Re-Print: Hawks on Hawks

Broadly speaking, what is a Howard Hawks film? Typically there is a strong-willed protagonist who works within a tight group, where maybe one member has a personal demon they need to confront, and then the group dynamics gets shaken by an assertive women who joins them, while they also confront an external threat. Hawks has worked in almost every genre and most of them somewhat reflect this schema. His world is one of action where friendship is important, relationships are mysterious, violent threats are overcome, people die, and life goes on. 

Howard Hawks is one of the most important directors in the history of cinema and reading his thoughts in Hawks on Hawks, a book-length interview with Joseph McBride, from late in his life, is fascinating for his remarks, observations and entertaining anecdotes on his films and career. 

There aren't too many good books on Hawks. And it's great that Hawks on Hawks is back in print along with a recent enough re-print of Robin Wood's Howard Hawks. But how come Todd McCarthy's epic Howard Hawks biography is still out of print? And how come Noel Howard's Hollywood sur Nil, on the making of The Land of Pharaohs, has never been translated? And why isn't George Plympton Shoot-Out at Rio Lobo available? And what about the footage from the Academy Awards where Hawks received a life-time achievement award? Where is the new writing on Hawks by today's younger film writers? 

The new edition of Hawks on Hawks, which was initially published in 1982, does not even include a new introduction, contextualizing its original historical position, and according to Wood's revised introduction The Land of Pharaohs is still a failure. There is something wrong with this situation and it needs to be resolved.

How can one measure Hawks' influence today? Is it because Hawks' style is invisible, not as poetic as Ford's, that his influence is harder to evaluate? Is his approach closer to the television series format as illustrated by the work of Aaron Sorkin? How come Fig Leaves, Scarface, Rio Bravo and Man's Favorite Sport aren't remembered today?

In Monkey Business and I Was a Male War Bride Hawks was already commenting on the notion of identity as a social construct and blurring traditional gender norms, which seems relevant today as some of the most interesting films are about mutating humans experiencing the limits of bodily experiences whether it is in last year's Cosmopolis and Holy Motors and in slightly more calm register Tower and Krivina, or this year in the liberation of phantasms and desires as shown in L'Inconnu du lac, Spring Breakers, Les Rencontres d'après minuit, La Vie d'Adèle, A Touch of Sin, The Oxbow Cure and The Dirties.

Even though thematically these films are similar to Hawks, they might not be stylistically. The directors that do owe to Hawks, in this respect, and can be seen as more clear successors include John Carpenter, Brian de Palma, James Cameron, Quentin Tarantino, Kathryn Bigelow, John McTiernan, Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Alfonso Cuarón, Hayao Miyazaki and the Farrelly brothers. Now that's a broad influence!

There are still fascinating things going on in cinema today and some directors - the good ones! - owe a lot to Hawks. It's time that Hawksian cinephiles pick him up again and re-visit his work. If the major voices and outlets of film criticism do not want to go into this direction, it will be up to the online film community of bloggers to do so!

Highlights from Hawks on Hawks

-       “All I’m doing is telling a story. I don’t analyze or do a lot of thinking about it. 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 dramatic, the audience does. I’m very lucky that way. I don’t stop to analyze it. We just made scenes that were fun to do. I think our job is to make entertainment.”

-       “I learned right in the beginning from Jack Ford, and I learned what not to do by watching Cecil DeMille.”

-       “I told John Wayne when we started to work together, “Duke, if you can make three good scenes in this picture and don’t annoy the audience the rest of the time, you’ll be good.” He said, “Do you believe that?” I said, “Yeah. If I make five good scenes in this picture, and don’t annoy the audience, I think I’ll be good.” So he started to work on that.”

-       “Scarface is my favorite picture, even today, because we were completely alone, Hughes and I. Everybody was under contract to the studios. We couldn’t get a studio, and they wouldn’t loan us anybody, so we had to find a cast. They just didn’t want independent pictures made in Hollywood. So we rented a little cobwebbed studio and opened it up and made the picture. It turned out to be the big picture of the year. We didn’t get any help from anybody. And that’s why I think I liked it best.”

-       “Well, would you rather see something dead serious or laugh at something? In the first place, true drama is awfully close to being comedy. The greatest drama in the world is really funny. A man who loses his pants out in front of a thousand people – he’s suffering the tortures of the damned, but he’s awfully funny doing it. I had a damn good teach, Chaplin. Probably our greatest comic.”

-       “I’m getting goddam sick of these pictures, you know, nothing but violence. Peckinpah and I believe in exactly the opposite thing. I like it when it’s so quick that you say, “My god, did it really happen?””

-       “Interesting thing – the last Oscar [1974], everybody said The Exorcist was going to win. I made quite a little money. They offered me five to one and ten to one and twenty to one: I said The Sting. And they came to me afterwards and said, “Why did you say that?” And I said, “There’s only been two good comedies made in four years. One was What’s Up, Doc?, the other was The Sting. None of the rest have been worth calling comedies.””

-       “I try to tell my story as simply as possible, with the camera at eye level. I just imagine the way the story should be told, and I do it.”

-       “I’ve been accused of promoting Women’s Lib, and I’ve denied it, emphatically. It just happens that kind of a woman is attractive to me. I merely am doing somebody that I like. And 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.”

-       “It taught me a great lesson, that if you make a good scene, if we could do something that was fun, the audience goes right along with you.”

-       “Actually, we didn’t care. It was the first time I made a picture and just decided I wasn’t going to explain things. I was just going to try and make good scenes.”

-       “I don’t think he’s got the greatest vision for a tableau, a long-shot, of any man. One of my favorite pictures of all time is The Quiet Man, which I think was just a beautiful picture. Ford, oh, he’s done some things that are just fabulous. And he was the first man to do them.”

-       “Oh, I think I couldn’t do his brand of humor. His brand of humor was kind of a bucolic travesty of an Irishman, kind of overdrawn characters. I certainly know that I made better comedies than he did. But I don’t think I made better westerns.”

-       “Peter Bogdanovich is good. I think he’s the best of all the young directors. 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.”

-       “[William] Friedkin was going around with my daughter in New York. He asked me how I liked his last picture, The Boys in the Bad. I said, “if you’re going to be making pictures you’ll have to learn not to ask that. I thought it was lousy.” He said, “I’m interested in why.” I said, “It’s too bad that somebody who has the talent you have should waste his time on junk like that.” He took it all very, very well. I said, “You made another lousy picture before that called The Night They Raided Minsky’s. You’re gonna run out of pictures. They’re not going to let you make them unless you make something that people want to see. And then they’re gonna tell you how to make them.” And he said, “Well, what kind of thing do you mean?” And I said, “Do something that’s entertaining. People seem to like chase scenes. Make a good chase. Make one better than anyone’s done.” And he did it in The French Connection. Did a good job of it.”

Rio Bravo by Hawks, Schickel and Carpenter

I don't know if Rio Bravo is Howard Hawks’ best film or if I would call it the best film ever made - even though it deserves to be up there with Citizen Kane and Vertigo - but it's great and it deserves close analysis, and for this, the Warner Home Video – Ultimate Collector’s Edition of Rio Bravo is a great resource: it comes in a nice two-disc cardboard box set that includes in two separate sleeves eight vintage-style lobby cards, a reproduction of the Rio Bravo comic book (Dell Comics), and a pamphlet with vintage Rio Bravo posters as well as exploitation tips. The special features on the DVDs include a commentary by Richard Schickel and John Carpenter, movie trailers for several John Wayne pictures, and the documentaries The Men Who Made the Movies: Howard Hawks, Commemoration: Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo and Old Tucson: Where the Legends Walked.

Schickel’s documentary The Men Who Made the Movies: Howard Hawks is a good introduction to Hawks' career and it includes rare footage of Hawks late in his life, where he's still looking as cool as ever, with a cowboy hat and glasses, as he joins his teenage grandson to watch him motor race.

“The French have been very kind to me,” says Hawks, “they attribute a lot of things to me, that I have no thought about.” He chuckles, “I don’t do the analysis that you guys do” (cf. Comolli on Sergeant York, Rohmer on The Big Sky). Hawks instead opts for straightforwardness to discuss his career and brings up the transition to sound at the dawn of the talkies, early special effects, the cross-talk of overlapping dialogue, fostering a creative atmosphere on his sets, and that “you don’t have to be too logical, you just have to make five to six good scenes.”

It's a shame that the earliest film discussed is The Dawn Patrol ('38) because this omits Hawks’ great silent films like Fig Leaves, Paid to Love and A Girl in Every Port (cf. Langlois on Hawks). But instead it focuses more on Hawks' middle to later career as it situates the films in an adventure (Scarface) and comedy (Twentieth Century) dichotomy. The documentary is full of interesting remarks like how Red River is said to be his John Ford film (which recalls the Hawks' quote, "I learned right in the beginning from Jack Ford, and I learned what not to do by watching Cecil DeMille.") and Hawks speaks about why he made Rio Bravo, “I didn’t like High Noon. It's ridiculous, the man is not a professional.”

Joseph McBride, in Hawks on Hawks, would write about the Hawksian professional,

“Hawks’s films almost always deal with a tightly knit group of professionals trying to perform a difficult task together while upholding their own rigorously defined code of conduct. Whether they are gunfighters, aviators, hunters, detectives, newspapermen, or scientists, Hawks’s people function in a self-enclosed society in which the standards of personal conduct are professional skill, group loyalty, and self-respect. The highest accolade one Hawks character can pay to another is “You did a good job,” and the worst thing one can say of another is “He just wasn’t good enough.”"

Even though some film critics claim that Hawks' films Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not and Rio Bravo form a "clear trilogy" on the basis that they have a similar structure and share the same screenwriter Jules Furthman; I'm skeptical of this because many of Hawks' other films share this structure as they are routinely about a small group of ordinary men who perform actions of bravery under the extraordinary circumstance of being threatened by external forces. There is the crew in the outpost in The Thing, the writers that are held hostage in Balls of Fire, the aviation plane in Air Force, the boat in The Big Sky, and the racing club in Red Line 7000 to only name a few examples.

***

The filmmaker John Carpenter elaborates about the motif of the contingent group under siege in the films of Hawks,

"It's endlessly fascinating. I mean, that's life. It's amazing to watch how people interact with each other under stress and in joy. So it's endlessly fascinating and endless in the number of stories, it seems to me, about people and how they respond to the environment they're in; whether they're in love or whether they're in hate, or whether they're in trouble, or whatever.

Carpenter also elaborates on his admiration for Hawks, from the same interview in The Cinema of John Carpenter: The Technique of Terror,

"Howard Hawks to me personally was the greatest director because he made a great movie in every genre. He did musicals, he did gangster movies, he did westerns, he did comedies. He moved with ease through these different genres. But what he brings to it is his own personal vision of the world, his own personal concerns with people, with actors. He's a very deeply personal filmmaker who worked with genres. That's what inspires me about him"

For a long time Carpenter was a Cahiers du Cinéma favorite (along with Romero, Cronenberg, and Argento) and their affinity towards him culminated in a lengthy interview with Nicolas Saada about his entire career, but which continued onward with Stéphane Delorme who wrote a rave review of Ghost of Mars ('01). But since Ghost of Mars, there was nine years that passed before his next film, The Ward ('10), which was received with ambivalent to poor responses.

So in this recent period Carpenter has been neglected and his films from the past have also been unfairly neglected. But luckily there has been more talk about Carpenter recently, most notably from the Vulgar Auteurist, but also in Jason Zinoman's book about American Seventies horror films Shock Value, and The Seventh Art recently blogged about the documentary John Carpenter: Fear Is Just The Beginning... ('04).

***

In the introduction to The Technique of Terror, Ian Conrich and David Woods situate Carpenter,

"Moreover, he is part of the group of filmmakers who emerged in the early to mid-1970s, the new wave of Hollywood renaissance of post-classical directors who were both self-taught and film-school educated. Crucially, such filmmakers were familiar with the work of their peers and of the saturated style of Hollywood's system of genre production. Working within a deregulated American movie industry, filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas have exploited the medium's commercial opportunities to make productions that have defined contemporary film and marked key transitions in American mainstream and art-house cinema. Others such as John Cassavetes, John Sayles and Robert Altman have been celebrated for their independence and heightened storytelling abilities. Carpenter, like Brian de Palma, is different; both being noted for their stylish re-interpretations of, and open homages to, directors of classical Hollywood (primarily Hawks and Hitchcock) as well as for their reliance on genre patterns of filmmaking. Both filmmakers have crafted astonishingly creative films, but in an age in which studios are increasingly driven towards high concept productions, there appears less of a desire for companies to accommodate the idiosyncratic nature of an independent director."

It is this connection between Carpenter and Hawks that I would like to further highlight.

Carpenter made several note-worthy student films at USC that led him to get funding to make his hippie science-fiction film Dark Star whose success let him go on to make one of his best films, Assault on Precinct 13, which is about a group of policemen that are under siege by local thugs in an abandoned Los Angeles precinct. Like many of Carpenter subsequent films, Assault asks questions about the role of violence in society and ways that it is expressed and controlled.

This structure of a group under siege, which is an ode to Rio Bravo, would be used by Carpenter in many of his other films. There are the Snake Plissken films starring Kurt Russell (Escape from New York & L.A.) as well as Ghost of Mars and Prince of Darkness. These latter films are already taking the fright of violence and pushing it towards the supernatural horror, which achieves an aesthetic climax for Carpenter with The Fog and Village of the Damned, but which is already there in The Thing, whose direct inspiration is Hawks' The Thing (a film that Carpenter speaks very highly of, which he discovered as a child). There are also some similarities between Vampires and Hatari! as they are both about the hunt for a rare and dangerous target.

Regarding Carpenter's comments about people and groups under siege, what actually interests him about the setting is the people, their character, and their inter-relational dynamics. It is not the face of evil that interest Carpenter but regular peoples responding to it, how they deal with this threat, and how they stand up for themselves. The bonds of friendship that are so important for Carpenter is what really connects him to Hawks and not so much the surface similarities that the two share. When Natasha Henstridge and Ice Cube reunite at the end of Ghost of Mars it is the celebration of the platonic friendship that is on display, which recalls Hawks' remarks about A Girl in Every Port, "This was the beginning of a relationship I have used in a number of picture. It's really a love story between two men." But for Carpenter by having the women as the character in power he's reacting to the male-centrism of Hawks (and of some of his own films), critiquing it, and offering a solution, which he would push further in The Ward.

***

It is these kind of connections that would have been great to hear about from Carpenter and Schickel on the lengthy Rio Bravo audio commentary instead of only casual observations mixed with immediate responses. The commentaries shift from Carpenter to Schickel, which make it hard to distinguish who exactly is talking, and even though it's never addressed if they recorded the commentary together, one gets a sense of two Hawksian friends bonding over a subject of mutual interest. As it progresses they talk less, and there are several extended quiet passages, which allow for the watching of the scene in full, and that are sometimes intercut with brief laughter.

The following is a paraphrasing and quotations of the highlights from the Carpenter and Schickel audio commentary:

Rio Bravo is “one of Hawk’s last great films,” posits Schickel, and he would go on to explain why, “It’s about more than just a western.” Hawks was a film industry veteran by the time he made it and he knew what worked. Its leisurely pace was a response to the fast pace of the television sitcoms of the period. This is why in Rio Bravo there are a lot of scenes of people just standing around and talking, these scenes are also used as bridges between the action scenes. The musical interlude was another standard of the movies of the period. As Schickel succinctly puts it, Hawks is a minimalist anecdotalist. 

There is a lot to say about Wayne in the film: he plays a heightened version of himself in an acting style that would only be appreciated after the fact. He knew his limits and the responses people had towards his anger (“The silence of the patriarch is always a good weapon in the hands of John Wayne”) but he had a good sense of humor about it. Wayne’s cowboy hat is the same one that he has been wearing in the movies since Stagecoach and he is wearing a Red River brand belt. There is real chemistry between Wayne and Angie Dickinson, and the scene where he carries her upstairs after he finds her sleeping on a chair, says all there needs to be said about his feelings towards her. Dickinson would make her mark with this picture with her great performance as a Hawksian woman, which are famous for setting their own moral standard. Dean Martin just got off from working with Jerry Lewis and did some serious work in a few films like Rio Bravo and Some Came Running. Walter Brennen, a long time Hawks collaborator (Come and Get It), who plays stumpy is like the bickering wife figure that was so prominent in the television sitcoms of the time. Ricky Nelson, who at the time had a big teen following, gives a nice cool performance and it was Nelson’s father who was Hawks’ friend that got him the job. The character actor Pedro Gonzales Gonzales's “painful ethnic humor" is a little patronizing but "is a stereotypical western character of the time."

Carpenter begins on a high note: Rio Bravo “is one of my favorite movies of all time” and Hawks “is my favorite director.” Hawks is a director whose camera is always at the right place at the right time and he always knows where to set the camera, and there is a moral quality to its gaze. Regarding the filmmaking: “One of the strangest opening sequences” as it is all silent and it can be seen as a return to the silent cinema that started Hawks' career. Carpenter speaks eloquently about the lateral tracking shot of Wayne and Martin walking down the street with the tumble weed going past them connecting them together. Carpenter also wonders if there was an influence by some Japanesse films like Yojimbo.

Rio Bravo is an adventure film about characters who define themselves by their professions and the depth of it comes from how these actions have emotional consequence. The love between men is a major theme that runs through Hawks' films. But Rio Bravo is also a romantic comedy but that proceeds through anti-romantic scenes of the two principals fighting together. In a Hawks movie, the male is always befuddled by the female. He compliments Wayne as the sheriff, “not Shakespearian, but who can spin like that,” and talks about the simplicity of Chance’s philosophy.

“Nobody does it like Hawks, Nobody does it today like Hawks, I don’t think that they can.”  Hawks was a “straight-forward director, unlike Ford, who was more poetic.” He was more like an engineer who is clear, simple, direct and thoughtful. Regarding the Nathan Burdette subplot "it is a little perfunctory" as the story is "more about what's going on between the lines." Rio Bravo concludes with Wayne finally getting together with Dickinson while the two other sheriffs Martin and Brennen are walking on the street happily bickering, which they will continue to do for a long time afterwards.

My Rifle, My Pony and Me

Éric Rohmer on The Big Sky

The 29^th issue of Cahiers du Cinéma: Revue du Cinéma et du Télécinéma has a film still from The Robe by Henry Koster on its cover, which was the first Cinemascope film to be released (a still from Rudolph Maté’s The Mississippi Gambler is featured on its inner cover).

The issue is, for one reason at least, valuable for Maurice Schérer’s article Les maîtres de l’aventure on Howard Hawks’ The Big Sky (which I translated below). Even though the article is not included in the bibliography of C.G. Crisp’s book on Rohmer, it is a respected article and is cited by Hillier and Wollen in their respective Cahiers and Hawks books. And as it turns out, it can also be found in the rare English collection of Rohmer’s writing, The Taste for Beauty (more about it in a future post).

Regarding this period for Cahiers, Kent Jones, in the book Olivier Assayas, writes,

"The avant-garde was a group of critics taking their first collective step toward becoming filmmakers. They were not heralding the new but something pre-existing yet hitherto unacknowledged in commercial cinema, and in the process they re-directed the attentions and priorities of film viewing through the language of discovery and revelation. The collective action of the Cahiers du cinéma critics (and of those who followed them at other publications) was fairly wondrous in and of itself, an endless lifting of the veil of surface beauty to reveal what they took to be another deeper and truer beauty. There was a great deal of excellent criticism (most of it written by Jean-Luc Godard), but it's the lovely tautologies and proclamations that are often invoked nowadays. Cinema was Bresson, Renoir, Hawks, Hitchcock, Nick Ray, and Rossellini; and cinema was not Autant-Lara, Delannoy, Decoin, Pontecorvo, Kubrick, or Wyler." 

Crisp in his excellent book, Eric Rohmer: Realist and Moralist (’88), analyzes in depth the connections between Rohmer’s writing and his filmmaking. "In fact Rohmer’s central position in recent French cinema is due not so much to the films for which he is now so well known as to his participation in the critical reformulation of film theory in the post-war years, in collaboration with André Bazin,” writes Crisp. “An early and regular contributor to Cahiers du cinéma, Eric Rohmer helped to define the thrust of that journal’s initial critical position as a champion of film realism. The whole of the New Wave came to prominence under that banner, and looked upon Cahiers du cinéma as its house journal.” 

Crisp elaborates,

“It is not only the crucial ten-year age gap that separates Rohmer from Godard and Truffaut, and places him alongside Bazin; it is a totally different temperament and a totally different world-view. And precisely because Rohmer in his early articles made no attempt to conceal the metaphysical foundations of his critical and theoretical position, it is instructive to analyze his support for realism during those early years, and to recognize thereby the implications which also underlie Bazin’s theorizing.”

Crisp writes (a little unfairly) about Rohmer’s prose,

“His early critical articles suggest at least one reason why he never pursued the literary career he long considered: they show as an atrocious literary stylist whose natural expression is turgid, affected and obscure. He launches without warning into formless and tortuous theorizing, only rarely and tangentially mentioning the films under review.”

And Crisp writes about Rohmer’s departure from the magazine,

“After Bazin’s death he continued on as co-editor until June 1963, when the job of editing the magazine was taken over by an editorial committee in which Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, and ten further members were included. Three new chief editors were named, however, among them Doniol-Valcroze and Rivette, so the ultimate effect of the 1963 re-shuffle was to edge out Rohmer and leave less conservative men in charge.”

*****

The Masters of Adventure

I'm not crazy about westerns. The genre has its conventions and requirements, like any other, but with them they offer less liberties. There needs to be prairies, livestock, harsh environments, wooden homes, mandolin music, pursuits, these good guys with their eternal bravery, hints of Irish humor, weariness of the old world, and people travelling with all of their possessions. This is what resounds, but which combined, in some westerns, achieves something more than just that. However, the greatest masters (Ford, Wyler) were able to assert in them their mastery without sacrificing anything. I have to, speaking on the behalf of Cahiers, openly reconcile with Fritz Lang and his Rancho Notorious, which we did not pay homage to on paper. I agree that this movie taught us nothing of the author, except that it belied a pseudo-decadence. But perhaps as a critic that holds a different opinion, and is more sensitive to innovation, I should not hold any strict laws and be more equitable.

I therefore take this opportunity to denounce a curious prejudice, as to what motivates a filmmaker to create: to consider ones talent, this exercise, is what is evaluated so highly by the Cahiers writers. What master filmmaker has not been yelled at for their decadence? From Gance to Renoir, from Clair to Ford, from Lang to Hitchcock... For my part, I rather give credit to the man than to the work and only with an extreme slowness do I listen when it is argued otherwise. In short, I’m on the side of the older generation, not because we are the same age, but because I agree that it is strange that quality can go from being so high and then fall so low; if it is true that it was even so high to begin with. Regarding the role of chance, king of this art, as we are told, is just really another sophism. I do not think that I’m important enough to not allow a few filmmakers of this genius – and even though it wasn’t planned – what they achieve is a creation of what they’ve wanted to make, exactly how they imagined it.

Regarding the genius of Hawks I refer to the excellent article by Jacques Rivette, which he wrote for us a few months ago. I see nothing to add to this study, if I had too, since it was exhaustive. I value, just like Rivette, the filmmaker Hawks, as the most important American filmmaker, except for Griffith, and much superior to Ford for my taste, who is more generally estimated. The latter bores me while the former delights me. This might be a futile criterion, lets say. And how can we confirm this? I remember Alain citing Treasure Island by Stevenson as one of his favorite books: he didn’t care for anything, which is true, other than eagerly being seduced by the story, he used to say, about being a reader. But if you’ve read Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae you would know that the author of that story, who charmed us, offers such a rich understanding of man, and this is what makes him a major novelist. "The purpose of art is to show," said Conrad, in the preface of The Nigger of the Narcissus. This is a vague sentence, like the style of its author, which I would like to like more than I do. Because what exactly does this suggest? If the only concern of the novelist was, through language, to describe the exterior world precisely, than I much prefer a bad film because of this potential boredom of description, and to get taken in by the whirlwind of action instead of the stiltedness of pretty prose. This isn’t cinema, it is one of its least merits, which we are severe about, because it marks the incapabilities of communication, which is more attuned to people’s nerves than to the surface qualities of its style, the verb and the adjectives, intent, movement and sensations, states, and morals.

This is how I disappointingly view Stevenson. I owe to the cinema my taste for the classics because of how it treats adventures. Nowhere else have I better seen the secret roots of desire, which emphasizes the instant when a choice is affirmed and the act begins. The arrival of the act is best managed if it is the only event, the waiting and anxiety is more than tragic as it weights the scene, these decisions menace the liberty of scene. Maybe even more than life itself. To read Stevenson’s stunning Reflux: to see how the characters are in a constant state of peril, either they are affirmed or are cleared, how the obscure is resolved, by actions. To show a part of man that for a long time has remained unknown, because I believe that man is a free being and can be renewed. I don’t like the few moments of artifice, ellipses or shadows. But what is necessary is to show the hero at the precise moment where we expect him, with his instinct, judging.

This brings us to Howard Hawks. Apart from a few scenes with harsh lighting, sometimes unbearable, with him, everything is prepared. An important point, rhetoric in exposition, too dry for a brutal resolution. There is a strong anticipation for something to happen, this is evident, and what is really surprising, is how it’s not expected, and this action which one would assume would be difficult, is actually done with an ease. Just like how Hitchcock plays with the fear, the kind of fear that is associated with danger, haunting the audience with suspicions, in a similar vein Howard Hawks’ gaze, how does he transform his subjects? Through an analytic examination and their geometric material. In this physical world where folkloric American heroes live, no missteps are allowed, and for the filmmaker: no bravura, fog or metaphor. I do not know of any filmmaker that is more indifferent to cinematic plastic form, with his banal editing, but on the other hand, more sensible to the gestures of characters, and pacing.

This is a sportive, efficient, beautiful style, and its poetry is additional, but which is also in the foreground, indiscernible from what it magnifies. Hawks is without a doubt more personal, stunning, and elegant with his burlesque charge, more so than the excessive grinning of the heroic-comic tones of the skillful Dudley Nichols' script, it is more traditional, and consistent to the spirit of Ford than to the flamboyant Red River. But what luxury of details is under its uniformity, and what restraint of exploiting the cheap horror of an amputation, a burnt face, or a fight between a man and a woman, and what mathematical beauty goes into the conflicts, these returns or when the equilibrium capsizes, the system inverses, but never cancels itself out!

I think that Hawks deserves a particular rank. Other very good directors, like Renoir, Stroheim or Vigo, have virtues that shine through their contradictions: a disdain for traditional forms, a rude intransigence; while for others, still, there is a tendency towards abstraction, all of which the auteur of Scarface doesn't bother with. Should we hold a grudge against him? I agree that he should not be elevated to the highest rank, because this title deserves to be earned by risk and ambition. But can you blame a cineaste for only being a cineaste? Hawks isn't about pushing the limits of his art form, but instead to always stay within its parameters, and to achieve this through a classical perfection, regardless of the popular form, wether it is the western, a thriller or a musical comedy. There are two ways to love the cinema that I disagree with. Some people are curiously attached to the ways in which they can be pampered, whether it is a pretentious drama, a shoddy opera, or a didactic poem that flatters their good taste; the others - are they less worse? - don't bother themselves with distinctions and just go see everything, sensible, so they say. With respect to the cinema, unless it is a masterpiece, it works best when it is more common than pretentious. But the cinema is already too old. And was it ever any different? Who would venture today to speak about the ingenuity of a Griffith or Chaplin? I do not believe in involuntary poetry, in the cinema and much less elsewhere. I think that the best westerns are those that are signed by a major director. I say this because I love the cinema, because I believe it is the product, not of chance, but of art and the genius of man, because I think that you can't love deeply any movie, if you do not love deeply those of Howard Hawks.

Maurice Schérer

Jean-Louis Comolli on Sergeant York

"My first article appeared in 1962, less than a year after arriving in Paris, an article on Sergeant York [1941] by Howard Hawks. I was astonished, enchanted and very nervous about writing my first article for Cahiers." - Jean-Louis Comolli ("Yes, we were utopians; in a way, I still am...")

The first few generations of Cahiers critics were known to be enamoured by a certain kind of American cinema, specifically the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks (which is why they were referred to by some as "Hitchcocko-Hawksian"). Jacques Rivette's enthusiastic review of Monkey Business, The Genius of Howard Hawks, opens with its famous claim:

"The evidence on the screen is the proof of Hawks's genius: you only have to watch Monkey Business to know that it is a brilliant film. Some people refuse to admit this, however; they refuse to be satisfied by proof. There can't be any other reason why they don't recognize it."

Jean Douchet in the book French New Wave writes on Rivette, "the young critic broke new ground not only in the way we understand a film or work of art, but cinema itself." He elaborates,

"For the first time, a film critic didn't limit himself to the surface of the film but attempted to grasp its internal organization and penetrate its organic life. We can image the effect this produced on the review's professional readership. Cahiers' reputation for unreadability stems from this, not from the words and phrases being obscure. Today, they are striking in their clarity. It was the thing itself ("the thing from another world" as Hawks would have called it) that seemed incomprehensible. This wasn't what a film was supposed to be like or the way it was supposed to be interpreted."

Luc Moullet, in his Cahiers review of Rio Bravo, uses contradictions in his argument: "I hate westerns. That's why I adore Rio Bravo." But he goes further, "So why did Hawks make this western? Because it enabled him to present actions that are not ordinarily seen in our everyday world, by beings outside of nature." In Douchet's review of Hatari!, he proceeds in an analysis that describes the film in terms of its scientific methodology, "The economy and efficiency of his methods result from a strict application of the law of conservation of energy."

I've translated here, in English for the first time, Jean-Louis Comolli's initial Cahiers du cinéma review of Sergeant York (Sept '62, N.135) where, in a sophisticated writing style, he elaborates on what are the qualities of good art, how the film's mise en scène can contradict its énoncés (cf. Comolli on Ford), and the genius of Howard Hawks. - D.D. 

*****

The Grandeur of Simplicity

A misunderstanding always separates those for whom cinema is only an occasion for a social, moral, or political engagement; and those who think that the essential of cinema is to make us enter a more authentic dimension of our being and our problems through the creations of certain filmmakers. This fundamental disagreement on art appears again regarding Sergeant York. Some have criticized this film for denigrating the serious problem of conscientious objection. They rely on the fact that the film is an object from the WWII that aims to dismiss, in the USA, the objection of conscientious objection from a religious standpoint. Without a doubt, the adventure experienced by Alvin York, which is the starting point of the film, is a good answer to the scruples of certain Christians, and is an absolution of the act of killing in wartime. But this is also only the pretext for Hawks’ film. To only be limited to this dimension of the film, a schematic view of its scenario, is to not understand the film that was directed by its author, and to not to notice the obvious ambiguity of the Hawksien mise en scène. This ambiguity defines itself in two ways: first it resides in the ambivalence that Hawks looks at his hero, and then, by permitting a total look at the man, it creates a mise en scène that takes its departure to be the simplicity of this man.

            Alvin York is simple. He is uncultivated, rough, naïve, and he is carried away by his faith in religion. His only positive force is to be attached to his little world. Hawks understands and knows this man. This knowledge is both critical and loving: it takes into account failings, limitations, and riches. Hawks’ gaze is also at the same time hard and ironic, sensible and warm. What is the meaning of York’s conversion as Hawks’ constructed it and filmed it? The warnings of the pastor are only addressed to York’s intelligence: they cannot really convince him because they do not move him. As well what is actually significant, to hit the target of something that is close (with a gun), but this time there is a miraculous quality to it, because he is personally engaged, which changes him so that he now understands the fascination of the pastor and hymns. Similarly, if York hesitated to engage in the army, it is because he interpreted naively, without seriously considering its implications, all of the tenants of the oracles that go beyond his understanding and all of its questions as well as the commandments of the bible (he responds to a child who doubts the holy word: "What is written in this book is the truth."). By the construction of the narrative (the sequence of reading the Bible follows the conversion and precedes the flag call), Hawks shows us that York’s religious understanding, which is established on such a basis, also comprises little actual engagement, limited to an absolute faith, an acceptance that is total and sincere, which incontestably looks over the problems posed to a Christian who thinks about these things, but that, by its strength and simplicity, it exceeds exactly all of the spiritual problems, without ever becoming a drama of consciousness. The direction of Gary Cooper during these sequences (his detachment when the pastor intercedes for him, his fatalism when he is incorporated) leaves no doubt about the real intentions of Hawks: to show how York’s simplicity leads him beyond life’s dramas, and how a simple man follows an interior path where his interiority pushes him, without preoccupying his sense, his limitations, or the new responsibilities that he encounters.

            The military section of the film is just a reprisal of the first part. Here too, the Hawksien staging is evident: the Major imposes onto York, to persuade him, a book that he presents to him as another bible, his speech moves him and recalls the exhortations of the pastor, and the permission that the major gives York, like the saying ("I was counting on the good") when York returns convinced, suggests that he knows about what plan to achieve. The choice of York, once again, is not intellectual or spiritual: he is carried (beyond the biblical quote that he interprets and like the lightning in its own way, this justifies a choice that is underlined by motifs that exceed his consciousness) by the fact that Daniel Boone, who is a fascinating hero of liberty, has planted a tree in the Valley of the Three Forks. (Hawks insist on this tree in both parts of the film and the original scenes with Boone refer to them, destructive, Alvin York, shoots them with his gun.)

            On the one hand, what affects York, returning to his native country, engages him more than just through its confrontation of words and ideas; on the other hand, he stays himself throughout the troubles of the responsibilities that he assumed, but which he exceeds through his vital force (helped with this by the fascinating impulses from the pastor and the major who both understand that only a deep emotional contact determines the simple man and drives him into action).

            Does York act? He passes through a war but he does not live it: it is like he is at home where he was shooting a turkey. Nothing affects him: his unconsciousness experiences these atrocities with an admirable inner strength. He kills just like he plows, with the same eagerness. The pretexts that he gives himself does not account for his spirit and his inner drive, beyond the contingencies and problems, which is just as good for removing rocks than it is to kill men. The parallels between the night-time hallucinatory work of the first part and the frightening hunt of the enemies in the second is flagrant: it reveals the same exploit and destructive force. York dreams to own land and a house. Hawks imposes the brutal, in the miracle of seeing it in front of him all of a sudden this dream that is realized, without any direct action and by the same force of a dream. York can fight, though he cannot build. Hawks refuses York the estimable prize of his work (York’s efforts fail to realize his dream) and instead he is rewarded the same prize for killing. This restores York’s true measurement: he is fixed in his strong convictions of man’s condition, and he possesses such a primitive purity that he becomes a saint. So this is why he is accorded miracles: the realization of dreams.

            The man is understood here by his tragic and frightening dimensions, in the ambiguity of life. The authentic existence can escape the efforts of the man who is trying to achieve them, as if he is not himself, but come naturally, when he is. York is always himself. The story of his life is not the description of a battle, but a chronicle of the acts and words of the life of a saint, for whom everything is simple.

The ambiguity of York’s life returns to the simplicity of his being, this corresponds to the ambiguity of the Hawksien mise en scène, which is something that is like the character’s simple existence, this is why the style is very simple.

            One can, in front of Sergeant York, like in front of any major work, including the cinematographic, be carried away by a sudden revelation that returns us to ourselves without giving us time to pick ourselves up and to go through the work, but to be penetrated by a progression of the work in us, and to undergo a maturation. But all personal growth remains a miracle. The definitive moment of fulfillment for each instant of the way stops us from governing the process. This can be said as well for Renoir, Mizoguchi, and Rossellini. What puzzles and worries us in a Hawks’ film, and that is singular to him, is the equilibrium between the feeling of being constantly overcome by ourselves and, at the same time, the certainty that what we are trying to capture is escaping us while we are trying to grasp it. The elusive has no other secret than being in us, rather than beyond.

            It is not a failure to either to try to understand the work through reflection: the work of Hawks can be understood through a variety of approaches.

            Precisely, by all approaches, it presents the same lesson, in it’s entirely, irreducible to the different methods of analysis. It remains unalterable in the fluidity of its different aspects. It was such a force of existence that each rapport between a scene and us, does not make us think of the whole (like in most great works), but presents its entirety in front of us. To this extent, all of Hawks’ films present an essential ambiguity, that they live out in each scene, and in each explanation that we propose, all the while living more fully in the totality (which leaves room for an ambiguity) of moments and explications more than in isolated scenes.

            The difficulty of the critical function and what makes Hawks’ art particularly astonishing is its clarity and simplicity. Everything is already so assimilated, felt and understood, all is said and without mystery or symbols, the cinematographic expression serves only to tell the story, there is no separation between the mise en scène and the scenario, everything is shown to us so immediately that there is no formal or thematic problems to cling to, without ever totally grasping it: it escapes us, even when we have understood. This is the dimension of Hawks.

            How has Hawks managed this simplicity of narrative, and finally what exactly is this simplicity? We must first separate its secret and complex dimension beyond its apparent simplicity. One might think that in this film Hawks’ conveys a thematic concealed behind an easily comprehendible facade to not have to engage with its essential reality. This is thought of for Rossellini, Lang, Preminger, Hitchcock and is verified by a critic who penetrates the work and recreates it, as the author has designed it, on the level of his poetic imagination and his reverie of forms. When this critical method is applied to Sergeant York there is nothing that is crystallized. Every attempt to address the work, we face the film in its whole, which illuminates in some ways but not totally. If there were any latent themes behind its simple appearance, the work would be beyond itself, there would be a dimension where what it is lacking would be a key to understanding it. This dimension would call towards a reality that is more essential than the work, and that would not be able to be felt, expected, searched or at least found. A dimension that would set up a call to a more essential reality of the work, and that could not be felt, expected, and look more or less found. This lack is not revealed in Sergeant York. There is no appeal: on the contrary, every search reveals a reaction to the totality of presence of the film. I do not think Hawks’ oeuvre contains a hidden thematic: it is not deeper than that what is immediately accessible.

            The man is introduced, under the purity and strength of the Hawksien gaze, as if he now could not be those qualities. This constant presence of the essentials confers to the film its greatness and simplicity of the immediate revelations of being. Each scene is the renewal of spirits by the apparition of the man York. The film is not constructed with the function of a progression but allows for this revelation to be total and continuous. This approach to get the essential necessitates a complete lucidity and is tied together through the totality of its existence. At this narrative level, Hawks does more than tell the story of Alvin York, because the narrative is the totality of action and creation. Hawks is making cinema: he is creating York with every moment, and he has for his creatures a profound understanding, irony and love. This mise en scène can only then be simple: to create. The creation is the easiest and most powerful way to access existence.

            This simplicity resides in the totality of the gaze: in its ambiguity (cf. examples). This ambiguity is totally imposed, there are no alternatives, the man is offered in its whole. It surpasses itself in its simplicity of creation which presents in a single moment all of the facets of his being. The critical process accompanies the creative process: Hawks shows Alvin York and his world, and realizes them by the fact that he is showing them.

            The Hawksien creative process is a constant renewing fusion, where there is an eagerness and anticipation, that of the look and act: it is a mise en scène of authentic knowledge. Hawks creates by successive drives that work to create a "grand oeuvres" of cinema: the incessant transmutation of a gaze towards life, from an appearance into being. This process must utilize all of the facts, he realizes a complete movement where nothing is exceeded and that becomes the basis of the scenes. It is a dialectical cinema that is in the state of renewal: a dynamic cinema.

            The apprehension of this dynamic, of this tension, perpetually released to be brought anew, this creates the essence of cinema.

            The idea of the Hawksien process is confirmed when it is renewed, in a way that calls attention to itself, in this dialectic, as its unfolding, is a strong impression: like a perpetual voyage between seizing and giving, between expectation and possession. In terms of the vision, as a reflection of the Hawks process, is lighted by its momentum that creates its movements: it is the movements of life and creation that comes through in Hawks’ art.

            This is the simplicity of Hawks, his grandeur.

Jean-Louis Comolli

Henri Langlois on Howard Hawks

A great resource for Howard Hawks is the book Howard Hawks: American Artist which is edited by Jim Hillier and Peter Wollen. One of its major strengths is its translation of some French film reviews, most notably from Cahiers du Cinéma, including: Jean-George Auriol on A Girl in Every Port, André Bazin on Air Force and the Hitchcocko-Hawksians, Henri Langlois on The Modernity of Howard Hawks (which I transcribed below), and Jean Douchet on Hatari!.

Though this is a good selection, it doesn't go far enough! There are too few important classic French reviews that are translated. And where is Positif? Though there are some good websites that try to make up for this unfortunate situation (cf. Serge Daney in English), there is still an overall lack of good translations available. Because of this, it is difficult for readers to fully understand the multi-faceted perspectives of French criticism.

In the following essay The Modernity of Howard Hawks, Henri Langlois, who was one of the co-founders of the Cinémathèque française, discusses the difference between French and English cinephilia and, as an early film preservationist, describes eloquently Hawks' early and rare silent films. The placement of this review at the front of its issue of Cahiers du Cinéma (N.139), which has a still from Hatari! on its cover and then following a lengthy annotated filmography, shows the respect and influence Langlois had on the Cahiers critics. For more of Langlois' writing there is also the rare French book Trois cents ans de cinéma. - D.D.

*****

The Modernity of Howard Hawks 
It seems that A Girl in Every Port was the revelation of the Hawks season at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
For New York audiences of 1962, Louise Brooks suddenly acquire that 'Face of the Century' aura she had had, many years ago, for spectators at the Cinema des Ursulines.
Because for Paris A Girl in Every Port is not a recent event, but one which occured in the 1928 season.
It was the Paris of the Montparnassians and Picasso, of the surrealists and the Seventh Art, of Diaghilev, of the 'Sporees de Paris,' of the 'Six,' of Gertrude Stein, of Brancusi's masterpieces.
That is why Blaise Cendrars confided a few years ago that he thought A Girl in Every Port definitely marked the first appearance of contemporary cinema.
To the Paris of 1928, which was rejecting expressionism, A Girl in Every Port was a film conceived in the present, achieving an identity of its own by repudiating the past.
 To look at the film is to see yourself, to see the future which leads through Scarface to the cinema of our time.

The modern man - that's Hawks, completely.
When you look back over his oeuvre today what is striking is the degree to which the cinema of Hawks was ahead of its time.
To be more precise - since there is generally a time lag between the main currents of contemporary art and the cinematic art - what is striking is the degree to which Hawks's art is up-to-date, and even in the vanguard of artistic movements.
The art he created is that of an America which has now been exposed and which did exist, but whose evolution was then still in progress.
Thus, five years before the appearance of the first modern construction in the streets of New York, on 53rd Street - fifteen years before the appearance of the first modern skyscrapers which have transformed Manhattan - Hawks, like Gropius, conceived his films as one might conceive a type-writer, a motor, or a bridge.
That is why, Today, when America has discovered Hawks, his old films like The Crowd Roads have such an impact when shown on televison.
In these forgotten Warners films, the people of New York and America, much to their surprise, recognize themselves: the depiction of the American scene now seems very accurate.
It is this which has causer people to write that Hawks is the most American of filmmakers.
He is certainly American, not more so than Griffith or Vidor, but his work is rooted in contemporary America in its spirit as well as in its surface appearance. It is now clear that Hawks's is the only oeuvre the American public can totally identify itself with, in terms of both simple admiration and criticism:

It has no relation to my work... I didn't care to do it but was forced under contract... It was made right after Murnau's Sunrise, which introduced German camera trick-work to Hollywood... They liked it; I didn't... I've always been rather mechanically minded so I tried a whole lot of Mechanical things, and then gave them up completely - most of the time my camera stays on eye level now... I just use the simplest camera in the world.

So many excuses for three or four shots made as a concession to Fox in Paid to Love, which anticipates Lubitsch.
It must have meant a lot to him.
Thus, at the time when Paris was rejecting expressionism, at the very moment when Babelsber was conquering the United States and Hollywood, Hawks too rejected it and for the same reasons, because it was in conflict with the demand of the new age.
Curiously, A Girl in Every Port, so novel for people at the time seems much less so today than Fig Trees, in which Hawks's art operates in complete freedom.
But Fig Trees was at that time too new a film for contemporary audiences not to be blinded by it.
With the coming of the sound film, the problem arose of cinematic construction in terms of speech, of the editing of dialogue in terms of movement.
A new dramaturgy was about to be born: it had to be discovered, explored, established.
Hawks applied himself directly to the task, without trying to evade the difficulties.
He immediately arrived at the heart of the problem: dramatic film construction in terms of the roles played by dialogue and sound.
From The Dawn Patrol to Ceiling Zero, Hawks was totally preoccupied with this construction. As a result, he became the Le Corbusier of the sound film, in the way he handles lines and volume.
His works, then, are stripped bare almost to the point of abstraction - but it is as if they are made of concrete.
The essential. The truth of the dialogue, the truth of the situations, the truth of the subjects, of the milieux, of the characters: a dramaturgy derived from an agglomeration of facts, words, noises, movements, situations, as a motor is assembled. There is nothing superfluous, no stopping, no meandering, no fleshing out. What is most impressive is Hawks's progressive mastery, culminating in Ceiling Zero, a totally accomplished film, and one which is diametrically opposed to filmed theater, except for those who no longer see its originality and its extraordinary achievement because they have learned too much from it and thus find it too familiar.
The dialogue: what one says, what one is, what ones does. Hawks puts great emphasis on dialogue and intonation: on meaning of the dialogue, the construction of the dialogue, the delivery of the dialogue.

No, it isn't done with cutting. It's done by deliberately writing dialogue like real conversation... All you want to do is to hear the essential things... And, of course, if I have a scene today that I don't think is very interestng the quicker I can play it the better off I am.

As in every man's work, there is one exception to his general rule:
Twentieth Century, lit up by the radiance of Carole Lombard's femininity, and that is enough. Thanks to it everything is balanced, everything comes alive, through cutting which makes the dialogue into cinema.
The period characterized by Scarface is coming to an end.
In 1937 there is a short pause.
The explosion of Bringing Up Baby.
And, suddenly, in 1939, that night at the Marivaux when they showed Only Angels ave Wings, a charm was reborn, that trance-like spell which had seemed lost since the advent of sound.
Out of cinema, mastered anew, magic was reborn. And with it, Hawks rediscovered that total freedom which let him dispense with all heaviness of touch. Already there was a hint of things to come: the play of colors and light in the brilliant facets of Red River and The Big Sky.
From The Dawn Patrol to Only Angels Have Wings: the circle is closed.
Another stylistic exercise, as if for the pleasure of a private gamble: His Girl Friday.
And now the great masterpieces.
Hawks is himself again, as before, as he was at his debut in the silent period.
The same arabesque, and this art of giving brith, from a void, to miraculous life.
The 'concrete' period has been transcended. The logical force of To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep is hidden beneath the sheen of an art as dense and translucent as the extraordinary vegetable-like growth of the new New York.
The constructivist, almost abstract art of Hawks becomes colorful.
Pared down further - and because it is in color - Rio Bravo is a construction of psychological impulses.
All of Hawks's intelligence is confirmed and exercised in Land of the Pharoahs, the only epic film which has style, rigor, and plastic beauty, qualities whose meaning we had long since forgotten.

Henri Langlois

Howard Hawks: Cahiers du Cinéma 1956 Interview

In the current world of film criticism where, with some exceptions, there is a a narrow representation of contemporary film tastes on the internet and a lack of space dedicated to film history in print, it's important to return to its history to read, or re-read, its major texts to have a better perspective on where it's today.

The following is one of the first major interviews with Howard Hawks from Cahiers du Cinéma from 1956. Scott Breivold in Howard Hawks: Interviews writes about it,

"The "discovery" of Howard Hawks began in the 1950s (ironically not in America but in France) with the publication of Jacques Rivette's 1953 essay, The Genius of Howard Hawks in the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. [...] In 1956, some of the French critics conducted what is regarded as the first important interview with Howard Hawks. [...] The 1956 Cahiers interview is a good foundation for discovery of Hawks, exploring his choice of subjects, genres, techniques, and early influences."

In the interview Hawks discusses his films The Land of the Pharaohs, Scarface, Viva Villa and Paid For Love as well as he emphasizes the humor in his films. Saul Austerlitz in his book on film comedy, Another Fine Mess, would highlight the Hawksian "farcical good humor" of the performances and especially the ones by Cary Grant. This interview is also frequently cited (cf. Bill Krohn's The Making of Land of Pharaohs). - D.D.

*****

Interview by Jacques Becker, Jacques Rivette, and Francois Truffaut (Cahiers du Cinéma, N.56, Feb. 1956). English translation from Interviews With Film Directors by Andrew Sarris.

“The evidence on the screen is the proof of Hawks’s genius,” we had recently written. It would have been an exaggeration to pretend that this evidence was accessible to everyone; and critical unanimity is happily far from being settled on the genius of one of the great American cineastes: it is clear enough that our own evaluation has not changed.

            It was not a question of interrogating Hawks on his “genius”; no metaphysical speculations; nothing that could distress the champions of clarity or common sense; at least, let us hope that each will find here his own account, and that includes the “Hitchcocko-Hawksians” of pure obedience.

            When we arrived for our interview, we found Hawks conversing with whom? Jacques Becker, one of our old friends. The auteur of Casque d’Or courteously took his leave of the auteur of Sergeant York when we protested his departure: since Jacque Becker was a friend of Howard Hawks, the interview could only gain in interest. Furthermore, Becker’s fluency in the language of Griffith made him more than an interpreter, a valuable collaborator.

            Since our interview transpired a few days before the release of The Land of the Pharaohs, our first questions quite naturally dealt with that film.

Howard Hawks: I made this film for one simple reason: Cinemascope. At the time I was approached to direct a film in this new screen size, I was considering as a project the story of an astonishing feat of construction in China during the war. The American Army wanted an airfield which the engineers estimated would take eight months to construct. The Chinese supplied twenty thousand men and women, who carried stone in little baskets on their heads, and this huge airfield was completed in three weeks. I was about to abandon this project because the political situation made cooperation with Red China impossible; the producers then considered shooting the film in Thailand. It then occurred to me that the building of the pyramids was the same kind of story – it too demonstrated what man is able to create with his bare hands from sand to stone. This kind of story appeals to me tremendously. We thus wrote our script on this one theme: the construction of a pyramid.

Cahiers: What part did William Faulkner play in the development of the scenario?

Hawks: He collaborated with Harry Kurnitz in the writing of both story and screenplay. As always, he contributed enormously. He’s a great writer; we are very old friends and work easily together. We understand each other very well, and any time I need any sort of help, I call on Faulkner. He has done three or four scenarios for me, but he has also helped me on many others. The story of The Land of the Pharaohs because his imagination was challenged by these men, their conversations, the reasons for their belief in a second life, how they happened to achieve these tasks for beliefs we would find it difficult to understand today, such as the slight importance attached to the present life in comparison with the future life, the rest that was to be assured to the Pharaoh in a place where his body would be secure…

Cahiers: For ages, or even…

Hawks: For eternity, for eternity. For all these reasons, Faulkner was the man for the assignment: he has an affinity for these ideas. They are what he is made for.

Cahiers: We would like to know how you transported your imagination back to an age so remote as the ancient Egyptian.

Hawks: We were assisted by several historians in Egypt’s Department of Antiquities, and above all by a Frenchman who has lived and written numerous books on Egyptian history in a little house in the shadow of the great Pyramid – the exact spot on which we shot the picture. He and the other authorities instructed us in the ways and customs of the Egyptians. I’m afraid we paid attention only to hat best suited our picture. It is possible to reconstruct the furniture and dress, and even some of the ritual, of the Pharaohs from the hieroglyphics and drawings on the tombs. We know what the soldiers’ uniforms looked like, what musical instruments were played, and what utensils were used. As for the architecture, Trauner did a great piece of work. He is, without doubt, one of the greatest scene designers in the world. We tried to reproduce Trauner’s visual conceptions exactly.

Cahiers: Did that French Egyptologist see what you shot each day?

Hawks: He saw some of the rushes, I think. He was very interested in some of the schemes we concocted for moving and transporting the blocks of stone. According to him, it was quite possible the Egyptians had thought of the same stratagems. For example, we were in agreement about the use of a ramp to get the stones to the summit, and the subsequent dismantling of the ramp once it was no longer need. The method by which stones are raised from the ground and lowered onto the boat in the film is our invention. So is the way the pyramid is sealed after its construction. The scholars were quite intrigued. We employed a hydraulic process which is quite modern, but instead of water or oil, we used sand. Thus, we had a huge stone rest upon enormous wooden pilings. Each pile was sunk in a hole, and each hole was filled with sand. For each block of rock to fall into place it was necessary merely to open a small hole which allowed the sand to run out. As the sand did so, the huge block settled down slowly into its final position. This is probably the method the Egyptians used. We don’t know for sure.

Cahiers: Then you have tried to make a realistic film?

Hawks: As realistic as possible, but that didn’t stop us from using camels, even though very few camels were in Egypt at the time of our story. Our justification, shaky on purely historical grounds, was that camels did seem integral to our image of Egypt. There were many other things we could only guess about. That’s why we had the workers be free at the start of the pyramid and slaves at the end. We reasoned that the employment of 10,000 men on a pyramid for 30 years would drain the country economically and that after the first few years of exaltation, discontent would smolder into collective rage and the workers would have to be enslaved to make them continue. This thesis is an integral part of our film.

Cahiers: You ordinarily avoid stories with a long time span, and the notion of continuity plays a great role in almost all your films. Were you bothered by the fact that this story extended over thirty years?

Hawks: Bothered, no, but handicapped. It was difficult to devise a story that lasted thirty years while maintaining an acceptable continuity.

Cahiers: What have you concluded from your experience with Cinemascope?

Hawks: We have spent a lifetime learning how to compel the public to concentrate on one single thing. Now we have something that works in exactly the opposite way, and I don’t like it very much. I like Cinemascope for a picture such as The Land of the Pharaohs, where it can show things impossible otherwise, but I don’t like it at all for the average story. Contrary to what some think, it is easier to shoot in Cinemascope – you don’t have to bother about what you should show – everything’s on the screen. I find that a bit clumsy. Above all, in a motion picture, is the story. You cannot shoot a scene as quickly in Cinemascope, because if you develop a situation quickly, the characters jump all over the wide screen – which in a way makes them invisible. Thus you lose speed as a means of exciting or augmenting a scene’s dramatic tension. You have to proceed differently. What you lose on the dramatic plane, however, you gain on the visual plane. The result can be very pleasing to the eye. You have to decide what seems best. Have you seen a film entitled The Tall Men with Gable?

Cahiers: No, not yet.

Hawks: My brother produced it. It’s Red River, but in color and in Cinemascope, and it’s a very pleasant film to watch. It’s not a great film, but a good film. It made me regret not having Cinemascope when I made Red River. John Ford and I made some anamorphic attempts around 1926, but we didn’t care for the results. I always think that the artist who paints a scene in a certain manner must, in changing his manner, change his scene.

Cahiers: And Africa?

Hawks: For this film we must use portable cameras. For certain scenes even hand-held cameras; the Cinemascope gear would be too difficult.

Cahiers: Will this be your next film?

Hawks: I don’t really know. We can start shooting, the scenario is finished, but I must make another film before; we won’t go down into Africa before next September.

Cahiers: Could you tell us a little about this other film?

Hawks: It’s difficult, we are only beginning to work on it. I can’t tell you very much, because we haven’t even decided on the main plot line. I don’t know what form it is going to take. I don’t even know what genre of film it will be. Its point of departure is a true incident that I’ve heard about, but it might never become a film. It depends.

Cahiers: All your films are based on events which tend to show a man in action, his effort and struggle. Even considering the wide variety of your projects, these themes keep recurring in almost all your films. Do you think this is so?

Hawks: That may be true, but I am not really aware of it. I make movies on subjects that interest me: That could be automobile racing, airplanes, a western or a comedy, but the best drama for me is the one which shows a man in danger. There is no action where there is no danger. It follows that if you achieve real action, there must be danger. To live or to die! What drama is greater? Therefore I have probably chosen this direction because I have gradually come to believe that it matters more than anything else. It’s very easy to make a movie knowing that everyone will love it, but that doesn’t count for much. What one should do, what one must do, is try to anticipate what the public is going to like. I don’t think that these people are producers; they make a picture because somebody makes a picture that is successful, so they make one like it, you know?

Cahiers: Yes, too many films exist only as imitations of others.

Hawks: That’s true. We made Scarface because the violence of this particular era was interesting. Scarface is still being copied – and hence still lives. There were fifteen murders in Scarface, and people said I was crazy to have so many. But I knew that was the story: violence made the story. Also, in practice, all the gangster movies that have followed Scarface only reiterated the same material. Similarly, when I made Red River, I thought an adult western could be made for mature audiences, and now everyone is making “intelligent” westerns. And a film like Twentieth Century… have you seen Twentieth Century?

Cahiers: Helas non!

Hawks: It was the first time the dramatic leads, instead of secondary comics, played for laughs. I mean we got the fun out of John Barrymore and Carole Lombard. It was two or three years ahead of its time.

Cahiers: We think that a film like Monkey Business has renewed American comedy, and is undoubtedly more ambitious than it seems…

Hawks: Oh, probably, yes. Because of its general theme: the laughs are born out of the inhibitions that restrict each of us and are here abruptly removed by rejuvenation. It was a good story. Perhaps we pushed the point a bit too far for the public. From this point of view, it is less amusing than Male War Bride or Bringing Up Baby. Monkey Business went too far, became too fanciful and not funny enough: this is my opinion.

Cahiers: And Gentlemen Prefer Blondes?

Hawks: Oh, that was just … fun! In other movies, you have two men who go out looking for pretty girls to have fun with. We pulled a switch by taking two girls who went out looking for men to amuse them: a perfectly modern story. It delighted me. It was funny. The two girls, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, were so good together that any time I had trouble figuring out any business, I simple had them walk back and fort, and the audiences adored it. I had a staircase built so that they could go up and down, and since they are well built… This type of movie lets you sleep at night without a care in the world; five or six weeks were all we needed to shoot the musical numbers, the dances and the rest.

Cahiers: What period of work do you prefer? Script, shooting, editing?

Hawks: I hate the editing.

Cahiers: But you do the editing of your films?

Hawks: Oh, yes! Simultaneously with the shooting, if possible. When I started out in this profession, the producers were all afraid that  made a film too short because I didn’t give them enough film for editing. And I said: “I don’t want you to make the movie in the cutting room, I want to make it myself on the set, and if that doesn’t suit you, too bad.” That’s not to say that editing isn’t a chore, particularly when you haven’t done a good job wit the shooting. Editing is a horror for me because I look at my work for a second time and say that’s pretty bad, and that, and also that – The difficult work is the preparation: finding the story, deciding how to tell it, what to show and what not to show. Once you begin shooting you see everything in the best light, develop certain details, and improve the whole. I never follow a script literally and I don’t hesitate to change a script completely if I see a chance to do something interesting. I like to work on the scenarios. Some of my best movies were written in very little time. Scarface took only eleven days, story and scenario.

Cahiers: Does that include the dialogues?

Hawks: Everything. The whole thing took eleven days. I know because I paid the writers who worked for me by the day.

Cahiers: Who gave you the material, the basic facts?

Hawks: The facts came from several reporters in Chicago, many books, and magazine articles. The outline was done by Ben Hecht. He didn’t have to do any research. All he had to do was ask me about this or that detail, and I would rattle off the information because I had read a lot on the subject. For example, I don’t know if you recall George Raft flipping a “nickel” in his hand? There are actually been a large number of murders in Chicago, where, as a mark of disrespect, the killer stuck a nickel into the hand of the corpse. Raft’s character being that of a killer, he always had a coin in his hand. We also exploited another little known fact: The papers that published the photos of a murder indicated “X marks the spot where the body was found.” So we designed fifteen or twenty scenes around the X, finding all sorts of ways to use the X when a murder occurred.

Cahiers: Each time someone was killed, there was an X?

Hawks: Yes. X.

Cahiers: Did that have something to do with the scar on Muni’s face?

Hawks: Yes. Once you start off on that path, why not go all the way? Do you remember the scene in which Boris Karloff is bowling? As he lets the ball go, he’s hit; the pins all go down. An X for a strike is marked on the scorecard.

Cahiers: And the cloud in Red River, was it intentional or accidental?

Hawks: We saw it coming just as Wayne began reading the prayer over the grave. We told him to hurry reading so that we could catch it at the right moment. This was a case of seizing an opportunity as it presented itself. I don’t think we would have held up the scene to wait for a cloud.

Cahiers: You were the producer of The Thing without getting credit as a director, but you undoubtedly supervised the production very closely.

Hawks: Oh, yes. The direction was handled by my editor, but I was on the set for all the important scenes. It was a very pleasant assignment. We wrote the script in four and a half days. I had read the story in Germany, in Heidelberg, where we shout Male War Bride. We only used four pages from it. I bought the rights and hired tow good screenwriters. The story interested me because I thought it was an adult treatment of an often infantile subject.

Cahiers: Many critics have complained about the big differences that existed between the Hemingway story To Have and Have Not and the film you shot from it. Why did you change so much?

Hawks: Hemingway and I are good friends, but whenever I tried to persuade Hemingway to write for the movies, Hemingway insisted that he could be a good writer of books, but he didn’t know whether he could be a good writer of movies. Once when Hemingway and I were hunting together, I told him that I could take his worst story and make a movie out of it. Hemingway asked me what was his worst story. “To Have and Have Not,” I said. Hemingway explained that he had written the story in one sitting when he needed money, and that I couldn’t make a movie out of it. I said I’d try, and while we hunted, we discussed it. We decided that the best way to tell the story was not to show the hero growing old, but to show how he had met the girl, and, in short, show everything that had happened before the beginning of the novel. After four or five days of discussion I left. Faulkner and Jules Furthman then wrote a script incorporating the ideas Hemingway and I had evolved on our hunting trip. In fact, there was enough material left over for another movie (Michael Curtiz’ The Breaking Point) which was pretty good.

Cahiers: Your career has been divided equally between adventure films and comedies. The adventure films seemed optimistic and the comedies pessimistic, but there always seemed a lesson to be drawn from the humor in both genres. Are you more interested in the mixture of genres within your subject or in the clash of genres?

Hawks: Perhaps I can best answer in the following manner. Life is very simple for most people. It becomes so routine that everybody wants to escape his environment. Adventure stories reveal how people behave in the face of death – what they do, say, feel, and even think. I have always liked the scene in Only Angels Have Wings in which a man says “I feel funny,” and his best friend says “your neck is broken,” and the injured man then says “I have always wondered how I would die if I knew I was going to die. I would rather you didn’t watch me.” And the friend goes out and stands n the rain. I have personally encountered this experience, and the public found it very convincing.

             But a comedy is virtually the same as an adventure story. The difference is in the situation – dangerous in an adventure story, embarrassing in a comedy. But in both we observe our fellow beings in unusual situations. You merely emphasize the dramatic or the comical aspects of the hero’s reactions. Sometimes you can mix them up a bit. My serious pictures usually have their comic sides. You’ve seen The Big Sky? You remember the scene where they amputate Kirk Douglas’ finger; it was really funny. I had already wanted to do that scene in Red River, but John Wayne had said that I was crazy to want such a scene played for comedy. I said okay, I would do it in my next picture instead. When Wayne saw it, he phoned me and said he’d do whatever I wanted to in our next picture together.

            It’s possible to do comedy scenes even at very tragic moments. I once told a Spaniard I was thinking of doing Don Quixote with Cary Grant and Cantinflas, and the Spaniard said it was impossible to make a comedy out of a tragedy. I asked the Spaniard to tell me the story of Don Quixote, and after the Spaniard had done so, I said, “You’ve just told me the story of three of Chaplin’s best pictures.” He looked at me and said, “You’re right. Let’s go make a comedy.” And that’s pretty much the way I see it. The only difference between comedy and tragedy is the point of view. That’s the only way I know how to answer your questions.

Cahiers: The question has been answered.

Hawks: You know the story of The African Queen? I turned down an invitation to direct it because I couldn’t see any humor in the situation. It pleased me to see how they made it a comedy. There were some silly things it, but it went. Whenever I hear a story my first thought is how to make it into a comedy, and I think of how to make it into a drama only as a last resort. Do you remember the story about the man who wanted to commit suicide and stayed on a window ledge – Fourteen Hours? They wanted me to do it, and I said no. “Why not?” they asked me. “It’s a great story.” I told them I didn’t like suicides, and I told my friend Henry Hathaway that I didn’t like the film he had directed. The public didn’t like it either, and Zanuck told me I had been right. I told Zanuck: “I might have done it if it had been Cary Grant getting from the bedroom of a woman whose husband had come back unexpectedly and after he was found on the ledge he pretended he was contemplating suicide.” Zanuck asked me if I wanted to start on that one the next day.

Cahiers: You’re not interested in abnormal characters?

Hawks: Sometimes I get interested in the encounter of a normal person and an abnormal person. Almost all my caprices, my manias (like the way I am playing with key chain while I talk to you), I like to think that these are abnormal things. To see the difference in the way of thinking makes good scenes, but to tell a long story about a nut isn’t easy. Besides, I don’t like theoretical situations. I like stories like Viva Villa! which I wrote and half of which I directed. The Villa in that film, like the Villa in real life, was a quite bizarre man. So was Scarface. Ben Hecht wanted to make the Capone-like character a Caesar Borgia and Capone’s sister like Lucretia Borgia. This analogy permeates that script, and every intelligent person sense something unusual, something that can’t be brought out into the open, but affects all the scenes.

            Pancho Villa had a very complex personality – that’s what made him interesting – but these subjects are rare. Fox wanted me to do Zapata, but the script was all wrong about the character. Zapata was the worst murdered Mexico had ever seen. Had Fox been willing to tell the true story of Zapata, I would have been interested. But they made a sort of Santa Claus of him and had him riding around the country giving presents to poor peons.

Cahiers: In short, you’re guided in your work by an intentional reaction to what is going on around you.

Hawks: Exactly. I’ve already said that it’s easy, when one sees crowds rushing off to see a movie, to make another movie almost exactly like it. What is more fun is trying something new, and hoping it will work. That’s how I hit upon the tempo of my movies. I made a film called His Girl Friday in which the characters spoke so fat that the characters kept stepping on each other’s lines. The public liked it. Moreover, the tempo in Scarface was faster than usual in that period. I generally work with a faster tempo than that of most of my colleagues. It seems more natural to me, less force. I personally speak slowly, but people generally talk, talk, talk without even waiting for other people to finish. Also, if a scene is a bit weak, the more rapidly you shoot it, the better it will be on the screen. Moreover, if the tempo is fast you can emphasize a point by slowing the rhythm. Similarly, when you have a scene with two characters, don’t always use a close-up. When you use close-ups sparingly, the public realizes that they are important. I hate movies which, without any reason, are composed completely of close-ups. I don’t like them. I don’t want to say that they’re necessarily bad movies, but I don’t like that particular style of film-making.

Cahiers: Have any particular directors influenced you?

Hawks: In the beginning, I was very much impressed by Murnau’s Sunrise, particularly for its camera movements. I once made a film in this style – Paid to Love – with a great many camera effects, but I have never used such trickery since that time. I try to tell a story as simply as possible with the camera at eye level. Since I had directed Paid to Love at a time when the public was easy to impress, the result was well-received. But I don’t believe the future is in that direction. The other directors who have most impressed me are John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch, and Leo McCarey; these are the men who, in my opinion, have been the best.

Cahiers: What do you think of the young directors: Nicholas Ray, for example.

Hawks: I’ve seen several of Ray’s films, and find them very promising. He is one of those directors of whom it is said: “I will go see everything he does because he is a good story-teller.” But the actual situation in Hollywood is hard for young directors. They don’t get the freedom we older directors enjoy. Young directors are told what to direct, where to shoot it, on what day to be finished. It’s hard. However, the more successful a young director’s movies, the more freedom he will be give.

Cahiers: What would be your ideal film, that which you would make for yourself alone?

Hawks: I have no desire to make a picture for myself. There has never been a picture so good the public didn’t care to see it. I like to make comedies because I like to go into a theater and hear people laughing – the more laughter the better I feel. I have no desire to make a picture for my own pleasure. Fortunately, I have found that what I like, most people also like, so I only have to let myself go and do what interests me.

            I am actually thinking about a subject for a movie. For four-fifths of the picture there is only one person on the screen. A girl, cut off from all contact with humanity by avalanches and melting ice, bears a child and cares for it for three moths before she is found.

Cahiers: Do you always work on your scripts?

Hawks: From the beginning and for all my films.

Cahiers: If you had to choose three or four of your films to be saved, which ones would they be?

Hawks: For sentimental reasons, my first talking film, Dawn Patrol, then Scarface and probably Twentieth Century; but … there are many others I would like to save. Dawn Patrol was very interesting because it was my firs experience with sound. I had not worked since the coming of sound because the producers didn’t know if I could work with dialogue. I had never had any theatrical experience. I myself wrote almost the entire scenario, and during the shooting, everyone kept telling me: “It’s not good dialogue, it’s not dramatic. Everything is flat. Everything you’re doing is going to be flat.” No one liked the film because none of the characters cried or screamed. When the editing was finished, the studio had so little confidence in the movie, they dispensed with the premiere. They preferred to release it discreetly, and then it turned out to be the best film of the year, and then they got into the habit of screening it for other directors and saying: “That’s what good dialogue is like.”