Tag Archives: Howard Hawks

The Count of Monte Cristo is a great yarn by Alexander Dumas, though I admit I couldn’t get into the unabridged edition. The 1934 film THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO (1934) stars Robert Donat as Edmund Dantes, condemned to life imprisonment by three schemers (one wants his lover Mercedes, one wants his promotion as ship captain, one has political reasons), sent to the inescapable Chateau d’If, and pronounced dead to ensure the bullshit charge will never come to trial.

Decades later, Dantes breaks out of prison, having received a world-class education from a fellow prisoner along with directions to a horde of treasure. Dantes uses the money to establish himself as a nobleman, then comes to France to arrange revenge on his three tormentors.

The movie takes considerable liberties with the book. I can understand giving Dantes a happy ending (Mercedes has never stopped loving him) but there’s a lot of emphasis on Dantes as an agent of justice rather than revenge — he’s not hunting these men down in retaliation but because of the crimes they’re committing against France. Was that some issue with the Production Code? A desire to keep him sympathetic? I’ve no clue. “I have followed your brilliant career with some interest.”

Not having seen the Jules Verne adaptation THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961) since I was a tween, I was disappointed to discover this Ray Harryhausen film has way less kaiju and a lot more Robinsonade material (i.e., desert-island survival a la Robinson Crusoe) than I remembered. A group of Civil War soldiers break out of a Confederate prison by balloon (accompanied by one Southerner—the film formula for a long time was that both sides were valiant and noble, the war was a bad mistake, nothing personal), get caught in a storm and wind up on a Pacific Island. Their struggle to survive is enlivened by occasional giant monsters, pirates, pretty women washing up on the beach and finally an encounter with Herbert Lom as Captain Nemo. This badly needs a stronger cast; Gary Merrill as a cynical war correspondent is good but he needs a strong, idealistic character to play against. Plus the Southerner’s accent is horrendous. “Considering the ships and crews you’ve sent to the bottom, you can’t disturb my conscience.”

It’s weird watching THE ROAD TO GLORY (1936) and realizing that just three years before WW II broke out, they were still making movies about the glory and tragedy of WW I. This Howard Hawks film is impressively dull, cobbled together from bits of The Dawn Patrol (the terrible burden of command in a doomed fight) —

—and Tiger Shark, with burnout commander Warner Baxter and womanizer Fredric March (in a surprisingly weak performance) in love with the same woman. As Films of Howard Hawk puts it, the film starts out with the insight that War is Hell and doesn’t add anything to it. John Barrymore plays Baxter’s father. “You know if one man fails, ten others may die with him.”

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Several years before Merchant Ivory became big with films such as Howard’s End and Room With a View, they made the less successful THE WILD PARTY (1975). James Coco plays a fading comedy star (baased on Fatty Arbuckle, I believe) whose party will double as a screening for his new film which he hopes will turn his life around. In the meantime he’s increasingly abusive to his mistress (Raquel Welch) even as she struggles to be supportive.

I’ve been curious about this one for a while but it lost my interest almost immediately. The cast, which includes Perry King, Royal Dano and David Dukes, is good but there’s something heavy-handed about the execution that I didn’t see in later Merchant-Ivory works (whether it’s the Americanness of this one or that it’s an early work, I don’t know). As a result I lost interest fast; The Cat’s Meow worked much better in a similar vein.

Howard Hawks’ TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934) stars John Barrymore and Carole Lombard in a screwball comedy where Boy Director Gets Girl Actor, Boy Director Loses Girl Actor to Hollywood and Boy Director then moves heaven and hell to get back as he can’t seem to score a hit without her. This feels very much like a dry run for the Cary Grant/Rosalind Russell relationship in Hawks’ His Girl Friday, which was also written by Ben Hecht but as Films of Howard Hawks says, it’s not as balanced: this is a Barrymore star vehicle and while he’s hysterically funny, Lombard’s role isn’t written to match him (nor does he have Grant’s charm) which makes her too much the victim (and her boyfriend is a complete cipher). Thumbs down.“There’s a law in this country about riding on trains and I’m calling on you to invoke it.”

JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH (2021) is the grim story of how the FBI gave one petty black crook the choice to either spend time in prison or joining Fred Hampton’s Black Panther chapter, giving them intel to take Hampton down and ultimately helping them assassinate him. Well done, although as I’m familiar with Hampton’s story and they’re sticking close to the facts there’s nothing terribly revelatory here (the big surprises were that Hampton was only 21 when they killed him and that the informant committed suicide the night after PBS aired an interview with him). “You don’t have to understand, Bill — you just have to draw me a blueprint.”When I moved up here TYG bought me a copy of the Amicus horror film THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1971) and proceeded to freak out about the 1970s fashion. That made it irresistible when Carolina Theatre aired it on the big screen last weekend. Investigating the disappearance of horror star Jon Pertwee, a Scotland Yard man learns it’s only the latest several bizarre deaths in the house, from Denholm Elliott being attacked by his fictional creation to Peter Cushing and Joss Ackland losing their heads over a wax figure of Salome to Christopher Lee worrying his daughter is the child of Satan. Not the best of Amicus’ output but fun. “Then I wouldn’t suggest that you spend time in that house alone.”

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Next up in my Howard Hawks would have been Today, We Live but that melodrama didn’t turn up anywhere. Onward to VIVA VILLA (1934) which Hawks co-directed and co-wrote (with his frequent collaborator Ben Hecht) uncredited. Wallace Beery plays Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa who in childhood witnesses his father’s unjust execution, which inspires him to grow up into a Robin Hood-esque revolutionary before a saintly reformer convinces him to fight the tyrants more conventionally. After treacherous general Joseph Schildkraut seizes power and kills the reformer, Villa starts playing hardball.This is fun and Beery’s performance is full of energy, but it conforms too much to the Frito Bandito stereotype for my taste. This also leaves out his raid into Texas — while I can understand not mentioning that to an American audience, surely it’s what they’d know him best for. With Fay Wray as one of Villa’s many romances. “There is no need to clutter up the proceedings of justice with trivial details.”
JOHN WICK (2014) stars Keanu Reaves as a widowed, retired hitman who gets back into harness when a mobster’s son not only steals his classic car but kills the puppy Reaves’ wife gave him as a dying gift — a premise that ought to be laughable, but works perfectly well here. Part of the appeal is that it posits a world of assassins with their own hotel, clean-up services and transactions in gold coins, which I imagine they explore in the several sequels. With Willem Dafoe as a brother assassin and Ian MacShane running the hotel. “John Wick wasn’t the bogeyman — he’s the guy you hire to kill the fucking bogeyman.”

The second season of the QUANTUM LEAP reboot wrapped up and I enjoyed it almost as much as the first. When Ben (Raymond Lee) materializes in the season opener it’s been seconds since the last season; for his friends at the project it’s been three years and Addison (Caitlin Bassett) is now involved with someone else. Plus there’s a mystery woman, Hannah (Eliza Taylor) who keeps running into Ben in leap after leap.

While I enjoy the Ben/Hannah relationship and I loved the season ender (which I think is set up to be a series ender, just in case), having Hannah and Ben keep meeting each other felt a little deus ex machina, even given the assumption God’s manipulating the leaps. And it’s always bugged me that the point of MIA, the S2 ender of the original show, just got retconned out. That episode clearly showed Al’s marriage to Beth was a doomed trainwreck; fans didn’t like that which may be why the series walked it back (the series ender reunited them) and the current show continues that (I guess being a POW for seven years really shaped Al up). “Just FYI there’s a movie about a blazing building coming out this year — it might be triggering.”

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My friend Ross bought me the DVD of THE BAND’S VISIT (2007) for Christmas and it proved a good pick (it was on my Amazon wish list). It’s a low-key story in which an Egyptian brass band arrives in Israel to play at a small village’s cultural event. When they arrive it turns out they’ve taken the bus to the wrong village and they’re stuck their until morning.During the course of the evening, various members of the band hookup, flirt, roller-skate, give advice, offer a sympathetic ear or struggle with personal issues, all in interaction with their Israeli hosts. The writer/director said he didn’t want to do the thing where the two cultures meet and form a bridge between worlds, and he didn’t, because the connections are all about personal stuff. Quite winning. “A man should not hide behind a hat.”

Like Howard Hawks, A Girl in Every Port, the Hawks-directed TIGER SHARK (1932) has two close buddies falling apart over the woman one of them married, but the characters are different enough it’s not just a remake (though it would be remade itself several times, such as 1941’s Manpower). Mike (Edward G. Robinson) is the Portuguese-American captain of a tuna fishing boat; when Mike has to tell Quita (Zita Johann) her father died on the last fishing trip, he falls hard for her. Although she tells him she’s not in love with her she needs someone to support her and so she says yes … but then falls for Pipes (Richard Arlen), Mike’s first mate and best friend. The result is an enjoyable, well-acted melodrama; I like that unlike many films of this sort, Quita’s likable rather than being written as a self-serving witch. There’s too much tuna-fishing footage but also familiar Hawks elements — these are tough men working a tough job. “If I stopped to say goodbye, I never would have gone.”

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SPIDER-MAN: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) is a disappointing sequel to Into the Multiverse, partly because it’s way longer than it needs to be: almost two and a half hours, and even then it’s continued in a part two (which I did not expect, having carefully avoided spoilers). We open with Spider-Gwen struggling with her guilt over Peter’s death and her cop father’s determination to bring in the Spider-Woman. Then she’s recruited by Miguel O’Hara, the Spider-Man of 2099 (as you can see from the Rick Leonardi cover, a real comics character, from when Marvel tried a bunch of future-set books in the 1990s) who maintains a legion of multiversal spider-people struggling to keep the destiny of all their counterparts  from going off the rails.

Then we have Miles Morales as the “Brooklyn Spider-Man,” still missing Gwen and dealing with the Spot, a dimension-warping villain who insists he’s Miles’ nemesis. Needless to say, Miles soon meets up with the multiversals (including a black, pregnant version of the Jessica Drew Spider-Woman) but things go increasingly off the rails: Miguel is convinced every Spider-Hero has to endure a tragedy and preventing that will lead to entire worlds falling apart. If Miles refuses to let the Spot kill his father well, Miguel’s going to restrain him until it happens (in a side-note, Peter’s tragedy is the death of Gwen’s father Captain Stacey rather than Uncle Ben)!

Visually and in the array of spider-counterparts, this was nowhere near as good as the first film. The opening with Gwen feels padded with backstory, which is more annoying given the running time. And the ending feels really off — it seems they could wrap everything up in 40 minutes or so, not another movie. I still had fun, but it’s flawed fun.“In every other universe, Gwen Stacey falls for Spider-Man — and in every other universe, it doesn’t end well.”

Howard Hawks’ THE CROWD ROARS (1932) stars Jimmy Cagney as an ace race-car driver, Eric Linden as the brother who follows him into the sport, Ann Dvorak as the woman who can’t stop loving that no good man of hers and Joan Blondell breaking up the brothers when Cagney can’t accept that she’s good enough for Linden. This suffers from Linden, who’s too much the Aw Shucks innocent to keep up with the others; it’s also hurt by missing about 15 minutes of footage, so that Cagney helping Linden win the race at the climax seems to come out of nowhere.

STALKER (1979) is the tormented guide who leads a scientist and a writer into the mysterious Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s three-hour drama, with the end goal a mysterious Room where your deepest desire will be made manifest (reminding me a lot of Brackett’s “The Moon That Vanished.”). This has occasional striking visuals due to the Zone’s reality warping (a narrow, flooded tunnel for one guy becomes a wide, sand-piled chamber for the next) and some clever ideas (“It’s impossible to use the Room to reorder society — that’s not about desire but about your understanding of complex systems.”). Unfortunately it ends up being ultra talky and pretentiously pessimistic as the travelers declare there is no point to attempting to achieve their fondest wish — very Russian, sure, but also very much a Twilight Zone episode stretched out to an absurd length. “I dig for the truth but while I do something happens to it.”

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I’ve long been a fan of the 1938 The Dawn Patrol, with Errol Flynn, David Niven and Basil Rathbone as flight commanders on the WWI front, struggling not to crack up as they lead increasingly inexperienced pilots on suicidal missions (Marked for Death will give you the real history behind all that). As part of watching Howard Hawks’ films I finally caught the original 1930 THE DAWN PATROL and I must say it’s a poor substitute.It’s easy to see this as a prototype for the tough flyers in Hawks’ later Only Angels Have Wings or for that matter in The Thing From Another World. War is hell but they’ll drink in the canteen, salute the ones who passed and never say die, at least not aloud. There are some great flying scenes and this has more of the nuts and bolts of the air war than the remake (without rewatching that, however, I can’t be sure I’m not imagining it). However the core cast of Neil Hamilton (Rathbone role), Richard Barthelemess (Flynn) and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (Niven) simply can’t put over the drama and neither can anyone else in the cast. The later film did it better. “Here’s a toast to the men dead already/Hurrah for the next man to die!”

THE WONDERFUL, HORRIBLE LIFE OF LENI RIEFENSTAHL (1993) is an impressive documentary on the filmmaker who gave us the memorable Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, though Riefenstahl insists onscreen that it was never propaganda, how could it be? Pure art and aesthetics, baby! (she does not phrase it that way).

The movie chronicles the 90-year-old’s life (and dear god, I hope I’m as spry and active at 90 as she is) from her early years as a dancer to an actor in “mountain films” (a German 1920 genre) to directing which led to her making a documentary about Hitler’s Nuremberg rally, then Olympia about the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Her defenses are very much standard Good German stuff: she had no idea Hitler was serious about genocide, she didn’t hang out with the Nazi high command as much as everyone says, and of course her films weren’t propaganda: if Hitler had made a speech about farming or popular music she’d have filmed it exactly the same way. While the film shows her claims of utter innocence are dubious, they don’t try to nail down whether Riefenstahl is lying or rationalizing. In the end it’s a fascinating film about a memorable, horrible woman. “Have you ever thought how one would define a fascist aesthetic?”

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