Mr. Howard Hawks, a Story-teller

 

David Huxley, palaeontologist, is poised high up on the scaffolding that supports his precious brontosaurus. The socially awkward scientist is played of course by a bespectacled Cary Grant in Howard Hawks’s Bringing up Baby (1938). The hippy dippy heiress Susan (Katharine Hepburn) rushes headlong into the cavernous space with some good news for her beloved. As she climbs up the ladder, David is stricken with dread and fear, especially when she reassures him, “Everything’s going to be all right.” “Every time you say that, something happens,” he whimpers. Which it then does. She has no sooner told him that her aunt’s money for his museum will be forthcoming than her ladder begins to teeter, then sway wildly.
 
When I first came to Hawks, the common view was his comedies were brilliant but weak on endings. Certainly there were no passionate clinches, no promises of a happily ever after, no resolution. Instead there was more likely to be a great exhalation, a moment of exhaustion and resignation, before resumption of the battle of the sexes by means fair and foul. Sexual antagonism was as much the food of love as attraction; in fact, in Hawks telling, the screwball couple was never more in love than when hating each other with unbridled passion. Even in his terror, Grant has an epiphany about the chaotic 24 hours that have brought him to this impasse.
 
 “I just discovered that was the best day I ever had in my whole life.” No sooner said, than things go further awry: the ladder goes one way, Susan another, even as she is pledging her love, asking for his. He grabs her arms, holds her poised over space as the brontosaurus implodes. “Ohh-h-h,” he moans, watching his life work disintegrate. “I love you… I guess.”
 
Now those up-in-the-air truces, hanging over the crumbling carcass of the Hollywood happy ending, seem fresher and more modern than all the blissful unions of traditional love stories. The irresolution speaks to a different view of love and marriage: longer lifespans, shifting identities, temporary rather than ‘eternal’ commitments, a less restricted view of women’s roles. The energy unleashed in the Hawksian perpetual motion machine has much to do with gender twists.
 
Conditions favourable to the Hawks dynamic were created when, after 1934, any direct expression of sexuality was prohibited, thanks to stricter policing of morals by Hays Office. Hence the sublimation of desire into dialogue and physical sparring, activities in which women could excel no less than men. For Hawks’s tomboyish women, the notion of domesticity and children is nowhere on the horizon. In the resistance to conventional femininity there are echoes of Restoration and Shakespearean comedy.
 
Essentially, one or both members of the couple must be shaken out of some misguided or conventional notion of their lives and introduced to a freer more uncertain, existential sense of identity.

 
In Ball of Fire (1941), Gary Cooper’s stuffy professor and Barbara Stanwyck’s gangster’s moll learn each other’s language. Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940) thinks she wants to be a little wifey, living in Buffalo, married to a conventional husband who will treat her like a lady. (“What do I treat you as,” asks Cary Grant’s editor, “a water buffalo?”) Actually he treats her worse than a water buffalo, but she holds her own against his ruthlessness (and provides a dimension of human decency), and we know from the body language of those fast and furious early scenes of sparring, that they clearly belong together. When Hildy breaks down and cries toward the end, it’s not a sign of “feminine weakness”. The poor woman has been pulled this way and that, has rescued a man from hanging, written the story, and then after thinking Walter was doing everything he could to keep her at the paper he now wants her to go to Albany with Bruce. When she realises he’s up to yet another trick to keep her, she collapses with exhaustion and relief. Their remarriage will be one long honeymoon interruptus, but they’ll never get bored. After all, any old woman can be a wife, but few can be the “best newspaperman” at the Morning Post. In Twentieth Century (1934), John Barrymore’s Svengali and Carole Lombard’s lingerie model turned actress go mostly toe to toe (sometimes literally) for seven or eight rounds until a stalemate finds them both doing what they are designed to do, even when pretending otherwise: acting and fighting.
 
As with Susan and David, fighting is not only a substitute for a declaration of marital love, it’s a promise for the future: perpetual motion rather than stasis, anything can happen. Instead of the blissful denouement of most film romances, a lifetime (if they’re lucky) of ongoing digs and insults and one-upmanship. Readiness is all. For the Hawksian couple, avoidance of boredom is not a negative virtue but a consummation devoutly to be wished. And fought for and fought for…
 
 
Bone of contention: the final scene of Bringing up Baby. By Molly Haskell. Sight and Sound,  August  12, 2021.

He is approaching 75, but Howard Hawks still fits the old Ben Hecht description of him as “a drawling fashion plate, apurr with melodrama”.

 
On the stage of the Carnegie Theater for the Chicago Film Festival last November, a month before the premiere of his Rio Lobo, he was the image of the consummate professional. He was wearing rimless dark glasses, and kept them on even when the audience, through an electrician’s error, was left in darkness. As he sat there in the spotlight, asking for light, it seemed oddly appropriate – recalling Robin Wood’s words about ‘the eternal darkness… against which the Hawksian stoicism shines.’
 
The lights came on again, and Hawks stoically endured a long eulogy by Charles Flynn, editor of Focus! magazine. Flynn closed with, ‘Unless Mr. Hawks wants to say something at the end … ’ Hawks, visibly grimacing, replied, ‘I think you’ve said more than enough,’ and from that point on the audience was his.
 
Hawks kept the talk going by quietly nodding at each new questioner, quickly asking for repetition if a question confused him, and beguiling the audience with a flow of anecdotes. Some were familiar, but he embellished them with new twists and flourishes, just as his heroes repeat the same tasks in an endless but volatile routine until they achieve an almost effortless mastery. When a particularly obtuse question came up – such as one which criticised his direction of Henry Hathaway’s The Sons of Katie Elder, or another which asked where to obtain a ‘Red River D Belt buckle’ – he would field it gracefully, with a barely perceptible irritation. What follows is an edited transcript of his remarks, rearranged by topic.
 
Is the story of Rio Lobo similar to El Dorado, as El Dorado was similar to Rio Bravo?
 
HH : Well, when we came to a certain place in Rio Bravo, we had a choice between going in this direction and going in that direction. But we made notes to remember because we said, ‘That is so good we can use it again.’ So when we started on El Dorado, I said to the writer, the same one who worked on Rio Bravo [Leigh Brackett], ‘Now, look, we had a very good boy gunman in Rio Bravo, let’s make it a boy who can’t shoot at all.’ That wasn’t the same, was it? I said, ‘John Wayne was the sheriff in Rio Bravo, so let’s have Bob Mitchum the sheriff in El Dorado.’
 
You’re right, there is a similarity, but it comes from style, it comes from writing, it comes from the fact that it’s made in the same part of the country, because the costumes are very much the same… Rio Lobo is quite different because it starts in the war between the North and the South, so you don’t quite think it’s going to be a western, then it changes to the western. You can probably say that western is a lot like the other two. Sure. You’ve got fellows with guns, and one of them’s a sheriff… You know, there isn’t much you can do.
 
What kind of working relationship do you have with John Wayne?
 
HH : The last picture we made, I called him up and said, ‘Duke, I’ve got a story.’ He said, ‘I can’t make it for a year, I’m all tied up.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s all right, it’ll take me a year to get it finished.’ He said, ‘Good, I’ll be all ready.’ And he came down on location and he said, ‘What’s this about?’ And I told him the story. He never even read it, he didn’t know anything about it.
 
Didn’t it sound familiar to him, though?
 
HH : Yes, he said, ‘Do I get to play the drunk this time?’
 
El Dorado seems to start out in a very sombre vein and then loosen up toward the middle.
 
HH :  That’s a particular theory of mine, that if people start a picture and they have a funny main title, a lot of funny things, it’s as much as to say, ‘We expect you to laugh.’ I think that’s committing suicide. So I start out and try to get their attention with a good dramatic sequence, and then find a place to start getting some laughs. We did that with Rio Bravo, we did that with El Dorado, and we did it very much with the new picture. It starts off being very serious and then before the audience realises it, you’re starting in having some fun.

 

Could you explain how Rio Bravo was made as a reaction against High Noon?
 
HH : I saw High Noon at about the same time I saw another western picture, and we were talking about western pictures and they asked me if I liked it and I said, ‘Not particularly.’ I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help. I said that a good sheriff would turn around and say, ‘How good are you? Are you good enough to take the best man they’ve got?’ And the fellow would probably say ‘No’ and he’d say, ‘Well, then I’d just have to take care of you.’ And that scene was in Rio Bravo.
 
Then I saw another picture where the sheriff caught a prisoner and the prisoner taunted him and made him perspire and worry and everything by saying, ‘Wait till my friends catch up with you.’ And I said, ‘That’s a lot of nonsense, the sheriff would say, “You better hope your friends don’t catch up with you, ’cause you’ll be the first man to die.”’
 
While we were doing all this, they said, ‘Why don’t you make a picture the other way ?’ And I said ‘O.K.’, and we made Rio Bravo the exact opposite from High Noon and this other picture – think it was called 3:10 to Yuma.
 
 
What sort of stories would you like to do in the future?
 
HH : Cary Grant and I were talking the other day, we’d always wanted to do Don Quixote and have Cantinflas do Sancho Panza. Before Cary gets too old or I get too old, we hope to do it.
 
Outside of that, any story that I think’s fun to do, I expect to do. Things are changing so rapidly now that I like to know what they’re beginning to think. I talked to an exhibitor the other day and he said booking a picture today is like playing Russian roulette.
 
How would you attempt to do such a complex philosophical work as Don Quixote?
 
HH : I think we could have a lot of fun with it. To me, Don Quixote is a great comedy. I think that Don Quixote is the basis really for the Chaplin character. I think we all found that funny, and I don’t see why we can’t make Don Quixote very funny.
 
Is there any chance of Scarface being redistributed?
 
HH : We’re working on it. We think we’ll probably re-release it and send it out for television. I’m trying to get it ready and modernise it a little bit. The picture holds up very well, but some of the music and some of the stuff that the censors made us put in at that time I’d rather not leave in, so we’re taking that out of it.
 
I have a very hard time convincing people that Red Line 7000 is a great film. How do you feel about it?
 
HH : I don’t like it. I was trying to do something, I tried an experiment. I had three good stories about the race track – I used to race, I know it pretty well – but none of them would make a picture, so I thought maybe I can put them together. And just when I got people interested in two people, I cut over and started to work with two more, and when the audience got interested in them, I went over to two others, and pretty soon the audience got disgusted and I got disgusted too.
 
To be serious, I think there were some pretty good things in it, but as a piece of entertainment I don’t think I did a good job. I think there were some individual scenes that were pretty good, and there were a lot of great race scenes. But I’m not proud of the picture as a whole.
 
On a movie such as Hatari!, it’s obvious that you can’t control much of what’s going to happen. Could you explain how you prepared for the hunting scenes?
 
HH : We had some marvellous camera cars – six months’ building, could do about 80 miles an hour over no roads – and a pretty well-trained crew. And we had airplanes spotting up above that had radio connection with the cars. We had around fifty jeeps of various kinds: little jeeps, station wagons, everything.
 
I could talk to the airplanes, and I could talk to the cars. An airplane would say, ‘Car 33 is headed for a good bunch of rhinos.’ So I’d say, ‘Where’s car 33?’ They put up a flag, and we’d find out where 33 was, and we’d all head for 33. And then we’d hear a voice say, ‘Be careful when you swing round that bunch of trees, they’re right behind there and they look kinda mean.’ And then you’d hear, ‘Look out there!’ and a big crash, and the boys in the airplane would say, ‘I told you they were mean.’
 
Then we’d make a scene – we only had three or four minutes to make a whole scene. We had to catch them and get ’em into a cage. Three or four minutes was a long time, because they weren’t fun. I think we chased nine rhinos and caught four to get the scenes in this part of the picture.
 
How much control do you have over the editing of your films?
 
HH : Oh, practically complete control. I’ve had a little trouble on a couple of pictures that they thought were too long. I made the mistake of making them too long and they made the mistake of trying to shorten them.
 
Is there one of your films that stands out as being particularly satisfying to you?
 
HH : I don’t think you can answer that question. You make a comedy – you take it out, if the people laugh, you’re immediately pleased, you get an immediate reaction and the pleasure that you’ve done a good job. If you make a drama, it takes a little bit longer. You have to have people come up to you and say, ‘I enjoyed that’, because they can give you no visible expression in a theatre. Oh, if they don’t walk out, that’s pretty good.
 
I think probably the last picture that worked out well is your favourite for a while, and then you start thinking about it and you go back a little further.
 
Not that you’re trying to make every scene a great scene, but you try not to annoy the audience. If I can make about five good scenes and not annoy the audience, it’s an awfully good picture. I told John Wayne when we started to work together, ‘Duke, if you can make two good scenes and not annoy the audience for the rest of the film, you’ll be a star.’ So he always comes up to me and says, ‘Is this one of those not-annoy-the-audience…?’ And I say, ‘You better believe it.’ Or he says, ‘Is this one of our good ones?’ And I say, ‘Well, this is almost that…’ We work that way, and now he preaches that as though it’s gospel, and he does a great job of not annoying the audience.

 
Would you say something about your use of colour?
 
HH : When we were making Red River, we discussed whether to use colour or not. At that time colour wasn’t very good. It had a kind of garish look to it. I didn’t like it, and we were trying to get a feeling of the period, so we made Red River in black-and-white. Some things I think go well in black-and-white; they give you a feeling of being older.
 
Now colour is better, and it’d be pretty hard for me to make a picture without colour. I think I enjoy it now. We’ve learned how to handle it, to control it, to print it. The colour is faster, so we can use it just as if we were using black-and-white; it doesn’t jump at us. We can use all the fall colours, ambers and muted colours, and come out with a very good-looking picture.
 
On El Dorado, I noticed that the Remington paintings always had a great slash of light across the street coming out of the saloon door. So I said to the cameraman, ‘How do we get that?’ He said, ‘Use yellow light, but don’t walk your people through it – they’ll look like they had yellow jaundice or something.’ He used back light on them and it was a very mellow, pleasant look. We used it in the last picture.
 

What kind of relationship do you like to have with your cameraman?
 
HH : There’s a lot of cooperation with a good cameraman, and I’ve been fortunate in having good ones. Some of them get very tired of working in normal stuff, they relax and then you pep them up and get them to take chances. I tell them, ‘If you make two good scenes for me, you can make two mediocre ones and one bad one.’ All I’m interested in is the good one. So they go ahead and take chances, and their work shows it. Because you people pass up the bad scenes, but you really appreciate the good one.
 
Could you say something about the way you improvise with actors, how many liberties you’re willing to take with a scene?
 
HH : A lot of that has been overemphasised. We have a scene that we’re going to do: I’m interested first in the action and next in the words they speak. If I can’t make the action good, I don’t try to use the words. If I want something to happen in a hurry, I can’t have a man stop and read a line. I let him run on through yelling something. I must change to fit the action because, after all, it’s a motion picture. I don’t change it so much – we end up with the same scene, except we just do it in a little different style.
 
I recently saw Tiger Shark and I was amazed by Edward G. Robinson’s performance. It seems so much better than what he did in Little Caesar.
 
HH : When we started that picture, it was written as a very dour, sour man. At the end of the first day I said to Eddie Robinson, ‘This is going to be the dullest picture that’s ever been made.’ And he said, ‘What can we do?’ I said, ‘Well, if you’re willing to try it with me, why, let’s make him a happy-go-lucky, talkative… you’re going to have to keep talking all through the picture.’ He said, ‘Fine, let’s do it.’ So every day I give him a sheet of yellow paper and say, ‘Here’s your lines.’
 
He’s a fine actor, and I thought he did a great job. But I hate to think of what the picture would have been if we’d done the dour, sour man instead of this rather gay. futile man, because the whole tenor of the picture changed.

 
Could you tell us something about the off-camera lives of people like Bogart and Cagney?
 
HH : I had enough trouble with them on the set to worry about.
 
How do you handle difficult actors?
 
HH : Look, if they’re good, they’re no trouble to handle. The only people that are hard to handle are bad actors. I had trouble the first day with Bogart. I think I grabbed him by the lapels and pushed his head up against the wall and said, ‘Look, Bogie, I tell you how to get tough, but don’t get tough with me.’ He said, ‘I won’t.’ Everything was fine from that time on.
 
Do you pick the scripts you work on?
 
HH : I get complete opportunity to pick the script. There are only a few times that I’ve done a favour for somebody and made a picture, and usually it hasn’t been good because I know the kind of a story I can tell and that I enjoy telling. Then it’s fun.
 
Could you explain how the day-to-day writing goes on a script?
 
HH : Well, when Hecht and MacArthur and I used to work on a script, we’d sit in a room and work for two hours and then we’d play backgammon for an hour. Then we’d start again and one of us would be one character and one would be another character. We’d read our lines of dialogue and the whole idea was to try to stump the other people, to see if they could think of something crazier than you could. And that is the kind of dialogue we used, and the kind that was fun. We could usually remember what we said, and put it right down and go on working.
 
And sometimes you’re so far in a picture, and you get an idea that you’re going to change a character, so you just go back and change the lines that you’ve written for that character and start all over again.

One of the best known lines in American films is, ‘If you want anything, just whistle’ in To Have and Have Not. Who was responsible – Faulkner, Furthman, Hawks, or was it improvised?
 
HH : I was making a test of Bacall, so I wrote the scene just for the test and it went over so well we had an awful time trying to put it into the picture. Faulkner was the one who found a place to put it. He said, ‘If we put these people in a hotel corridor where nobody else is around, then I think we can make that scene work.’ So we did it.

I wrote the line, but he wrote the stuff that led up to it. Bill and I were very good friends. We hunted and fished a lot. I bought the first story that he sold; he was working as a clerk in Macy’s basement in New York. He worked with me on, oh, half a dozen pictures. I could call on him any time and ask him for a scene, and he always gave it to me.
 
Could you tell us something about Land of the Pharaohs?
 
HH : We had a lot of fun, and we had a pretty good premise of a story. For writers we had Bill Faulkner and Harry Kurnitz, a very fine playwright. We started to work on it, and Faulkner said, ‘I don’t know how a pharaoh talks.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, I never talked to one.’ And he said, ‘Is it all right if I write him like a Kentucky colonel ?’ And Kurnitz said, ‘I can’t do it like a Kentucky colonel, but I’m a student of Shakespeare – I think I could do it as though it were King Lear.’ So I said, ‘Well, you fellows go ahead and I’ll rewrite your stuff.’ They did it, and I messed it up, and… we didn’t know what a pharaoh did.
 
The dialogue in your films is very sophisticated. Have you ever found the Production Code restrictive?
 
HH : Oh, no. We made one picture, [The] Big Sleep, and they read the script and they didn’t care for the end Chandler wrote. I said, ‘Why don’t you suggest a better one?’ And they did. It was a lot more violent, it was everything I wanted, and I made it and was very happy about it. I said, ‘I’ll hire you fellows as writers.’
 
What things do you think you have in common with John Ford?
 
HH : A great deal. He was a good director when I started, and I copied him every time I could. I don’t think I’ve done nearly as good a job as Ford on some things. I think he’s got the greatest vision for a tableau, a long shot, of any man. One of my favourite pictures of all time is The Quiet Man, which I think was just a beautiful picture.
 
Ford, oh, he has done some things that are just fabulous. And he was the first man to do them. Every time I run into a scene that I think Ford does very well, I stop and think, ‘What would he have done there?’ And then I go ahead and do it, because he gets more use out of a bad sky… he goes right on shooting whether the weather’s bad or good, and he gets fabulous effects.
 
I was making a picture with Wayne, Red River. We had a burial scene, and the cameraman said, ‘We’d better hurry, there’s a cloud coming across that mountain right behind.’ So I said to Wayne, ‘Now, look, you go out there – if you forget your lines, just say anything, keep talking until I tell you to come on in. We’ll make the sound afterwards.’ And I waited until the cloud got near, thought of Ford, and started the scene. Then we started the burial service, and the cloud passed right over the whole scene. I told Ford. I said, ‘Hey, I’ve made one almost as good as you can do. You better go and see it.’
 
Could you comment on your earliest films?
 
HH : A very astute and wise man gave me a chance to direct, and I made a picture [The Road to Glory, 1926] that I don’t think anybody enjoyed except a few critics. And he said, ‘Look, you’ve shown you can make a picture, but for God’s sake go out and make entertainment.’ So I went home and wrote a story about Adam and Eve waking up in the Garden of Eden and called it Fig Leaves. It got its cost back in one theatre. And that taught me a very good lesson; from that time on, I’ve been following his advice about trying to make entertainment.

 
You’re famous for taking a scene that has elements of pain and humiliation, such as the finger amputation in The Big Sky or the steak scene in Only Angels Have Wings, and either playing it lightly or for outright slapstick…
 
HH : You’re looking for something new to be funny. I told John Wayne (on Red River), ‘Look, I’ve got an idea for a funny scene. You get your finger caught between a saddle horn and a rope, and it’s mangled, and they say, ‘Well, that finger isn’t going to be much use to you.’ And they get you drunk and they heat up an iron in the fire and sharpen a knife and cut off your finger.’ He said, ‘What kind of a scene is that?’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘It’s supposed to be funny.’ He said, ‘That isn’t funny.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘if you’re not good enough, then we won’t do it. I’ll do it with somebody else who’s a better actor.’ So I did it with Kirk Douglas, and I told John, ‘You better go see that picture.’ And he came back and said, ‘If you say a funeral is funny, I’ll do a funeral.’ Because I think that was a funny scene.
 
I think that humour comes very close to being tragedy. In Rio Bravo, Wayne hit a fellow across the face the most horrible way. Dean Martin said, ‘Hey, take it easy.’ And Wayne said, ‘I’m not gonna hurt him.’ The audience thought it was funny.
 
In Rio Lobo, we set a man on fire. He’s burning and somebody goes to pick up a blanket to put the thing out, and Wayne says, ‘Let him burn.’ And the other fellow says, ‘Don’t let him burn so much he can’t sign the papers we want him to sign.’ And, I don’t know, to me it was funny.
 
Pauline Kael attacked your films because she said they are examples of male chauvinism.
 
HH : God, I don’t know what that means.
 
That the role of women is seen to be subservient and auxiliary to the heroics of the men.
 
HH : Well, I’ve seen so many pictures where the hero gets in the moonlight and says silly things to a girl. I’d reverse it and let the girl do the chasing around, you know, and it works out pretty well. Anyway, I know that a little better than I do that other stuff.
 
You say you are an entertainer, and the French critics in the last few years have been treating you as an entertainer and a philosopher…
 
HH : Oh, I listen to them, and I get open-mouthed and wonder where they find some of the stuff that they say about me. All I’m doing is telling a story. I’m very glad that they like it, and I’m very glad that a lot of them are copying what I do, but they find things… I work on the fact that if I like somebody and think they’re attractive, I can make them attractive. If I think a thing’s funny, then people laugh at it. They give me credit for an awful lot of things that I don’t pay any attention to.
 
Your films always have a solid structure. But in today’s films it almost seems unfashionable to have one…
 
HH : If they let those fellows that are making them today go on with no structure, when they make the second or third picture I think they’ll begin to learn that they better have a little structure.
We made a picture that worked pretty well called [The] Big Sleep, and I never figured out what was going on, but I thought that the basic thing had great scenes in it and it was good entertainment. After that got by, I said, ‘I’m never going to worry about being logical again.’
 
But I think that in some of today’s pictures you don’t know where you are, who’s talking, or anything, and that’s why they have got motion pictures lying around over in Hollywood that they can’t make head or tail out of.
 
I think a director’s a story-teller, and if he tells a story that people can’t understand, then he shouldn’t be a director. You take the western. Every time a man I know is a first-rate director goes after a western, you come out with a pretty good picture, because a western’s good entertainment, it’s dramatic… But you get somebody who’s going to make a western about a psycho or a left-handed gun or something like that, then it’s no good, it doesn’t live up to what people want in a western.
 

What did you think of The Wild Bunch?
 
HH : Somebody asked me about it, and I said, ‘Well, he doesn’t know how to direct. I can kill four men and bury ’em before he gets through using slow motion to make one die.’ All I saw was a lot of red paint and blood running.
 
You’re quite an inspiration for a lot of young European directors…
 
HH : A number of them have a great deal of talent, but they’re telling pictures that are good for only France, Italy and Germany. When I go over there I talk to them about it. I say, ‘Why don’t you fellows widen out, make a picture that is good for the world? You aren’t going to get enough money to work with unless you get it out of universal entertainment.’ And I think they’re beginning to work on that.
 
A couple of the Frenchmen do beautiful jobs, and I admire their work. Peter Bogdanovich, who made Targets, I think is eventually going to turn out some very fine work. Of the older directors, I admire Carol Reed’s work very much. I like Hitchcock’s work, and Billy Wilder’s. When I think I can learn something, I go to see any of their pictures, but if I think I can’t learn, I don’t go.
 
[This interview featured in the Spring 1971 issue.]
 
An audience with Howard Hawks. By By Joseph McBride, Michael Wilmington. Sight and Sound, May 28, 2021.

The Slim years were very rich. You may decide they were the best in the career of Howard Hawks. In which case doesn’t his wife Slim Hawks deserve some credit? We are talking about 1939 to 1946, which means: Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, Sergeant York, Ball of Fire, The Outlaw (he started it before Howard Hughes dropped him), Air Force, Corvette K-225 (which he produced), To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep and Red River, which was shot in the autumn of 1946, though not released until 1948. Not a bad war.
 
Nancy Gross met Howard Hawks on 30 August 1938. She was 20; he was 42. She was born in Salinas, California – East of Eden country – and her father owned several fish canneries in Monterey. She was extraordinarily beautiful and a convent girl, but when the time came, adventure took her to the Furnace Creek Inn, a classy resort in Death Valley, not far from the Nevada border. There she met movie stars: William Powell (he called her the “Slim Princess”), Warner Baxter, David Niven, Cary Grant. Next thing, she was invited to San Simeon and became friendly with William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies. Very soon she was in Los Angeles. On that August day, she had been to the fights with two men – actor Bruce Cabot (“seriously dumb”, she said) and Cubby Broccoli (“truly intelligent”). After the boxing they went to the Clover Club, the most fashionable gambling nightclub in town.
 
She was dancing with Broccoli when a tall, grey-haired, immaculately dressed man passed by – it was Howard Hawks, just a few months off Bringing up Baby (a flop in its day). He was known as the ‘Silver Fox’, and he was watching her. Watching would prove to be Howard’s most loving form of attention. He asked her to dance and then he gave her the usual line: so, she wanted to be in movies? “No,” she said, and she meant it – though in the end she would affect Hawks’s work more than any other woman. Hawks kept a little black book with the names and numbers of pretty women who did want to be in pictures, and he called on them sometimes. He asked Nancy to come up to his house for a swim next day, and she accepted. They were soon in love.
 
Hawks had been married since 1928 to Athole Shearer, the sister of Norma Shearer and Douglas Shearer, the sound recordist at MGM. It was Athole’s second marriage (she had a son, Peter, by her first husband). But Athole was not always well. Norma would say that her sister had first been disturbed by so many Canadian guys they had known (they were from Montreal) being killed in the Great War. Athole was depressed. She took to her bed. She heard voices or ghosts.

 
Athole was very pretty and she appeared in a few films; she’s at the dance in D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920). In 1927 Norma Shearer married Irving Thalberg, so Hawks’s marriage to her sister saw him joining Hollywood society. His biographer Todd McCarthy is properly sceptical of the suggestion that Howard didn’t know about Athole’s condition. They had two children, Barbara and David, but by the time Howard met Slim he told her his wife “was ill a great part of the time”. What did “ill” mean, especially when California law forbade the divorcing of certified spouses? Athole’s illness had not gone that far.
 
You may feel this is more gossip than film commentary, but the way Howard Hawks looked at women, or fantasised them into movie life, is at the heart of his work. Athole Hawks lived until 1985, spending much of her last years in institutions. On Wikipedia she is said to have been “bipolar”, but that diagnosis came along later and is fashionable now to the point of stupidity. It’s clear she was disturbed some of the time (but not all of it) – and a husband’s infidelity can assist that. We know that Hawks had affairs – with Ann Dvorak and Joan Crawford, for example – and it’s evident that he was in the habit of ‘discovering’ young women as radiant as Frances Farmer.
 
Hawks gave us some of the most arresting women in American film – beautiful, smart, brave and seemingly ‘independent’, yet ultimately obedient to the man’s dream. In His Girl Friday (1939), Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) is on the point of marrying someone else, but her ex, rascal newspaper editor Walter (Cary Grant), wins her back. These women are often loners, like Marie ‘Slim’ Browning (Lauren Bacall) in To Have and Have Not (1945), who contrives somehow to be alone on Martinique in the middle of war, under the guise of an actress no more than 19. This ‘Slim’ is a million miles from Hemingway’s Marie in the novel, and famously Hawks warned Humphrey Bogart that Bacall would outdo him in insolence. Well, yes, if it’s cross-talk foreplay you’re interested in (and Hawks was wild for it), but the girl’s independence dwindles away until she’s ready to soft-shoe dance out of Frenchy’s place and go with her Harry into the new dawn.
 
To Have and Have Not comes on sultry tough, and we all know the film’s famous lines, with Bacall holding up a doorway in case it faints. It’s a film with marlin fishing, gunfire at sea and creepy Vichy cops (especially Dan Seymour), but it’s as complete and serene a fantasy as anything Fred Astaire ever made – and it does keep edging towards being a musical, led by the droll Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael). For a moment Bacall had the reputation of a slinky noir girl with an acid tongue.
 
Of course, this is the central film of the Slim years. There is, by now, an unshakeable legend (and I’m not seeking to dislodge it) that, one day at home, Slim saw a picture of a pre-Bacall Betty Joan Perske in Harper’s Bazaar – the fashionably dressed young woman outside a blood bank, with the look of a vampire – and tossed the magazine over to Howard. Maybe as the magazine was in mid-air the wife had second thoughts. Did she guess that Howard might take a fancy to her discovery? But Slim Hawks had great instincts about film, and perhaps she divined Perske’s promising look when Howard might not have seen it.

 
The movie was under way from that moment, and the machinery of Hollywood’s dream surged into high gear. Betty Perske was located. She was put under a personal service contract to Howard and taught to lower her deep voice. (Her Jewishness was tactfully overlooked by the Hawks couple.) As a script developed – for which Jules Furthman didn’t bother to keep a word of Hemingway – the man in the film would call the girl “Slim” and she would call him “Steve”.
 
These were the pet names Howard and Nancy had for each other. Hawks started to ask Slim what she’d say in certain of the film’s situations – Furthman admitted he took some of the lines from Slim’s lips, like the whistling stuff. Moreover, ‘Slim’ in Martinique ended up wearing a beautifully cut hound’s-tooth suit exactly like ones Slim Hawks favoured. A rare game was being played, good enough for a Hawks comedy, in which a director is ready to fall for his actress, but keeps his wife around to pretend it isn’t so. When Bacall and Bogie fell in love, Howard was taken aback. He said their romance was spoiling the picture. Try to find a place where that is so! Bacall burst into tears; Slim said, “But what do you do, Howard, if you’re stuck on a guy? How do you handle it?”
 
Slim knew that difficulty. She had been torn over living with Hawks in 1938-9 and recognising the awkward reality of Athole (whom he finally divorced in 1940). But she went along with the compromise. She found Hawks not just sophisticated and dry, but a complicated man who tried to make everything as smooth as his camera style.
 
“If anything, he was slightly frightened of moviemaking, and, I suspect, surprised that he was able to do it at all,” she recalled in her memoirs, Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life (written with Annette Tapert, and published in 1990, the year Slim died). “He used to tell me that on the first day of shooting a new picture he would stop the car, get out, and throw up a couple of times on his way to the studio. That process would go on for about a week until he got into the rhythm of the work and the movie started rolling along…
 
“Although his talent lay in being able to tell a story,” she continued, “it always seemed to me that he told the same one over and over. The characters never had any intellectual reactions, only emotional ones. This always puzzled me because as a person, Howard’s emotional thermometer was stuck at about six degrees below 98.6. He was frozen there. He did not take emotion into any part of his existence; neither through his children, his wife, nor, I think, his work.”
 
Now that’s film commentary.
 
Sex on the screen
 
 
Slim and Howard married and had a daughter, Kitty Steven, born in 1946. Hawks had more affairs – Slim named Dolores Moran (who plays the Free French wife, Helene de Bursac, in To Have and Have Not – the woman ‘Slim’ would like to anaesthetise); then there was Ella Raines, who is in Corvette K-225. But Slim was restless too. She and Ernest Hemingway certainly noticed each other, and in 1946 she started an affair with the agent Leland Hayward – but not before Hayward had brought his new client Montgomery Clift over to see Hawks about playing Matthew Garth in Red River.
 
Clift was not keen on doing a western, so Slim took him for a walk in the garden. He told her he couldn’t ride a horse, wear a six-gun or walk in funny boots. She said Howard and John Wayne would teach him those things (though the task actually fell to a wrangler named Richard Farnsworth). When they came in from the garden, Clift said, sure, he would do it. The shoot took off for Arizona, but Slim went with Hayward.

 
So Slim’s years stretch from Cary Grant teasing Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) to Red River’s Joanne Dru, who starts off with Clift by slapping him in the face. In the middle there is the timeless screwball bickering of Bogart and Bacall, perhaps the sexiest talk in an American movie to this day. Hawks could do a two-shot of a man and a woman – with her rubbing at her knee (call it her lower thigh) and him telling her to scratch – that any halfway sane censor would have stopped. And Slim presided over such relationships and scenes, though she saw the colder side of Hawks that was hidden on screen. She also realised why he had been at the Clover Club that night: he was a chronic gambler. (No one knows the inside story of Hollywood without understanding the gambling.)
 
“I don’t know which was more unpleasant, Howard’s gambling or his infidelity,” Slim wrote in her memoirs. “Beneath that jaunty exterior, I think there was a great deal of sexual confusion and insecurity within Howard. When I look at the role of sex in his films and compare it with his life, it’s very interesting. The love scenes in the movies are invariably the same. There’s a terrible fight, the woman insults the man, he insults her back, she insults him again, and then suddenly they’re in each other’s arms and slashing round in the hay. This scenario was, I think, a way for Howard to put sex on the screen that didn’t make him want to gag. In his own life, he had a very tough time with tenderness or sentimentality. Even at the height of our courtship he was a tentative partner. Sex was simply a physical need that had no relation to the person he was with.”
 
Red River was to have been the making of them. In the Slim years Hawks had prospered. With hit after hit his salary rose; Red River was his own production, and he hoped to clean up. But the expenses on the picture got out of hand, and then Slim left him for Leland Hayward. Hawks’s salary was deferred against profits on the film, and the profits weren’t declared for a few years. The divorce was a long-drawn-out financial quarrel in which Hawks resisted paying child support for Kitty.
 
As Todd McCarthy puts it: “Hawks’s behaviour in relation to Slim and Kitty is hard to fathom, although it certainly stemmed from some combination of arrogant stubbornness, a conviction that he needn’t pay since Leland Hayward and Slim had far more money than he did, a lack of liquid cash and a lingering resentment of Slim for having left him. Relations between the two were strained when they existed at all, and Hawks undoubtedly knew that Slim bad-mouthed him to her show business and society friends. Slim remained very close with Bacall, Bogart and Hemingway, whereas Hawks did not.” Bogart may have known how much Hawks went after Bacall; Hemingway could not forget that his most political novel had been turned into an airy fantasy.

 
But the new Hawks season may be the occasion for a reappraisal. There was a time when it was stressed how Howard Hawks had flown planes and driven fast cars – how he made films about men doing a dangerous job with laconic professionalism. There was a suggestion of realism. In fact he re-enacted a dream, with hard-boiled dialogue and allegedly blunt confrontations. Laconic was like italic. He made absurdist, floating comedies (The Discreet Charm of the Cowboys, perhaps, with the herd never reaching a railhead?) in which men pretended to be strong and the women challenged them and then subsided. It’s like Rio Bravo (1959), where Angie Dickinson tells John Wayne not to mess up her life with his preconceived notions, talks him into a heap of wet laundry, but ends up guarding his door and wearing tights for him.
 
By the time I met Slim she was no longer slim, but she was great fun and a storyteller, who gave not the least hint she was dying. I got to see her by sending her a piece on Red River written for this magazine (in 1977) – a serious, heartfelt essay, though it did realise that the strenuous cattle drive was usually the same valley shot from different angles. Slim thought Howard would have liked the piece – he admired admirers. She was fond of him again by then, I think, though he was dead.
 
Then, gently, she tried to explain the kind of man Howard Hawks was: talented, cold, a fantasist, a gambler. I believe that is film commentary, and an insight into how American films functioned once upon a time. I doubt Hawks liked being laughed at in life, but he was a fabulous poker-faced comedian who dreamed the same dream over and over again – in which a man and a woman play word games and then decide they are in love. Until the next picture. The reason Walter has lost Hildy in His Girl Friday is to permit the fun of winning her back again.
 
 
Howard Hawks: Slim and the silver fox. By David Thompson. Sight and Sound  , August 13, 2014.
 

Howard Hawks: 10 essential films + three underrated ones. By  Matthew Thrift.  Sight and Sound, May 27, 2016.

Howard Hawks movies: 20 greatest films ranked worst to best. By Zach Laws and Chris Beachum.  Gold Derby, May 27, 2020.