Monday 7 August 2017

Howard Hawks Films

I've recently started working on a book on Howard Hawks's use of music in his films, and as a way to get my value judgements out of the way I thought I would here give a gut-reaction ranking of his entire oeuvre. Over the past few months I've gone through all of the films chronologically, which has been a fascinating exercise. Watching them all in relatively quick succession shows just how much thematic material repeats from film to film: while the personnel surrounding him changes, there are most definitely elements that the whole oeuvre has in common. Robin Wood, Gerald Mast, Peter Bogdanovich, and many other critics have listed these, so I don't want to take more time here to do it and instead get onto the films themselves. This ranking is based on my primal reactions and personal taste; the book's readings will of course be much better critically justified!

First, a caveat: I'm not ranking every film Hawks had a hand in, only those he directed large portions of. So I'm not including Viva Villa! (about a quarter directed by Hawks before he was fired and Jack Conway hired), The Outlaw (for which Hawks only shot a day or so of material), or Corvette K-225 (Hawks only produced, though apparently he had something to do with the screenplay). Of his eight silent films I'm only including the two I've seen complete: Fazil and A Girl in Every Port. The Road to Glory and The Air Circus are lost, The Cradle Snatchers is mostly lost, and I've not seen Fig Leaves, Paid to Love, or Trent's Last Case (please tell me if you've got a copy of any of those!).

1-10: The Immortals
These ten are the films that no film lover should miss, whether or not they care about Howard Hawks.

1. Rio Bravo (1959)
While Bringing Up Baby is my favourite film in absolute terms, Rio Bravo is my favourite Hawks film because it so perfectly distills everything the director is about. Its dramaturgy never falters in spite of its leisurely pace, it has the only Dimitri Tiomkin score that I really like, and it has the best performances most of its actors ever gave. It's nominally quite long, at 141 minutes, but every moment is packed with action and/or feeling and the time flies by amazingly quickly.

2. Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Long my favourite film, Bringing Up Baby is simply the funniest ever made. Words fail, just watch it.

3. Red River (1948)
With the exception of over-acting Joanne Dru, this is the best-cast of all of Hawks's films. John Wayne demonstrates that he can actually act, Montgomery Clift becomes a star, Walter Brennan shows that he was the best character actor in the business, John Ireland and Harry Carey Jr. show how to support the leads, and Harry Carey Sr. adds nostalgia value. Each of the minor members of the team is fully characterised, which makes this a great film to get lost in. That also makes analysing it quite challenging: I try for critical detachment but keep getting caught up! (This is true of all of these great films, and I found the same thing writing my doctoral thesis on Monteverdi operas.)

4. To Have and Have Not (1944)
In which Bogart and Bacall demonstrate what chemistry means. Every performance here is good, especially Walter Brennan and Hoagy Carmichael. I reckon this is Hawks's most musically sophisticated film.

5. Ball of Fire (1941)
Gary Cooper is watchable when doing comedy, and Barbara Stanwyck is especially watchable here. They are surrounded by a fine supporting cast and a great script by Billy Wilder. Alfred Newman's score is very clever; ironically, the music here is much better than in the 'musical' remake, A Song is Born.

6. His Girl Friday (1940)
Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell have great chemistry here. There are some unfortunately preachy moments in the film (very unusual for Hawks), but most of the time it's expert filmmaking.

7. Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Like Red River, this one is full of well-rounded supporting characters. It also has one of Cary Grant's best performances.

8. The Dawn Patrol (1930)
Hawks's first sound picture and his first real masterpiece. This one has everything: action, comedy, and engaging performances (especially from Richard Barthelmess and Douglas Fairbanks Jr). Hawks shows right off the bat how good he is at dialogue directing, and the screenplay has a clear, organic structure. The air battle sequences are beautifully done.

9. Scarface (1931)
Hawks seems to have got all of his grisly guignol tendencies out of his system with this one, his most violent and dark film (but also very funny). Paul Muni overacts, but George Raft is great as his sidekick and there are some good supporting performances and cracking Ben Hecht dialogue.

10. Hatari! (1962)
Many critics would not rate this as high, but it provides the most pure pleasure of all of Hawks's films apart from Rio Bravo and Bringing Up Baby. Yes, it is overlong and sometimes wooly in its structure, but it's two and a half hours of joy.

11-20: Good
These ten are amusing and interesting, not masterpieces but still quite good.

11. Twentieth Century (1934)
There is an awful lot to like here, especially the cast and the dialogue, but I can't help but wonder if Hawks had stuck more closely to the play with its single setting on the train whether this would be even better. As funny as it is, the long prologue before we get to the train feels somewhat unnecessary. As the play and the musical adaptation (On the Twentieth Century) showed, there is plenty of intrigue to keep us occupied in the single location. Here is an example of the drive to 'open out' stage plays for the screen not really being necessary.

12. Air Force (1943)
Pure propoganda, but well made and effective. The pilot's death scene, written by William Faulkner and subtly scored by Franz Waxman, is the most moving scene Hawks ever shot.

13. I Was a Male War Bride (1949)
Solid middle-period Cary Grant paired with Ann Sheridan, and some amusing situations and dialogue, don't quite manage to let this take off into screwball hilarity.

14. Ceiling Zero (1936)
Hawks made this aviation film between the more famous Dawn Patrol and Only Angels Have Wings. James Cagney is the only really great thing about this one, but he's here at his very best and the rest is watchable.

15. The Big Sky (1952)
A little known middle-period Hawks western, with fine performances from Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin. This is constantly engaging if never quite breaking through to sublimity. It's Hawks's most under-rated film.

16. Monkey Business (1952)
More mid-career Cary Grant, mismatched with Ginger Rogers and a screenplay that starts well but descends into dullness. Grant's scenes with Marilyn Monroe are the best part.

17. The Big Sleep (1946)
If The Big Sky is Hawks's most under-rated film, this is his most over-rated. Yes, it's fun to get lost in, but at the end of the day the plot makes no sense and I get the feeling that the whole thing doesn't really amount to a hill of beans (to quote another Bogart picture). But Bogart and Bacall are wonderful to watch, as are most of the supporting cast, and the nutty dialogue is amusing. I don't like the Max Steiner score, which is a little too repetitive and obvious.

18. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
Hawks seems to have mostly been phoning in the dialogue direction, and the songs (the best part of the picture) were directed by Jack Cole. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell are excellent in spite of mediocre dialogue.

19. Barbary Coast (1935)
The strange combination of Edward G. Robinson, Joel McRae, and Miriam Hopkins destabilises this film, but makes it interesting. Hawks was never as good at doing period pictures as he was with contemporary subjects, but this makes a gallant attempt at recreating gold rush San Francisco.

20. The Crowd Roars (1932)
Auto racing doesn't really float my boat, but James Cagney is good as always. The dialogue direction feels like a step backwards from The Dawn Patrol.

21-31: Falling Short
Compiling this list has made me realise that Hawks made quite a few films that don't quite work for various reasons. Sometimes it's miscasting or an unfixable screenplay, or they just rub me the wrong way.

21. Sergeant York (1941)
This is a Hollywood propaganda film and little more (compare to Air Force, also propaganda but much more compelling). I don't find much evidence of Hawks here; it's really more of a studio film than most of Hawks's other work. I find Gary Cooper annoying here and elsewhere (other than Ball of Fire).

22. A Girl in Every Port (1928)
This is widely recognised as the first truly Hawksian film, in that it deals with the male group/conflict subject matter he would return to so often. It's a very breezy film, and not as stolid as many other silents. One can feel Hawks wanting to break into dialogue.

23. Tiger Shark (1932)
Edward G. Robinson is wonderful here playing a Portuguese fisherman, but the rest is not.

24. The Thing From Another World (1951)
There is some debate as to whether this was ghost-directed by Hawks or was actually done by the credited Christian Nyby. Whether or not he told them where to put the camera, Hawks's fingerprints are all over this, almost to a fault. Like so many science fiction films of the period, it is overly schematic and predictable. This is anathema for Hawksians, but I prefer The Day the Earth Stood Still.

25. The Criminal Code (1931)
Walter Huston and Boris Karloff are always watchable, but this one is pretty forgettable. It is a backwards step from The Dawn Patrol in its speed and vivacity.

26. Come and Get It! (1936)
The Hawks sections of this (approximately half, before he was replaced by William Wyler) are decent but no more. The same can be said of the Wyler sections. In his biography of Hawks, Todd McCarthy describes the film that could have been, making the one that was made seem even more disappointing.

27. A Song Is Born (1948)
Aside from its jazz sequences, this is an unnecessary and dull musical remake of Ball of Fire (often shot-for-shot).

28. The Ransom of Red Chief (1952)
Hawks's only short film, released as part of the omnibus O. Henry's Full House. Hawks's film is a mediocre adaptation within a mediocre group of five O. Henry adaptations.

29. Man's Favorite Sport? (1964)
This is a largely inert film with a lovely performance by Paula Prentiss and the occasional good scene. One gets the impression that Hawks was phoning it in.

30. Rio Lobo (1970)
This is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, but it isn't as bad as some make it out to be. The first half goes along very well; it's really only the second half that falters, as it becomes an uninteresting rehash of Rio Bravo. Most of the acting as bad, but I quite like Jorge Rivera's performance: he finds a very Hawksian balance between serious and tongue-in-cheek.

31. El Dorado (1967)
An imitation of Rio Bravo, this can only pale in comparison. Without the precedent of Rio Bravo, would this be seen as a better film? In a way it's a meaningless question, as the intertextual references are so explicit here. El Dorado is more interesting as a semiotic case study than as a film. The French critics at Cahiers du Cinéma went nuts for it because it seemed to confirm all of their auteurist theories, but even they don't quite claim that it's a great film.

32-36: Disasters
Even Howard Hawks can fumble horribly, as these turkeys demonstrate.

32. Red Line 7000 (1965)
Some people out there (Robin Wood and Quentin Tarantino among them) swear by this auto racing film, but it is Hawks at his most derivative, and it also features some truly awful music. The acting is bad, but the cars perform well. Stick to The Crowd Roars if you want a film about cars. I should say, though, that I've only seen this in a pan-and-scan VHS version. A new blu-ray is coming out later this year, and seeing it in the right aspect ratio and digitally restored might make a difference (I doubt it).

33. Fazil (1928)
This one is a curiosity in that it features every orientalist stereotype in the book. There are some intriguing scenes, but Hawks had not developed much of his signature style and there is little to set this one apart from all of the other Middle Eastern-themed films of the 1920s.

34. Land of the Pharaohs (1955)
It is often said that Hawks excelled in every genre, but this film belies that claim: he failed miserably in the historical epic. The unrelenting score by Dimitri Tiomkin, the abysmal acting, and the stolid dialogue drag this one down into the lower depths, but the production design (by the great Alexandre Trauner) is first-rate and there is some good editing, especially in the pyramid building sequence and the climatic burial. But the success of these sequences has little to do with Hawks and are more the work of Trauner and editor Rudi Fehr. Those sequences can't save the film.

35. Today We Live (1933)
Miscast Gary Cooper and Joan Crawford star in this boring First World War drama. The first few reels of this, which take place at Crawford's country house (she's meant to be English), are unbearably awful, with the slowest dialogue in the whole Hawks canon. Franchot Tone does manage to liven things up in a decent performance, but Cooper and Crawford are both dull as dishwater.

36. The Road to Glory (1936)
This is Hawks's worst film, and surely one of the worst to ever come out of Hollywood. An unnecessary remake of the French film Les Croix de Bois, this is Hawks doing the First World War even worse than he did in Today We Live. The whole thing runs as slow as molasses, and Frederic March gives a particularly awful performance in the lead. Lionel Barrymore hams it up in the worst possible way, yet he's still the best thing in the film. The dialogue is poorly edited and has the pacing of a bad stage performance. It all reeks of sentimentality, and there is a particularly egregious performance of Schubert's 'Ave Maria' in a church while it is being bombed. June Lang, the female lead, gives the worst performance in any Hawks film (there's a reason you've never heard of her), not helped by wooden costars and unsensitive direction. It's just plain awful.

There we go, Hawks's films ranked according to my taste. Percentage-wise there are only a few duds, and considering how prolific Hawks was over a long period it's a pretty good track record. I suppose I fall into the typical 'auteurist' category of critics, who find even bad films by an 'auteur' interesting. Now I've got to write that book...

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