prodding him into continuing the game of checkers that had been interrupted by the news. This pointed nonchalance in the face of death, the attempt to ignore it with frivolous fun and surface celebration, is a constant in Hawks' films, perhaps most poignantly captured in the cheerful drunken wake for a dead aviator in Only Angels Have Wings.


These typically Hawksian moments abound, particularly in the director's handling of the film's two best acting assets. Huston of course is always great — especially when he stoically faces down a whole yard full of restless prisoners — but Boris Karloff threatens to steal the whole film away from everyone in his relatively few brief scenes. This was Karloff's first major picture, and his role as the hulking murderer Galloway led directly to his famous part in Frankenstein. It's easy to see why: he brings a sinister intensity to Galloway, with his tightly cropped bowl haircut, outsized body, and an overhanging brow that casts heavy shadows over his glinting, shard-like eyes. In his early scenes as Graham's cellmate, he stays mostly in the background, an unobtrusive minor character until Hawks abruptly highlights Karloff's frightening visage in a blurry, massive closeup as Galloway fantasizes about finally getting his hands on a "squealer." But Galloway is also, intriguingly, somewhat sympathetic and humanized; his devolution into an obsessed killer largely developed, it's implied, because of the actions of the manipulative chief guard (DeWitt Jennings).

Later, Hawks brilliantly stages a murder scene by focusing on Galloway's huge, unmoving back, his posture erect and his form towering over his intended victim, who cowers before him. The scene remains motionless for a few long, breathless moments, so that the focus of attention becomes the thin sliver of light that plays along the well-polished blade that abruptly appears in Galloway's outstretched hand. Moments like this obviously stand out from the sodden mush that often surrounds them in this film. It's a film where the parts are greater than the whole, perhaps because the vibrant, interesting scenes are often separated from each other by intermittent fallow patches. Working with substandard material and only two actors who possess sufficient fire and energy for a Hawks film, the director nevertheless makes The Criminal Code a worthwhile and often even fascinating drama.

The Dawn Patrol (1930)

[This is a contribution to the Early Hawks Blog-a-thon hosted right here at Only The Cinema. It will run from January 12 to January 23, 2009.]

Howard Hawks' first sound film after a string of silents, The Dawn Patrol is as technically rough, ragged, and uneven as one expects an early talkie to be. And yet the film is undeniably potent and enthralling, as well as displaying many of the characteristics that we have come to think of as Hawksian: it seems that the director's aesthetic and signature concerns were forged relatively early. The aviation film is of course perfectly suited to Hawks, and he would return to this subject many times over the course of his career, including for one of his most successful slightly later works, Only Angels Have Wings. The flying milieu provides Hawks, readymade, with all the elements he needs to craft his aesthetic: the tough, manly men facing death with bravado; the constant threat of mortality hanging over everything; the responsibility of leadership; the aerial adventures and daring of the fliers. As in his later aviation films, Hawks primarily uses this genre to explore the behavior of men who are continually confronted with their own mortality and the mortality of their friends and loved ones.

The film centers around a squadron of World War I bomber pilots located not far from the German lines, and therefore repeatedly called upon to undertake incredibly dangerous missions at or even across the enemy lines. The constants of this squadron are Dick Courtney (Richard Barthelmess) and Doug Scott (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.), two ace pilots who have earned veteran status simply by surviving for the longest amount of time, as their squad mates cyclically die and get replaced by new recruits. The two are inseparable friends, united in their defiance of death, though as the head of the seven-man A-flight, Courtney has the heavier load, feeling personal responsibility for each man he loses in battle. This responsibility weighs even heavier on their superior officer, Major Brand (Neil Hamilton), who receives his endless supply of near-suicidal orders with a heavy heart, knowing that his protests will do no good, and he'll have to keep ordering his men into danger. He does this with regret, but with a stoic dedication to duty that earns him the ire of Courtney, who needs to transfer his own rage somewhere.


The film's central theme is the cyclical nature of war, de-emphasizing the individual in order to show the constant stream of bodies, young men being thrust into positions opened up by their now-dead predecessors. The film's structure ingeniously displays the repetitive nature of combat, with certain key scenes reappearing at intervals like recurring motifs in a piece of music, slightly altered each time to accentuate the changes that have occurred in between repetitions. One such scene is the one where the squad's commander sits in his office listening to the sound of the planes returning from their latest mission: he counts the number of motors he hears and can therefore tell how many of his men have returned, and how many died in battle. Hawks places the audience in the position of the commander, listening to the motors swooping in on the soundtrack, trying to count the number of planes. There are many scenes in which Hawks does show the aerial combat, but he almost always cuts away from the battle before its conclusion, so that he can return to the base for that tense, uncertain moment, the commander wondering how many men he has sent to their deaths this time. Many a war film has focused the audience's sympathy squarely on the lower ranks, depicting the higher-ups as craven, careless desk jockeys with no knowledge of the risks their subordinates are taking. Not so for Hawks, who not only understands the commander's horrible burden but makes him the audience's surrogate, waiting with a pit in his stomach to hear what has happened next.

Hawks also continually returns to the scene in which the commander — first Brand, then later Courtney, assuming command when Brand is promoted — delivers his orders to a reluctant subordinate, who accepts each dangerous assignment with a hate-filled glare. This is a film in which nearly every line is delivered with gritted teeth, as though each man was being forced to swallow a horrible poison and then grin afterward. The actors, still adjusting to sound, are not always up to the task, but Barthelmess at least is fantastic at playing dark and glowering. He has a fiery intensity to his stare that seems to radiate throughout his hard-set face.

In other ways, however, the acting is often melodramatic, and the delivery of the dialogue stiff and surprisingly formal, qualities that mesh awkwardly with rugged displays of Hawksian masculinity. It is obvious that the actors are transitioning uncomfortably into the demands of the sound film, and that the primitive sound equipment does them no favors. There is virtually no soundtrack music in the film — other than periodic blasts from the base phonograph — and the dialogue scenes consequently play out in an eerie, unnatural silence that emphasizes each stilted line and uneasy stab at camaraderie. Barthelmess mostly fares okay, other than a few over-the-top speeches, but the fresh-faced Fairbanks can't shake a kind of gee-whiz naiveté, and William Janney, playing Scott's younger brother Donny, is even more overwound.


If the film occasionally falters in its rough early dialogue scenes, Hawks more than compensates with the gritty brilliance of his aerial combat staging. The film was remade in 1938 as an Errol Flynn vehicle, but director Edmund Goulding retained much of Hawks' aerial footage; it's easy to see why. The flying scenes, accomplished with a great deal of grainy rear projection and scale modeling and just a minimum of real flying, are far from realistic, but they have a raw, straightforward intensity that is often as involving as the best that much more realistic effects can produce almost eighty years later. Hawks, always a master at translating the efficiency of his productions into a powerful directness onscreen, captures the essence of flying in the broadest strokes possible: a few striking shots of dot-like planes streaking across a cloud bank, along with tight in-the-cockpit closeups against rear projection backdrops. When Courtney and Scott go off on their own for a midnight bombing raid against a German encampment, Hawks turns it into an exhilarating tour de force, capturing the adrenaline rush of the fliers as they swoop and dive in their strafing assaults on the enemy.

The film is remarkable, in scenes like this, for capturing the emotional atmosphere of war rather than its concrete details. The whole war, for these men, seems to take place in this hazy rear projection universe with a relatively constant backdrop of sky and clouds, and only occasional glimpses of enemy combatants on the ground below. There is little sense of physical location, little sense of the broader picture of the war's progress; the fliers are given only tidbits of information, just enough fragmentary knowledge to identify their targets and carry through their immediate mission. Hawks passes only this information on to the audience in turn, keeping the film locked into the tunnel vision of the fliers, who in the cockpit can see only as much of the sky as they can crane their necks to take in. One is reminded of the fog-drenched atmosphere of Only Angels Have Wings, which achieves with the greater visual sophistication of a decade later roughly the same effect that Hawks already sketched out here with the limited means of the time.

Hawks also of course has a feel for the brighter emotions of these fliers, their joy in a particularly bravura maneuver, their playful camaraderie (at times hampered by the stiff acting, though the idea comes across anyway), their soulful music, singing songs intended to ward off the sadness of losing a friend. As in many of Hawks' films, coming to terms with the masculine world means masking one's emotions beneath a surface toughness and laughing off danger with a song and a grin. It also means maintaining a healthy respect for one's enemy, as shown in the extraordinary scene — virtually unimaginable in later, more propagandistic war films — in which the fliers capture a shot-down German pilot and wind up grudgingly inviting him to drink and sing with them. The same impulse is there in the enemy pilots who exchange salutes even as they gun each other out of the sky. The film suggests that all these men, on either side, are unified in their nobility and bravery, that war is not so much a necessary conflict between diametrically opposed sides, but a game, a proving ground for brave young men to test their mettle against those who, by pure chance, have been placed on the other team.

A Girl In Every Port

[This is a contribution to the Early Hawks Blog-a-thon hosted right here at Only The Cinema. It will run from January 12 to January 23, 2009.]

Howard Hawks' 1928 silent film A Girl In Every Port is both a singularly fascinating glimpse into Hawks' early aesthetic and thematic development, and a massively entertaining action/comedy romp. It is, as befits the director who later became known for his dramas about tight-knit groups of men in high-pressure situations, essentially a buddy comedy. More than that, it is practically a love story, a romance, about the development of a masculine friendship closer than any traditional romantic relationship. It's the story of the sailor Spike (Victor McLaglen), who in his travels around the world is plagued by a mysterious other sailor who keeps leaving his mark (an anchor within a heart) on the girls who Spike tries to romance when he goes ashore. When he finally runs into this other sailor, Bill (Robert Armstrong), the two predictably brawl and butt heads, but they soon find camaraderie in their shared distaste for the police, who arrive to break up the fight. After a night spent drunkenly wandering the town — Hawks economically suggests a lot with a great shot of the pair's wobbly legs walking down the street together — they become inseparable friends, enlisting on the same ship and always carousing as a pair from then on.

So the film's real story is actually not about the sailors' quest to get girls. Despite the title, the "girls" in question are mostly disposable, forgotten by the time the sailors get to the next port; what endures is their affection for one another, and the fun they have getting into fights together. Hawks continually films them in ways that suggest a romantic couple, in tight close-ups or with their arms wrapped around each other. When they have an argument, the reconciliation is filmed as a series of sheepish back and forth glances, the two of them gradually shifting closer together from their initial standoffish positions across the room, the shot getting tighter and tighter as they make up. There's a suggestion of homosocial undertones here, particularly in the eye-rolling single entendre involved whenever Bill has Spike pull his finger after a fight to put his joints back into place. Even when the film isn't quite as blatant as that, there's a tenderness and compassion between the men that they never show with the women they meet.


Spike and Bill's friendship and their journeys from port to port provide Hawks with a simple but dynamic foundation on which to build any number of comic and adventure sequences. The film is frequently a riot, keeping the use of intertitles to a bare minimum and communicating its bawdy humor through the raw physicality of the action. The bar fight sequences are especially hilarious and effective, slightly sped up to give the action a frenetic, unhinged slapstick quality. Hawks rarely resorts to a title to sell a joke, and the few titles there are mostly just deliver necessary exposition or set up a change of location whenever the ship moves on. In the absence of dialogue or text, the humor comes across instead in the comic wildness of the action, or in the nuances of the actors' performances. Both lead men tend to mug broadly, especially McLaglen, who spends much of the film with a huge smile slathered across his friendly, open face. And yet their exaggerated actions are frequently packed with subtleties of gesture and emotion that would otherwise not be communicated without dialogue, like the way that McLaglen's courtship routine (slicking back his hair, adjusting his collar) has become a ritualized series of gestures that's triggered automatically whenever he sees a pretty girl. McLaglen is especially great in a pair of scenes that play on the sailor's fear that one of his "girls" has delivered his child while he was away. Twice he comes across old flames who now have babies in tow, and Hawks boldly accentuates the sailor's fears; it's some fun business that would disappear from Hollywood film a few years later, once the silents started to give way to sound film and then the Production Code.

In fact, the film's attitude towards sex is, in general, refreshingly candid and straightforward. The script makes no secret of the fact that Spike and Bill are going to bed with numerous different women in every town they visit. At one point, Spike knocks out his compatriot, who keeps interrupting him while he's trying to make time with a girl. A cut then elides some unspecified amount of time before Spike returns to wake up his buddy and cheerfully lead him out of the bar. Hawks leaves his audience to make the not-so-great leap as to what transpired in between the two scenes.


The film's attitude towards sex is even more apparent in the depiction of the women themselves, who of course never get beyond the status of empty sex objects, but who are nevertheless given the chance to be exceptionally alluring and open in their sexuality. Maria Casajuana, as a local girl in a South American port city, is a particularly electrifying femme, a dazzling dark beauty who glowers and grins her way to a sensational impact in just a few short minutes of screen time. There are other tantalizing glimpses of intriguing women in one port or the other, but none of them match the simmering intensity of Casajuana or, even more so, Louise Brooks, who appears as a Parisian carnival performer and weaves through the final third of the film. This is the role that essentially propelled Brooks to fame, leading directly to her subsequent part in Pabst's Pandora's Box, and she plays exactly the kind of man-eating prototypical femme fatale with which she came to be synonymous.

In fact, Brooks' character provides the drama in the film's final act, when Spike falls in love with her and abandons ship to stay in Paris by her side. It's obvious from the start that she's a gold-digger, her eyes lighting up when Spike tells her how much money he has saved up. Things only get worse when Bill meets her and realizes that he used to run around with her back in New York, and that she still has a thing for him rather than Spike. So Brooks' characterization doesn't amount to much more than a wedge to be driven between the two men, threatening their idyllic friendship, but she does the best she can with the flimsy, misogynist caricature she's given. She is always an electric presence, doing most of her acting with her expressive eyes. It's so easy to admire the way her glances suggest her emotions and thoughts that one nearly misses the even more powerful way she rations these moments, keeping her eyes veiled with the downward tilt of her head and her fluttering lashes. Her demeanor shifts fluidly between reticence and a bold sensual quality, her generally retiring shyness evaporating into moments of sexual frisson, her dark eyes flashing with mischief and lust whenever she looks up. One thinks of her as a bad girl, and forgets that she is often able to disguise her bold sensuality with a sweet façade.

This is a remarkable early effort from Hawks, already possessing his signature rollicking roughness, the good-natured raggedness of his finest films. A Girl In Every Port blends comedy, adventure, and masculine bonding in a speedily paced story whose rough edges are left endearingly intact.

Sergeant York

Sergeant York is truly a film from another time, infused with values and ideas that seem today entirely alien, at least as portrayed unironically in a modern movie: earnest religious conviction, equally sincere and unapologetic patriotism, the forgiveness of those who do one wrong. The real-life Alvin York, as played by Gary Cooper, embodies all of these attributes, as he transforms himself from a dirt-poor rural farmer and drunken rabble-rouser into a reformed Christian, and later a decorated World War I hero. Surprisingly, the film version of York's unusual life, made under the able guidance of director Howard Hawks, does not focus on his wartime exploits, instead developing at a leisurely pace with the emphasis on his time in rural Tennessee before he is drafted for the army.

In this sense, the film's title is misleading: York does not attain his titular rank until the very end of the film, and indeed the combat adventure promised by the title is a long time in coming. In its place, the film offers a religiously tinged drama of abjection and redemption. York is a rough, hard-living man, working a barren farm with rocky soil, getting as much of a crop as he possibly can out of this unforgiving land, providing for his mother and two siblings. As a result, he's also apt to strike out, going on periodic drinking binges with a pair of equally downtrodden friends, taking out his angst in bar fights and drunken revelry. When he falls in love with childhood neighbor Gracie (Joan Leslie), now all grown up, she gives him the drive to better his position in life, causing him to work harder than ever in his attempts to earn a piece of land with better soil. Meanwhile, the local preacher Pastor Pile (Walter Brennan) works to save York's soul, convincing him of the virtues of faith and forgiveness to such a degree that York even forgives and humbly acquiesces to the men who cheated and deceived him out of his one opportunity to get his own land. York transitions from a rowdy, temperamental drunk — he's introduced in a hilarious scene where his gunshots and hollers continually interrupt the pastor's sermon — into a near-saint, so humble and self-effacing that he'll turn his cheek at almost anything.

Only Gary Cooper could sell this radical transformation so convincingly. Cooper seems essentially decent even when he's playing a drunk and a habitual brawler who's been in and out of the local jails, and his basic goodness shines through the layers of slow-witted stubbornness and bitterness etched on his face. Cooper's portrayal even manages to overcome the inherent sappiness of the script, which attempts to smother the central performance with leaden Biblical references and sentimentalized stagings. York's conversion is symbolized by a scene that obviously references, in a stunning bit of presumption, the story of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus: York is struck down off his horse by a bolt of lightning, powerful enough to bend his rifle (which he intended to use for vengeance) into a horseshoe-shaped loop. It's a heavy-handed contrivance, but Hawks' touch is felt in the following scene, which expresses the nature of York's conversion in a way that fits much more comfortably into the Hawksian universe. Following his solitary experience in the woods, York wanders into the nearby church, where Pastor Pile is leading the congregation in enthusiastic singing. As the singing intensifies — "give me that old-time religion," the worshipers chant — York wanders, as though dazed, into the crowd, which begins to gather around him. Hawks cuts between shots of the parishioners singing in tight clusters, and York's slow assimilation into their midst. The sequence culminates with a high-angle shot from behind the altar, as the pastor reaches down towards York, who is now kneeling in the center of the gathered throng. This is a distinctively Hawksian moment, one that has often recurred throughout his work, albeit not often in such a religious milieu: the people gathered in song, the music infused with emotional subtexts, as a lone individual is accepted into the group. Surely this is a vision of religious experience that would have made more sense to Hawks than York's lightning-bolt revelation on the road, which is staged in a much more saccharine, conventional manner, with hazy lensing and angelic choirs on the soundtrack.


Hawks continually makes his touch felt in this way, putting his own slant on material that is in many ways not a natural fit for his talents. He does have a strong feel for the folksy rhythms of everyday life in York's small rural community, and the early stretches of the film are packed with subtle down-home humor. The scenes of York carousing with his friends in the local bar — positioned right on the Tennessee/Kentucky border to take advantage of differing liquor laws — are a case in point, as Hawks nudges his camera in close to the three men. He sets up triangular compositions with Cooper in the middle and the two other men flanking him on each side, with the camera maintaining a conspiratorial closeness, as though it was huddled in to whisper and joke with the three drunken friends. Hawks also clearly has a lot of fun with a rough-and-tumble bar brawl, which manages to mix bawdy humor with rugged physicality. And one of the bar rats delivers an amazing running commentary on the largeness and impressiveness of a nearby dancing woman, showcasing the kind of irreverent sexual wordplay that feels much more attuned to Hawks' sensibility than anything else in the film.

Even the underwritten romance between York and Gracie — which proceeds almost entirely through the chemistry of the actors in a few key scenes, with little help from the screenplay — provides Hawks with an opportunity for some masterfully executed banter. York shows up at Gracie's house one evening to find her sitting on the porch with his rival, Zeb Andrews (Robert Porterfield). Once again, Hawks films it as a triangular composition, with York forming the pivot of the triangle in the center of the frame, bisecting the line between Gracie and Zeb. This composition becomes the basis for a great scene in which the two rivals trade barbs while jockeying for Gracie's attention, before York finally sends the other man packing. None of the romantic material is very fully developed here, but Hawks' graceful touch, coupled with the performances from Cooper and Leslie, manage to sell what otherwise would've been an wholly unconvincing screen romance.


The film remains interesting in its final stretch, the forty-five minutes dedicated to York's reluctant induction into the army. The recently devout York is convinced that fighting and killing are wrong, and tries to get an exemption as a conscientious objector on this basis. But when the army doesn't buy it, York goes off to war anyway, conflicted over whether he should actually fight or not. The result is predictable, particularly considering the film's timing: it was released in 1941 with an obvious eye towards inspiring American soldiers and potential soldiers. Still, the film's propagandist slant is unusual, dealing as it does with the potential conflict between religion and nationalism. What seems most extraordinary in today's context is that such a baldly patriotic film should posit that there even could be such a disjunction between God and country, that the tenets of religion might pose an obstruction to the orders of one's government, or vice versa. There is no hint of the suggestion, so familiar from modern wars and their accompanying propaganda, that God is on our side. York's moral dilemma is melodramatically staged, with lots of stirring shots of him sitting with his dog on a mountaintop, reading about the history of the United States, but it is no less genuine for all the corn piled on top of it. This is a moral quandry that centers around differing interpretations of Biblical texts, and conflicts between different forms of duty and ideals. If the film resolves York's choice with a pat reference to a single Biblical verse — "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's..." — it nevertheless retains the moral integrity that it earned by asking these tough questions in the first place.

Ultimately, Sergeant York is a film at war with itself, or at least with its director. When Hawks is able to suppress or ignore the sentimental tripe of the story — as he does for most of the taut, excitingly filmed wartime action sequences towards the end — he crafts some typically fun, engaging drama. If the film occasionally threatens to sink under the weight of its own overbearing corniness and melodrama, Hawks is frequently able to buoy it back up with scenes of grace, intelligence, and economic emotional storytelling.

Monkey Business (1952)

Monkey Business is perhaps Howard Hawks' most truly madcap farce, a film that takes an absurd premise — a distracted professor trying to discover a formula for youth — and diligently expands upon each of the scenario's many comic possibilities in turn. There's something simultaneously chaotic and methodical about Hawks' approach to comedy, and it's especially true here. There's a sense in his comedy that, while the action onscreen may be wild and frenzied, there is actually a thoroughly designed structure underpinning everything. The film takes its central idea and then rotates through the possible results: first the professor Barnaby Fulton (Cary Grant) drinks the potion and begins acting like a young man of twenty; then his wife Edwina (Ginger Rogers) takes a drink and becomes a teen; then they both down an even larger dose and regress to childhood; finally everybody in the lab accidentally ingests the formula. The script is schematic in the extreme, formally structured into discrete segments based around the stepped regression of the protagonists, and yet the result never feels mannered. The action is smeared across the frame with such energy and abandon that it's impossible not to giggle and laugh with pleasure.

A large part of the credit must surely go to the fantastic cast. Grant and Rogers have a surprising comic chemistry that's equally apparent in the early scene where the patient, bemused Edwina deals with scatterbrained Barnaby's attempts to get ready for a party, and the later scenes where the duo become childlike, sparring and bickering with petulant stubbornness. Both actors perfectly manage the transformations from adulthood to childhood, acting in multiple different registers to convey the shifts in their personalities. Grant is initially a stiff, somewhat stuffy scientist with a tendency to daydream and forget what he's doing, especially if he's hard at work thinking about a project. The opening credits introduce the actor overlapping with his own character; the credits sequence unfurls over a view of the couple's front door, and Grant keeps opening the door and starting to step out, before an offscreen voice (Hawks himself, actually) tells him, "not yet, Cary." It's a tossed-off metafictional moment intended to remind the audience that, no matter how much of a nerd Barnaby seems to be, it's stylish Cary Grant under that nebbishy exterior. Once he ingests his formula, however, his absent-mindedness gives way to boyish enthusiasm and energy, and quite naturally an interest in the office's leggy, dumb-as-a-brick secretary, Miss Laurel (Marilyn Monroe, in a small but show-stopping role), who he ordinarily barely even notices despite her bombshell beauty.

Grant is an absolute joy when he's playing his younger self. As a young man, he engages in a whirlwind courtship of Laurel, taking her out roller-skating, high-diving into a pool to impress her, racing frantically through the streets in the souped-up sports car he buys. Later, as a younger boy, he's even more fun: dressing himself up in warpaint to become an Indian, and hatching a plan with a bunch of real young boys to "scallop" his wife's former boyfriend Hank (Hugh Marlowe). This scene is perhaps the most distinctively Hawksian in the film. There is almost always, in Hawks' best and most characteristic films, a scene where a group of people gather together, in a tightly clustered frame, in order to perform and listen to music. These scenes are usually joyous and celebratory, representing the peak of Hawks' vision of communal togetherness and cooperation. In this film, the scene that fulfills this function is a truly unusual one, as Barnaby and the other young Indians begin performing a war dance in order to prepare for their ambush of Hank. The boys are gathered in a circle around Grant, whose face is smeared with black paint and a few white lines. He directs his new friends in what to do, giving one a rhythm to play, another a short lyric to shout, another a war cry to holler, and soon the boys and Grant are worked up into a frenzy, howling and singing with the rhythm of the war drums. Hawks' camera maintains its stoic fixed position, capturing the absurd energy of this scene. He follows it up with an equally enjoyable sequence where Hank is captured, tied to a tree, and then "scalloped" until he's left with only a scraggly mohawk on the top of his head. These scenes are truly hilarious, accumulating a ridiculous momentum driven by Grant's over-the-top performance.


Rogers is nearly as good, and her transformations from loving wife to bratty little girl are just as adept at signaling the change in her character (in fact, both actors render completely redundant the silly sound effect that accompanies their changeovers, which makes the whole thing seem more like magic than science). Rogers doesn't get quite as much meat as her co-star, but she does seem to have a real ball shifting from a TV sitcom housewife to a mouthy teen who speaks her mind. There are hints of sexism here — why does the younger Grant become playful and fun-loving while Rogers' youth unleashes a shrewish, whining quality in her personality? — though they are balanced on the whole by the film's overall thrust, and by Barnaby and Edwina's temperate consideration of what the youth formula brings out in each of them. The scene where Edwina, reliving her honeymoon night with her husband, abruptly breaks down crying and lashing out at him over everything, is cruelly stereotyped, depicting every negative feminine caricature rolled up into one character. On the other extreme, the "mature" Edwina dismisses her husband's philandering, his chasing after the luscious Laurel, with nothing more than a bit of affectionate ribbing, as though that's to be expected. Edwina vacillates between a dowdy housewife and a frightful nag, both hoary stereotypes even if Rogers does invest them with a greater than usual depth and complexity.

The film's theme, if such a light-hearted confection can be said to have one without sounding too pretentious, is the importance of retaining a youthful passion in relationships, even as youth itself recedes into the past. Initially, Barnaby and Edwina's marriage is a bit staid, and Edwina seems vaguely discontented even if she's too chipper and understanding to let it show. In one early scene, she casually shrugs it off when Barnaby's absent-minded musings prevent them from going out to a party, shedding her elegant dress for a frumpy housewife's apron and making her husband eggs instead. Despite her laidback attitude, it's hard to believe that she isn't at least subconsciously dissatisfied with this situation. Even the oblivious Barnaby soon realizes it, reminiscing about the much more passionate early years of their marriage.

This narrative of dimmed romance drives the film's narrative, which is otherwise structured only by the (il)logic of its escalating series of gags. There is no real plot here, just the riotous spirit of fun unleashed by the youth formula's effects. The narrative throughline is more subtle, an undercurrent beneath the surface insanity and laughs, a story of lovers reconnecting with their youth and realizing both what they've missed and what they've gained by growing up. The narrative here is thus not a sequence of events so much as a sequence of emotions, and the actors do a fantastic job of maintaining this serious subtext even through the film's most baroque bits of slapstick absurdity.

And there's plenty of absurdity to contend with, in the best sense. The dialogue is quick-witted and clever, packed with sexual double entendres and wordplay. It's not quite as pattering as in some of Hawks' earlier screwball comedies, but there's a real comedic edge to it, a bite to the verbiage that's enhanced by the actors' flowing deliveries. Monroe, though she has a bit part, gets a lot of the choice material, playing even more of an oblivious blonde bimbo than usual, whether she's showing off her "acetates" or explaining why she's at work so early: "Mr. Oxley's been complaining about my punctuation, so I'm careful to get here before nine." Speaking of Oxley, Charles Coburn, as Barnaby's boss, gives another great character actor turn, as a dignified old geezer who's utterly matter-of-fact about his perversions. One of the film's best lines is tossed off by Coburn as he watches Monroe leave the room, having just told her that she shouldn't try typing again after the last disaster. He admires her wiggling walk as she exits, then turns to Grant with a shrug and deadpans, "anyone can type." Hawks also packs a lot of physical humor into the film, whether it's from an impressively trained monkey or from Grant, who's a tightly wound ball of energy and even launches into one of the joyful somersaults he so often performed in his earlier career. The film is nearly a decade late to be a real screwball comedy — and it was certainly too late to be a commercially successful one, as the dismal box office take at the time proved — but it is nevertheless a vibrant, satisfying take on the genre that Hawks and Grant themselves perfected in their own younger days.

Early Hawks Blog-a-Thon: Jan. 12-23, 2009

The Early Howard Hawks Blog-a-Thon is happening now. GO HERE to participate and see all the posts!


The Early Howard Hawks Blog-a-Thon is happening now. GO HERE to participate and see all the posts!


This is an announcement for an upcoming two-week event here at Only The Cinema, and an invitation for others to participate along with me. The Early Hawks Blog-a-Thon will run from Monday, January 12 through Friday, January 23, nearly two weeks of exclusive focus on a classic Hollywood master's early career. Of late, I've been delving further into the work of Howard Hawks, a filmmaker who I've long loved, and who has been worming his way ever deeper into my mind with each further film I see by him. My appreciation of his work began with the moody, evocative Only Angels Have Wings, still one of my favorite Hollywood movies, and each subsequent Hawks film I've watched has confirmed his particular virtues as an artist.

The purpose of this blog-a-thon is to take the next logical step and delve into Hawks' earlier career, which for the purposes of this venture I'm somewhat arbitrarily defining as the films he made before Bringing Up Baby, his first widely famous screwball comedy. I won't be tackling his early silent films myself (except for A Girl In Every Port), but if anyone else would like to write about those films, I'd welcome the contributions. My own work on the blog-a-thon will mostly be limited to the films made between 1930 and 1936, including codirectional efforts where Hawks replaced another director or was himself replaced by studio meddling. I probably won't be revisiting the two films from this period I've already seen, but again any writing from others about either Scarface or Twentieth Century will be very much appreciated.

In general, I'd like this blog-a-thon to be a broad and varied appraisal of Hawks' early work, with reviews of the individual films as well as essays that attempt to put the early period in context as a whole and in relation to the later, better-known films. I suspect there are enough Hawksians out there to generate a lively and prolific blog-a-thon, and I hope to see a lot of cross-talk, debate, and discussion involved in this project. Among other things, I would like to see participants take up the questions and ideas of other contributors as starting points for their own writing. If you'd like to participate, let me know either here or by e-mail, or just write a post on some of these films between January 12-23 and send me the link so I can post it here.

I am announcing this far in advance to give people a chance to locate and see these films, most of which (including all of the silents) are not available on DVD in any form. Of the early 30s films, only Scarface, Twentieth Century, Barbary Coast, and Come and Get It can be found on Region 1 DVD (with links below). All the rest of the sound films (and maybe one or two silents) can be seen via varying but mostly surprisingly good quality bootlegs, available for download in various places. If you have any questions about acquiring these films, please contact me privately.

Below is the list of the films that will be officially considered a part of the blog-a-thon. The films for which I cannot find sources are marked with asterisks (***) following their years, and if anyone can point me to a source for any of these films, it will be greatly appreciated.

SILENT FILMS:
The Road To Glory (1926) ***
Fig Leaves (1926) ***
The Cradle Snatchers (1927) ***
Paid To Love (1927) ***
A Girl In Every Port (1928)
Fazil (1928) ***
The Air Circus (1928, w/ Lewis Seiler) ***
Trent's Last Case (1929) ***

SOUND FILMS:
The Dawn Patrol (1930)
The Criminal Code (1931)
Scarface (1932)
The Crowd Roars (1932)
Tiger Shark (1932)
Today We Live (1933)
The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933, w/ W.S. Van Dyke) ***
Viva Villa! (1934, w/ Jack Conway, William Wellman)
Twentieth Century (1934)
Barbary Coast (1935, w/ William Wyler)
Ceiling Zero (1936)
The Road to Glory (1936)
Come and Get It (1936, w/ Richard Rosson, William Wyler)

I also now have a banner, generously donated by Flickhead, that can be used to advertise the blog-a-thon. You can see the banner in my sidebar at the top of this page. If you would like to help me out by promoting the blog-a-thon, just paste the following code wherever you'd like on your own blog or website:

<a href="http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2009/01/early-howard-hawks-blog-thon.html"><img src="http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z43/sevenarts/cinema/earlyhawksbanner.jpg"/></a>

I Was a Male War Bride

I Was a Male War Bride manages to take a madcap premise, a first-rate comic actor, and a director famed for his mastery of screwball comedies, and still produce a boring, turgid mess of a movie with few enough smiles, let alone laughs. It should be comic gold: reunite Cary Grant with director Howard Hawks and give them a plot that pits Grant's stolid masculinity against a gender-bending scenario where he's forced to pose as a "war bride." Unfortunately, the script is as flat and characterless as a blank sheet of paper, and even the best efforts of Grant — a fine physical comedian who's always ready with some priceless facial expressions whenever the dialogue fails to crackle — can't salvage this turkey.

The film's problems start with casting Grant as a French officer in the aftermath of World War II, since he's as American as gas-guzzlers and greasy fast food: one is constantly wondering why there's such a fuss over his supposedly foreign status, when he's speaking English just as well as anybody else. There are even a few jokes that point out the incongruity, when American soldiers begin speaking to Grant in mangled French, while he answers them with his perfect unaccented English. It's obvious that everyone involved knew how ridiculous the whole set-up was, and these sly winks acknowledge that at least they're in on the joke. Grant plays opposite Ann Sheridan, as an American officer who he's placed on assignment with despite their past history of bickering and fighting. He spends the first half of the movie hating her and continually butting heads with her, at least until he decides he wants to marry her: then he spends the second half of the movie frustrated that he can't spend more time alone with her. Sheridan and Grant are both good actors, but there's virtually no comedic or romantic chemistry between them, mainly because the script gives them little chance to develop any; the dialogue has no sizzle, no momentum, and too often Sheridan is reduced to simply laughing while she watches Grant do something kind of goofy. Their sudden romance is thus completely without a foundation, and the switch from standoffish sparring to lovey-dovey canoodling is awkwardly handled. They go from kissing one moment, for the first time, directly to announcing their marriage.


The film does earn some chuckles along the way, mostly from Grant's deadpan handling of the script's understated humor. His grumpy back-and-forth with Sheridan yields some moments of comic interplay, though the spartan dialogue never gives the duo a chance to really let loose in screwball style. They're rarely allowed to simply spar and trade quips for its own sake, as Grant often did in lead turns opposite Jean Arthur or Katharine Hepburn. Not that Sheridan doesn't seem game for it — she's cheery and has a playful attitude that makes her fun to watch — but the dialogue is too practical, too focused on advancing the utterly uninteresting plot, so that the two of them rarely talk to each other except about what's happening at that immediate moment. Grant fares much better with non-verbal humor, and a lot of the film's best moments come from his physical comedy. There's a running gag where Grant, always forced to sleep in unconventional places, struggles to get comfortable, first while sitting in a chair and then jammed up in the fetus position in a bathtub. It wouldn't be funny in itself, but Grant mimes his discomfort and his awkward contortions brilliantly, doing a lot of the work with his big, slab-like hands, which he can never seem to find a good place to rest.

Grant's physicality also injects a lot of humor into the final stretch of the film, when army regulations force him to register himself as a "war bride" in order to be able to enter the United States with his new wife. It's a clever bit of satire, poking fun at both the torturous maze of military regulations and documentation, and an inherently sexist culture where sex roles are so rigidly codified that even the paperwork makes assumptions about what men and women can and can't do. There's some downright subversive material hidden here, about how uncompromising society can be in its accepted situations and behaviors for men or women. Ultimately, it's easier for Grant to simply pose as a woman — with a hideous horsehair wig and that distinctly un-feminine mug of his — than to continue explaining how he came to be a man in the situation he's in.

It's unfortunate that this satire isn't made the focus of the film, since it's definitely the film's most enjoyable stretch, and gives Grant the most to do. It's also the section of the film of the most obvious interest to Hawks, who naturally gravitates to material that deals with sex roles and reversals. It's perhaps for this reason that the film wakes up a bit the deeper it gets into this subject, overcoming the sleepy pall hanging over the first two-thirds or so. It still never quite approaches the energetic rhythm of the best classic screwball comedies, but in its relatively laidback, laconic sense of humor it at least has a little more spark and fizz. Even so, as enjoyable as the denouement is, the film as a whole remains disappointing, its promise in theory much greater than the result.

Twentieth Century

Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century is a hilarious story about people who "are only real in between curtains," who only exist as actors playing roles rather than people with real lives. When the egomaniacal Broadway director Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore) first meets his new starlet (Carole Lombard), he dispenses with her old name and gives her a new, more glamorous one, Lily Garland, then immediately tells her that's she no longer Lily Garland, but should instead inhabit her role in the play completely. Within the space of a few minutes in Jaffe's company, she has become two layers removed from her original self, an actor playing an actor playing a part. "You are no longer Lily Garland," he howls to her, waving his hands dramatically, as though she had already become too invested in a name he'd given her only minutes before. It's a prophetic moment, because before too long the young girl — previously a lingerie model with no acting experience — is the biggest star on Broadway, as well as Jaffe's lover and his meal ticket, driving his plays to mammoth success. But the film is not a love story, at least not in any ordinary sense, despite the romance between the director and his greatest star. Instead, Hawks treats the story like a tongue-in-cheek melodrama, a melodrama that realizes its own essential mawkishness and silliness, and amps up the ham accordingly.

Indeed, ham is hardly an adequate word to describe what Barrymore and Lombard do with these performances. They're playing characters who are always acting, who think of ordinary encounters as "scenes" to be played, and the people around them as extras in the grand epic of their own lives. They treat emotions like notes to be hit and held, pulling out a bit of anger here, a touch of suicidal angst there, screams and cries and moans like melodies to be wrung from their throats. They write their own speeches as they talk to one another. There's no such thing in this film as a simple conversation: everything is an oration, the two sparring lovers trading monologues and orchestrating curtain-calls even when there's no audience except one another. In an odd, masochistic way, it's obvious that they're perfect for each other, though Jaffe drives Lily away with his dictatorial nature; the last straw is when he hires a private detective to spy on her. So Lily heads off to Hollywood to become an even bigger star, while Jaffe flounders, his plays failing miserably in her absence. It's hard to blame Lily for leaving this blowhard, though the great irony — Jaffe might say "the final irony," as he does at several points — is that before she leaves he succeeds in making her just like him. The result is that she's not happy unless she's performing, and she's dissatisfied with men who lack a sense of drama: she is infuriated when her new beau (Ralph Forbes) has the temerity to walk out on her before she finishes her great speech telling him to leave.

Hawks has the perfect sensibility for this florid material, realizing that there's a very fine line between melodrama and comedy, a line that can be easily erased when it needs to be. This isn't the camp humor that sometimes arises from particularly pungent melodrama, but a comedic sensibility that is completely immersed in the story and the characters. These characters are just inherently funny, and Hawks is perfectly attuned to the rhythms that accentuate this humor. He knows to linger on Jaffe's melodramatic exits long enough to catch the trailing of the director's hand along the door on the way out, a conscious gesture meant to draw attention to its tortured grip on the doorjamb. Hawks also knows when to pull in for closeups, to catch Barrymore's arched eyebrows and the facial contortions that indicate Jaffe's hammy acting. Barrymore has a tricky part. He can't just be a ham, but has to play a character who's a ham. As a consequence, there's a self-consciousness in his performance that adds a meta-layer to the film: it's perfectly possible to laugh at Jaffe's absurd histrionics and still realize that Jaffe himself takes all of this seriously.


For her part, Lombard keys her performance to match and exceed Barrymore's wherever possible. In the best of their scenes together, it's like watching a duel to see who can be more ridiculous, more melodramatic: the first actor to give in and let a genuine, believable emotion show is the loser. This is the nature of the relationship between Jaffe and Lily. There's a core of love there somewhere, and certainly mutual respect for one another as artists, but there's also a competitive spirit, a sense that they're performing for one another, trying to outdo one another, to craft the grandest, most showstopping performance, the piece of acting genius that will silence the other with awe. Again, these scenes also function on the meta-layer, where Lombard and Barrymore are engaged in a similar duel of acting prowess, their voices overlapping in Hawksian style, fighting with one another for control of the scene. They're hilarious and irresistible together, and only Hawks could make such a pair of shrill, overacting brawlers so compulsively entertaining.

The absurdity of the melodrama is also accentuated by a pair of pitch-perfect straight men, Jaffe's loyal assistants Webb (Walter Connolly) and O'Malley (Roscoe Karns). These two play off of their boss brilliantly, rolling with his punches and setting up his craziest moments with their own straight-laced reasonableness. The scenes between them are masterpieces of balance and subtlety, with Hawks capturing Jaffe's manic over-emoting and his lackeys' exasperated stoicism in the same frame. In one scene, Jaffe paces back and forth frantically, orating about his plans for his next great scheme, while O'Malley sits off to the right side of the frame, a bemused smirk on his face, furtively nipping at his ever-present bottle to steel himself against his boss' megalomania. In another scene, Jaffe has fired Webb (one of many times he does so) and then completely forgotten about it as he goes on directing the play. Webb comes storming back in a few minutes later to return the combination to the safe, and Jaffe, almost without even looking at him, asks why he's bothering him with such trivialities during rehearsals. Hawks stages the scene as a two-shot, with Jaffe facing the camera and Webb just behind him, flustered and nonplussed by his boss' volatility. Jaffe's melodramatic flailing is foregrounded, while Webb provides a subtle background element, a quiet comedic counterpoint to the shot's main focus. The film works so well because, in small ways like this, Hawks makes himself complicit in Jaffe and Lily's egocentric worldviews: he makes them the grand players they demand to be, and celebrates their ridiculousness and humor in every moment of the film.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Today, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is most fondly remembered for a single musical number which is pretty much the iconic Marilyn Monroe scene: her vampy, bubbly performance of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." It's one of Monroe's most memorable scenes, as she coos and dances while delivering the lyrics that would come to personify, if not her true self, then at least the most true representation of her public persona. She's a cheerful, unabashed gold-digger here, surrounded by men who adore and lust after her, rejecting all their declarations of love as fickle, fleeting, and more often than not two-faced. It's easy to mock or dismiss Monroe's showgirl Lorelei Lee, who admits with a smile on her face that she's in love with money and wouldn't dream of marrying a man who wasn't rich. But underneath her brash forthrightness, barely concealed, are her fears, especially the fear of getting old, of losing her charms and her ability to make men fall in love. The "Diamonds" number, as upbeat as it is, is actually about a woman's insecurity in a world where she is judged for her physical beauty while a man is judged by his monetary success: Lorelei realizes that while women's assets are momentary at best, money and power doesn't dissipate with age. She believes that wealth is the only security against a woman's sad fate, of being cast aside for younger and prettier girls down the road. "Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty?" she murmurs, so charmingly that it's hard to argue the point. "You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?"

Sure, and it also helps when she's clever and self-aware and delightfully fun, all adjectives that apply perfectly to Monroe, perhaps more here than anywhere else. What comes through in this film is a sly, winking quality in Monroe's performance, a sense that she knows very well — as her character knows — the effect she can have on men, and that she's perfectly willing to conform, at least outwardly, to stereotypes if it'll get her what she wants. This seems to apply at least as well to the real Marilyn as it does to the bubbly, bouncy blonde Lorelei, and one suspects there's some truth to the rumor that Monroe herself suggested Lorelei's coy admission that "I can be smart when it's important, but most men don't like it." If a film as light and airy as this one can be said to have a theme, it's that women, living in a world with rules set by men, must erect elaborate facades over their true selves in order to exist comfortably.

Lorelei's best friend Dorothy (Jane Russell) doesn't see things the same way though, and where Lorelei loves only diamonds, Dorothy loves the company of men and the fun to be had on long nights with plenty of drinks and dancing. This duo of bombshells are opposites in almost every way — blonde and brunette, giggly and serious-minded, a whispery-soft murmur and a brassy tough-gal voice, a wide smile and a side-of-the-mouth smirk — but their friendship is nevertheless rock-solid. Russell and Monroe play off of each other beautifully, and it's a delight to watch them together, whether they're singing and dancing or trading fast-paced patter. They trade roles admirably in the comic scenes, taking turns playing the straight woman for one another. Sometimes Monroe's wide-eyed silliness sets up Russell for her deadpan one-liners, while at other times Russell simply stands back and lets her friend fire away.


With two such dazzling actresses at center stage, the plot doesn't have to do much besides stay out of their way, and for the most part it does. Lorelei's pending engagement to the goofy but sincere young millionaire Gus Esmond (Tommy Noonan) is threatened by Esmond's father (Taylor Holmes), who disapproves of his son marrying a showgirl. As a result, Lorelei and Dorothy head off to Europe together on a cruise, while Esmond's father hires the private detective Malone (Elliott Reid) to spy on Lorelei and gather incriminating evidence against her to halt the impending marriage. There's not a guy here who belongs in the same frame with these two, much less who can match wits with them as equals, and if the film has one weakness it's the necessity of believing that the tough Dorothy, who'd fit right in as a noir femme fatale, could fall for a wet blanket like Malone. Still, all these narrative detours are mainly an excuse to get Lorelei into hilariously improbable but incriminating circumstances, like the moment where an over-eager big-game hunter (Charles Coburn) demonstrates to Lorelei how a python kills a goat by strangulation. How would that be incriminating, you ask? "Well," Lorelei explains, "he was the python... and I was the goat!"

If the plot is largely decorative, so too are the many musical numbers, which are primarily designed as showcases for the girls and their ample charms. The "Diamonds" performance is undeniably director Howard Hawks' best musical piece, a gaudy delight of costume design and choreography: Monroe in a pink strapless dress that seems to be just barely clinging to her bosom, twirling and singing amidst crowds of valentine-toting tuxedo-ed men and ballerinas with black gauze masks drawn across their faces, all of it against a cartoony red backdrop that sets off the deep blacks of the tuxes. The opening number, "Two Little Girls From Little Rock," is similarly opulent, setting the girls' bright red dresses off against a similarly bold blue curtain. The film's palette favors primary colors, including the ever-present bright red of the girls' lips, while the wardrobes mostly cycles through a series of radiant green, blue, and red hues. As a result, even the less showy musical pieces, like "When Love Goes Wrong" and "Bye, Bye, Baby," have an impromptu charm that's hard to resist: they seem like pick-up songs casually performed with whatever passersby happen to be around, gathering performers from among the bystanders for a bit of song and dance.

Above all, this is a fun and light-hearted film, driven by the comedic performances from both stars. Howard Hawks seems to have ceded the film to Monroe and Russell, and there's very little sign of the auteur's signature concerns or style, except perhaps in the staging of the musical numbers, which seem at times like crowd scenes with an infectious sense of rhythm. The film as a whole has this same underlying rhythm, a propulsive beat that drives the songs and the comedic bits alike. It's the pulse, perhaps, of the men who come into contact with Monroe and Russell: hearts pounding like mad, dizzy smiles plastered across their faces.

Ball of Fire

Ball of Fire is a delightful romantic comedy in the "opposites attract" tradition, throwing together the stuffy, intellectual professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) and the smart-mouthed burlesque girl and gangster's moll Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck). Potts is part of a group of eight professors putting together an encyclopedia, but the project stalls when they reach the entry for "slang" and Potts realizes that using out-of-date reference books just doesn't cut it: he needs first-hand knowledge of "the living language." To this end, he enlists Sugarpuss to give him some linguistic tutelage after witnessing her va-va-voom nightclub act. Sugarpuss agrees for her own reasons: her gangster boyfriend Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews) is under pressure from the cops and needs Sugarpuss to go into hiding because she could be forced to testify against him. The professors' research institute is naturally the last place anyone would look for her, and so Sugarpuss settles in, shaking things up with her vivacious manner and colorful language.

Director Howard Hawks makes interesting use of his two stars, casting them not exactly against type, but in notable variations on their types. Certainly, Cooper is not the most obvious choice for a stuffy intellectual with no knowledge of worldly matters, but his taciturn, stone-faced chilliness turns out to be perfectly suited to a man who suppresses any hint of emotional excitement in himself. It's a matter of context: when Cooper's playing a Western hero, his stoicism is seen as courage and determination, but here he employs essentially the same demeanor, the same basic set of expressions and body language, to indicate his dopey, nerdy cluelessness. It's a clever bit of counter-intuitive casting. Likewise, Stanwyck's world-wise, tough gangland babe is familiar territory for her, but with a softer, cheerier edge to it. She isn't a femme fatale or a hard frontier woman here, though there are touches of both in her character. She's too fun-loving, too exuberant and lively, for the darker corners of her personality to define her completely. In one scene, she teaches the professors how to dance, leading them in a conga line, bumping her hips and swaying her fists in time with the music, a wide and toothy smile spread appealingly across her face.

Stanwyck's introduction is one of the film's finest scenes, demonstrating Hawks' intuitive grasp of her strengths. When Potts first arrives at the nightclub to see Sugarpuss perform, she comes on singing and dancing as part of a loose jazz number. Stanwyck looks out of her element here, playing the leggy chorus girl in a sequined, barely-there outfit; she's not cut out for this kind of glamour. Her sexiness is too casual, too intimate, to come across on stage, and she only winds up looking uncomfortable, unsure of what to do with her hands or how to move. She looks at her most relaxed during the instrumental break, when she lounges sedately on the stage, her legs uncrossed and sticking defiantly out of her flimsy little dress, leaning her head back and smiling while she listens to the band play. It's obvious that Hawks recognizes that intimacy and relaxation bring out the best in his star, and the next scene is a typical Hawks moment that requires a huge crowd to gather around Stanwyck and listen to the music. She calls everyone in around a single table, where her drummer casts aside his sticks and picks up a pair of matches instead. Together, they deliver a hushed performance, the scrape and tick of the matches keeping the rhythm while Stanwyck leads the crowd in whispered chants of the chorus, "drum boogie." Hawks loves these kinds of communal music scenes, which are more often clustered around a piano or a guitar in his films, though a matchbox suffices just as well. The image switches back and forth throughout the scene between a Hawksian crowded frame with the whole audience peering in at the performance from behind, and a shot of the black, polished table, with the matchsticks tapping out their rhythm while Stanwyck's smiling face is reflected, blurred, in the table's surface.


This brief scene is the film's most obvious visual touch from cinematographer Gregg Toland, who nevertheless peppers the film with moments of grace and elegance to offset its often farcical tone. Toland's moody, shadow-strewn images — like a lushly romantic kiss between the leads, shown only with black profiles in a darkened room — crop up periodically and do a lot of heavy lifting for the love story, which is otherwise a bit briskly developed amidst all the humor. Visually, though, Hawks' imprint comes through much more clearly, perhaps because he's blessed with a central cast of ten characters all living in the same house. Hawks' love of crowded compositions is especially apparent in the antics of the seven professors besides Cooper, who all warm up to Sugarpuss much more quickly than he does.

There's a shot of the old men all leaning eagerly over a railing to look down at the girl's arrival, their heads poking over the top like a row of wrinkled cabbages, that perfectly captures the boyish spirit of these old bachelors. The film's obvious starting point is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a reference that comes up explicitly just once in the dialogue, but which is tipped off much earlier, in the opening scene of the old professors marching in tight rows of two through a park. They might as well be humming, "heigh ho, heigh ho..." Hawks gets a lot of comic mileage out of this group, clustering their expressive faces around Stanwyck and Cooper and giving them plenty of choice lines. Fittingly for a bunch of dwarfs, they're like children in old men's bodies, turning into unruly schoolboys once Sugarpuss arrives on the scene.

This is a fun, vibrant film that unites the talents of Hawks, Toland, and even Billy Wilder, who co-wrote the amusing, pun-laden script, which comes up with an at times dizzying array of post-Code workarounds for joking about sex without ever really talking about it directly. The film is breezily paced, and shifts nimbly between silly comedy, romance, and even a violent gangster yarn without ever seeming schizophrenic. It handles all these modes with a light touch and a game cast who are just consistently fun to watch.

Scarface (1932)

Howard Hawks' original Scarface is not only the blueprint for Brian De Palma's 1983 remake, but for the entire genre of gangster pictures to come, all of which would aspire to be as crude, violent, and angry as this one, only to inevitably come up short. After all, it's hard to top the performance of Paul Muni as the ambitious thug Tony Camonte, who starts out as the right-hand man to Prohibition-era beer runner Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins) but clearly wants much more. Even saddled with one of the world's worst fake Italian accents, Muni delivers a powerhouse performance, slurred and brutish and lurching, equal parts menacing and unbearably silly, with his cocky salutes, the jagged scar down his cheek, his sheer dumb insistence on getting everything he wants. What he wants includes control over both the south and north sides of Chicago (the latter of which he'll have to wrest away from an Irish gang whose accents are almost as embarrassing as the Italian ones), the love of Lovo's snooty, standoffish girl Poppy (Karen Morley), and for everyone to listen to his word as final. This includes his free-spirited sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak), who Tony defends from suitors with violent rage that betrays more than a hint of incestuous desire, a subtext that comes triumphantly to the surface in the film's final act.

Tony's rise to power and his inevitable equally violent fall are couched in a narrative framework of political propaganda, starting with the film's opening title urging citizens to petition the government to do something about rampant gangsterism. The film itself contains numerous topical references supporting gun control, the deportation of immigrant criminals, and, most puzzlingly of all, continual snide references to the writ of habeus corpus that protects people from being held by the police without charges. This odd sloganeering sits uneasily in the film, especially when the action pauses for heartfelt proselytizing from the police chief or some other public figure. The hectoring tone is very much at odds with the rest of the film's blunt depiction of Tony's crude, casually evil lifestyle, which does not (as some critics contended at the time) glamorize the gangsters but mocks them, satirizes their crudity and the ignorance that makes them turn to violence without thinking first. In one of the more subtle scenes, Tony and his mob attend a play, and in between acts the crew turns into amateur art critics, commenting on the play and wondering which guy the girl will pick, while Tony discourses on the way the rain effect is created. They're philistines putting on airs, monkeys dressed up in nice clothes, who only care how the story will turn out. When they have to leave in the middle of the play to murder a rival gangster, Tony leaves one of his thugs behind so he'll know how the play ends. One of the film's preachy speeches rails against encouraging gangsters by treating them like jokes, but elsewhere Hawks makes a compelling case for the power of satire. What else to think of Angelo (Vince Barnett), Tony's inept secretary and henchman, who can never quite figure out how to handle a phone call for his boss? Angelo's appearances are basically all hilarious routines that blend silent comedy slapstick with the verbal dexterity of a Marx brothers skit, and they contribute to the film's basic thrust, which is to make these gangsters look ridiculous, but no less dangerous in their stupidity and lunacy.

Muni in particular plays Tony pretty close to the edge of madness, starting out as simply a cock-sure young thug looking to make his mark, but soon escalating his intensity to manic, eye-popping levels. By the film's stunning final sequence, a wild shootout with the cops who have him surrounded, he's raving, his shouts turned into incomprehensible gibberish, his walk as stiff and lurching as a movie monster; he makes his final stand clutching a machine gun, stumbling around, and screaming in his own nonsense language, a steady stream of hate spewed at the world with machine gun speed. He makes Pacino's later over-the-top take on this character look positively controlled and mannered by comparison; you can always understand Pacino, at least.


Stylistically, the film is as unfettered as its title character, with Hawks employing a fast-and-loose style that skips and jitters in time with the plot. The film's style is encapsulated in the famous transition where a calendar's days fly off as a machine gun fires in the background, giving a new violent twist to the old device for conveying the passage of time; the film moves to the rhythm of gunfire. Hawks' camera slows down when it needs to, panning languidly across large rooms to take in the entirety of a scene, though there are times — particularly in the early stretches of the film — when the narrative threatens to get bogged down in too many talky, static scenes where the camera simply sits in a corner and watches, a relic of early sound picture styles. More often, though, Hawks' style is punchy and fast, matching Tony's quick-talking bravado and rugged machismo with a camera that swings around to track car chases and exchanges of gunfire, or more patiently wafts across a row of shadowy figures projected on a wall, moments before they're eliminated in a haze of bullets. The photography in the night scenes is especially striking, taking advantage of the obviously artificial, constructed Hollywood version of Chicago to create some wonderful proto-noir effects with shadows: an assassin meanders along the wall in shadowy reflection, signaled only by his cheerful whistle as he prepares to kill a rival; the camera looks down on a murdered body, criss-crossed by shadows that seem to form an "X" running across his body.

Scarface is the prototypical gangster movie, a rough and ragged classic that overcomes its occasionally clunky style and moral overlays with the sheer intensity of its aesthetics and performances. Muni is the indisputable center of this chaos, but he gives up at least a few bites of scenery to Boris Karloff as a mannered rival gangster, and especially to Ann Dvorak as Tony's vampy sister, who's best when she acts like a silent star, projecting with her wide eyes and sexy, hip-swaying dance, rather than letting loose her screechy overacting voice. The film is an utter joy, by turns funny and violent and vulgar and sexy, a visceral explosion of the id that only purports to be a staid anti-gangster picture.