Tag Archives: Howard Hawks

I’m close to finishing up my long (re)watch of Howard Hawks, though it’ll be a couple more months at least.

Donald C. Willis of Films of Howard Hawks unaccountably loathes GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1953) — well not unaccountable, he loathes Marilyn Monroe for what he considers her “aggressive, brainless, painless sexuality” (he expressed similar disdain over her in Monkey Business). I think she and Jane Russell are both terrific.

The film adapts a Broadway musical based on Anita Loos’ same-name book, with Monroe as the book’s central character, Lorelei Lee (I’ve read the character is sharper in the novel). Lorelei’s a mercenary beauty out to marry amiable, slightly dim and very wealthy Gus (Tommy Noonan); she’s deeply troubled that her BFF Dorothy (Russell) is perfectly happy with guys who are good-looking and fun, regardless of wealth. Doesn’t Dorothy realize it’s just as easy to fall for a rich man as a poor one? It’s Lorelei’s duty to protect her friend from her own worst instincts.

The plot concerns the duo going to France as showgirls — Gus’s father doesn’t want Lorelei marrying him and she hopes blowing Gus off for a while will stiffen his spine. Complications include a gumshoe (Elliott Reed) sent to catch Lorelei cheating but finding Dorothy so gosh-darn sexy, and conniving lecher “Piggy” (Charles Coburn). The end results rely almost entirely on the charm of the two female leads but that more than enough, especially when Monroe cuts loose in “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” (the song Madonna pays homage to in “Material Girl”), showing why Hollywood could never clone her successfully. However Dorothy buying time for her friend by impersonating her at the climax isn’t quite charming enough. Not a classic, but enjoyable “I think you’re the only girl in the world who can stand on stage with a spotlight in her eyes and see a diamond inside a man’s pocket.”

I’ve read one of the reasons Hawks was dismissed for years as a talented lightweight was that he never confined himself to one genre the way Alfred Hitchcock was “the Master of Suspense” or John Ford was associated with Westerns. As witness he followed the above picture with LAND OF THE PHARAOHS (1955), a historical epic that, as Willis puts it, halfway works “until it runs headlong into Joan Collins.”

The pharaoh Khufu (Jack Hawkins) is rapacious in his lust for gold and jewels even by Egyptian imperial standards. Looking ahead, he’s worried he won’t be able to take it with him — haven’t countless cleverly designed burial chambers been looted by tomb robbers? The solution: offer the brilliant architect Vashtar (James Robertson Justice) the chance to liberate his captive people in return for designing the unrobbable pyramid. Vashtar himself will have to die, knowing the secret, but his people will be free, so he agrees.

This is good looking in the way many epics were, but not terribly interesting otherwise (and it’s entirely performed by white actors in brownface). It falls apart completely when Collins as the scheming queen Nellifer enters the picture. Khufu’s second wife, she wants power and she really wants those pretty things that are going to be wasted being stuck in a pyramid. Hawkins isn’t right for the role but still, he is the lord of Egypt and that gives his actions a certain grandeur. Nellifer’s an uninspired and not particularly memorable palace intriguer. Collins could have played the role well maybe 10 or 15 years later but at this point she’s in her early 20s and not yet good enough. “In the presence of Pharaoh, you kneel.”

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As 1950s SF expert Bill Warren says, MONKEY BUSINESS (1952) is a funny film to see once, but despite the charm of Cary Grant, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe and Ginger Rogers, it doesn’t hold up to repeated viewings.

In the last of his four films for director Howard Hawks, Grant does his usual amazing job as a chemist working on a rejuvenation formula. One of the chimps the lab uses as guinea pigs gets out, mixes up some chemicals and bingo, success! Grant finds he no longer needs glasses and can perform somersaults — though as Warren points out, nothing else changes physically. Mentally, though, he regresses to around 19, which makes hitting on boss Coburn’s secretary (Monroe — and Coburn telling her “Find someone to type this.” is still a funny line) feel perfectly normal. Never mind what his spouse (Rogers) will think.

That’s the premise of the film: people drink the formula (the chimp dumped it in the water cooler) and start acting like a teenager or, if they get too much, a little kid (or more accurately the movie cliche version of both). Unsurprisingly, Grant and Rogers are great in the leads (Coburn and Monroe are good, but they have less to do) but their antics wear thin — and why does Coburn conclude the research is a success? It’s hard to imagine anyone paying to stay physically the same and de-age themselves mentally (binge-drinking at the nearest bar would probably have similar results). It’s not as bad as Films of Howard Hawks says (the author loathes the movie) but it ain’t great. Though I did enjoy it first viewing.

A minor point is that this may have some contemporary-for-1952 stuff I’m not picking up on, like when Grant gets a new suit and hairstyle; they don’t look that different to me but I’m assuming they’d look Young and Hip to the original audience. “Every now and then you feel compelled to sit and stare at a piece of paper hoping it will speak to you.”

CAT VIDEO FEST 2025 is the follow-up to the collection of cat videos TYG and I saw last year, the high point being a mangy (literally) and flea-bitten cat ending up adopted, sleek and comfortable, though most of the videos are more light-hearted. Nothing that isn’t available in infinite quantities on the Internet, but still fun.

While it’s not from The Asylum, I assume THE RISE OF THE BLACK BAT (2012) is the same kind of mockbuster, in this case mockbusting 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises. The Black Bat was a pulp hero who preceded Batman and quite possibly influenced him, though his skill-set — blinded, he acquires the ability to see in the dark — means he could also have inspired DC’s Dr. Mid-Nite.

This film version — I’m guessing the original is public domain — has a mobster blind crusading DA Anthony Quinn (which as the name of a well-known actor throws me in a way it wouldn’t have in the 1930s) who undergoes an operation to save his eyes; he remains blind in daytime but becomes perfectly sighted in pitch darkness, then adopts the Black Bat identity to strike fear into the hearts of the criminals he wars upon (and guns down — like a lot of pulp heroes, he has no qualms about killing). Unlike Monkey Business, this doesn’t even watch well the first time — it’s low budget with minimal acting talent and pads the story with several minutes of bikini-clad women posing for a beauty contest. “It’s bizarre to imagine that a man dressed in a black mask who runs around in the dark carrying a gun would be up to anything but no good.”

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Introducing the anthology segments in O. HENRY’S FULL HOUSE (1952), John Steinbeck assures us that O. Henry is a great American author, one of the bedrocks of our country’s literature. Which is ironic because watching, I realized how much Henry is known — for Gift of the Magi if nothing else — rather than read (I might have read The Cop and the Anthem but that’s it). And these stories didn’t make me feel I was missing anything.

It’s not that the stories are bad, they’re just not particularly memorable, even with a solid cast performing them. Charles Laughton as a tramp hoping to get thrown in jail for Christmas. Richard Widmark as a tough guy cashing in on an old debt. A young, in love couple sacrificing their most precious possessions to buy each other a Christmas gift (but watching now, I realize the ending is unbalanced — her hair will grow back, he may never recover his fine ancestral watch). Kidnappers Fred Allen and Oscar Levant paying the parents to take back the nightmare child they kidnap in Ransom of Red Chief. There’s something about them that screaams “old fashioned” and not in a nostalgic, charming way.

Howard Hawks directs the Red Chief segment competently but I wouldn’t have suffered if this wasn’t available online.

TYG is a big fan of PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT (1994) and I like it too, so we went to rewatch it at the Carolina Theater (first big-screen viewing for both of us). A good, quirky Aussie comedy as drag queen Hugo Weaving recruits aging transwoman Terence Stamp and flamboyant queer Guy Pearce to come along on a road trip to Alice Springs to meet his ex-wife and their son. A solid character study with Stamp a standout as a world-weary soul (though TYG’s favorite was the Pearce role). “Assumption is the mother of all fuckups.”

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Depending which theory you go with, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951) was either Howard Hawks’ only SF film or directed by a protege, Christian Nyby, who gets official credit. After rewatching, I’m favoring Hawks directing — it feels like his work — and letting his buddy have the credit.

It’s an excellent and entertaining film: an alien invasion movie, a horror film, a story of tough guys cut off from the world, fighting to survive and under pressure — because if they fall, so falls the world.

There’s constant banter and crackling dialog (I disagree with Nevala-Lee that the film is mostly “a series of images“), and a woman, Nicky (Margaret Sheridan) who can hold her own with the men. She isn’t the screamer of the poster though she doesn’t get much to do in the struggle. However she’s right there on the front lines, rather than being put away somewhere safe.

USAF Captain Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) and his crew fly up from Anchorage to help out Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) whose science team have discovered a flying saucer that recently crashed in the Arctic ice. Attempting to remove the ship from the ice, they destroy it. Then they discover the pilot, trapped in ice, take him to Carrington’s lab … and the ice melts. The Thing (James Arness) is apparently here to colonize Earth and sees the humans as obstacles; he’s as ruthless with us as we might be confronted by intelligent, hostile cabbages.

Hawks said in a later interview that he liked his professional men to be professionals. Here, it’s Hendry, Nicky and Hendry’s team who see the threat clearly and work to deal with it. Carrington, the genius visionary, naively assumes the Thing’s advanced technology mean it’s wiser, nobler, a potential friend; the military high command likewise wants the Thing unharmed. It’s the guys on the front line who recognize that it has to be destroyed (a common question in 1950s film is whether you trust the generals or the GIs). In any case it’s an excellent film. “Intelligence in plants is an old story, Mr. Scott — older than the animal arrogance that precludes thinking about it.”

NUTS (1987) stars Barbra Streisand as Claudia a high-priced call girl (“$400 gets you laid, a hand job costs $300, a blow job is $500, wearing my panties is another $100.”) who recently slashed client Lesley Nielsen’s throat when he decided he wanted more for the money. Her mom and stepdad (Maureen Stapleton, Karl Malden) want the judge (James Whitmore) to commit her — no chance of jail time — and psychiatrist Eli Wallach recommends it. Claudia, however, would sooner risk prison than be treated as a madwoman; while her attorney (Richard Dreyfuss) finds her frustrating as hell to deal with, he reluctantly followers her requested course of action.

This is very good, with a spectacular performance by Streisand, excellent direction by Martin Ritt and solid performances all the way around. Like Red Kimona, I was inspired to catch this by the book Marked Women. “Sometimes people love you so much, love is like a goddamn gun they fire right into your head.”

Returning to Howard Hawks, THE BIG SKY (1952), as critic Donald C. Willis says, plays like it was assembled from leftovers from Red River. For surrogate father and son John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, we have frontiersman Kirk Douglas and young, reckless Dewey Martin; Instead of old coot Walter Brennan we have Arthur Honeycutt; for the cattle drive we have a trading trip up the Missouri to Blackfoot territory; instead of settler Joanne Dru we have Native American princess Elizabeth Threatt. The result is perfectly watchable but completely unremarkable. “She figures you’re even — you saved her life and she hasn’t killed you yet.”

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I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE (1949) stars Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan as military officers in post-war France. Despite friction from a past mission — he got handsy, she objected — they have to travel together on a new assignment, despite finding each other the most obnoxious, the most irritating person they’ve ever met — that’s right, you know where this is going.

You can guess at least some of what comes next from the title (another example of Snakes on a Plane literalness). Sheridan and Grant marry but the military bureaucracy assumes overseas spouses will be women; Grant can’t sleep in the wives’ dorm, can’t sleep in the officers’ dorm (he’s out of the Army by this point) and Sheridan’s quarters are women only (getting their wedding night takes a lot of work).

As The Films of Howard Hawks says, this works well for one reason: Cary Grant. Not that Sheridan or the script or the directing are bad but Grant is utterly amazing, spectacularly funny even when all he’s doing is giving a deadpan put-upon look as in the image here. It’s not his best movie or even his best Howard Hawks movie (that would be Bringing Up Baby, which has some similarity to Male War Bride in its romantic rhythms) but it might be his funniest performance. “I think it’s only fair to warn you that Jack the Ripper’s up the alley before you go into it.”

A DOLL’S HOUSE (1973) is a filmed adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play, starring Jane Fonda as a flibbertigibbet wife, David Warner as her banker husband, Edward Fox as a disgruntled clerk, Delphine Seyrig as Fonda’s BFF/Fox’s ex and Trevor Howard as a dying doctor. Despite the cast and the play’s classic status this film didn’t work for me.

A big part of the problem is that it’s one of those filmed stage plays where dialogue that would have worked fine on stage sounds tinny and forced. Another is that Fonda’s Nora is too shallow and selfish to feel much sympathy for her plight (which involves forging her dead father’s signature on a loan as a woman in the 1890s couldn’t take one out by herself), nor does her feminist awakening at the end work for me. I don’t know if the problem is Fonda, the production or that the play, classic though it is, doesn’t work for me. “Nearly all young criminals are the children of feckless mothers.”

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When I watched BALL OF FIRE (1941) back in January, I mentioned my disappointment I hadn’t watched it with TYG. So this weekend I watched it again, as a date movie, and for comparison with the 1948 remake, A SONG IS BORN.

As I anticipated, she squeezed maximum dirty jokes out of having gangster’s moll “Sugarpuss” O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) rooming with Professor Potts (Gary Cooper) and his seven elderly male colleagues, all working together on an encyclopedia. Potts wants Sugarpuss as a source so he can update the section on slang; she needs to hide out until her mobster boyfriend Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews) can arrange a marriage license. She knows stuff the cops want to grill her about but a wife can’t testify against her husband (to be clear, Lilac was already into her, it’s just that the murder rap he’s facing gave him an extra nudge).

In Romantic Comedy, James Harvey argues the appeal of screwball comedy is that characters can stay sharp, cynical and smartass and still get all goofy over a guy (or a dame). Sugarpuss knows “Pottsy” is a stick-in-the-mud, can’t kiss, is corny in his romantic overtures — but after initially wrapping him around her fingers, she can’t help falling for him anyway. What could have been insufferably cutesy and coy turns out a winner. With Dan Duryea as Lilac’s chief gunman and Richard Haydn and SZ Sakall among the professors. “The human heart reminds me of the windflower, also known as the anemone.”

According to Donald C. Willis in Films of Howard Hawks, Hawks remade Ball of Fire in 1948 as A Song Is Born because RKO offered him “a hell of a lot of money.” The big distinction is that Prof. Frisbee (Danny Kaye) and his crew are researching music; when Frisbee discovers his knowledge of popular music stops with ragtime — no swing, no jazz — he rushes out for a crash course and winds up with singer and mobster’s moll Honey (Virginia Mayo) as an unanticipated house guest.

What makes the film worth remaking was that the set-up allows for some great music. Benny Goodman (playing one of the professors who’s also a clarinetist), Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong and a lot of musicians I’ve never heard of — but no question, these cats can swing, man! However Frisbee going from nightclub to nightclub to listen pushes the nominal plot into the background. And where I found it easy to believe Potts was out of touch with everyday slang, for some reason I find it harder to believe in Frisbee not keeping up on popular music (perhaps because it doesn’t require interacting with regular folks — there’s the radio, vinyl discs …).

A bigger problem is that Hawks is fitting Kaye and Mayo into the Cooper and Stanwyck roles and not making any adjustment. Much as I love Danny Kaye, he’d normally play Frisbee as a nervous, ineffective nebbish; instead he has to play a forceful authority figure like Cooper’s Potts and he just can’t do it. Mayo is a competent actor but she doesn’t have any of Stanwyck’s flirtatious flash and confident swagger. Lines that were funny in the first film — Potts calling the housekeeper a “crab apple annie,” showing he’s learning slang — show up here but they aren’t funny without the slang subplot to anchor them. And none of the supporting cast have the vibrancy of Sakall or Duryea (one of the screen’s great sneering thugs, though also good in rare sympathetic roles). I’d say stick with the original, but if you like the music, it might be worth watching. “I’m merely assuming the role of the lover and you, the role of the maiden.”

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RED RIVER (1948) was Howard Hawk’s first Western (unless you count Viva Villa) and a spectacular, enjoyable Western it is, even to me (I’m not generally a Western fan). In the opening scenes, Dunson (John Wayne) breaks away from a wagon train with an eye to claiming some Texas land and breeding his cattle there. His true love wants to go with him but he refuses, promising to send for her. A short while later, she’s dead, the wagon train butchered by the Comanche. The only survivor is Matt, a teenager (who grows up to be Montgomery Clift) who becomes Dunson’s surrogate son and his trusted right hand along with Groot (Walter Brennan) — yes, I laughed at the name too.

Years later, after the Civil War has left Texas mired in poverty, Dunson decides the only way to save himself from ruin is to drive his 10,000-strong herd across country to Missouri. Matt and Groot are along, backing him up, but as the road gets tougher, Dunson turns into a petty tyrant and Matt eventually has to make a stand.

While the Western stuff doesn’t grab me, the acting is good and the drama is strong enough to hold me — well, with the exception of Matt’s rivalry with fast gun Valance (John Ireland), which comes off incoherent (Valance’s actions at the climax seem more plot-driven than character). It doesn’t pass the Bechdel test — Joanne Dru’s Tess is the only female character besides Wayne’s dead love, and she’s not strong enough to make her role work. Still, I really enjoyed this. “You ever had a good Swiss watch?”

As I enjoyed the Japanese horror film Goke, the Bodysnatcher from Hell, I spent my birthday gift money on a boxed set including that film and three others from the Shokichu studio. Alas, THE X FROM OUTER SPACE (1967) is a pale imitator of Toho’s kaiju films, with the first hour taken up with dull drama and spaceflight as a Japanese mission tries to figure out why all Earth trips to Mars have failed. When we finally get to the silly-looking monster there’s plenty of satisfactory city-smashing but not satisfactory enough to excuse the first hour. “It’s advancing towards Tokyo creating mass hysteria and devastation.”

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