A Closer Look at: Howard Hawks

For the first edition of this recurring feature, I've chosen to write about Howard Hawks, a man whose contribution to film is undeniable and who rarely gets credit for it.

Howard Hawks has long been the overlooked genius of early cinema. Hawks first gained notice with the gangster film Scarface (which was remade into the more popular, though significantly worse, 1983 version starring Al Pacino) and went on to work in every genre imaginable. A true chameleon, Hawks took on screwball comedies (Bringing Up Baby), westerns (Red River), film noirs (The Big Sleep), war films (Sergeant York), and made classics in each genre. Hawks, along with Alfred Hitchcock, was one of the first directors to be cited as an auteur (a director who asserts creative control over his films) when the term was first coined by french film critics in Cahiers Du Cinema in the 1950s. Despite all of this, he never quite achieved the public awareness of contemporaries Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, John Ford, or Orson Welles.

Hawks is perhaps most famous for the overlapping 'Hawksian' dialogue that is abundant in nearly everyone of his films, a trademark that was reused by Robert Altman throughout his career. This dialogue is often the primary obstacle standing in the way of the Hawksian protagonist's success, as in Bringing Up Baby, where an exasperated Cary Grant is continually thwarted by his own bumbling mannerisms, and through a series of events that he is unable to explain, is sent to jail.

No matter the subject matter, Hawks was always an optimist. He imposed his wry sense of humor upon each of his films, even one as dark as The Big Sleep. Hawks toys with Raymond Chandler's original story just enough to satiate his comic tendencies, and though much is changed, it is striking to note that major plot points remain intact. The original protagonist is a sardonic loner; in the film, he is a reluctant ladies man. Hawksian dialogue is injected into important scenes and distracts from the events of these critical moments. The ending is changed to offer a likely romance between the two leads of the film (Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall), an alteration that runs against everything the novel was about. But Hawks never showed any romance, he merely implied it. Every character ends up in exactly the same way they did in the book. The body count is even higher in the film. It is a testament to Hawks's brilliance that he could so perfectly balance his own leanings with those of Chandler.

Hawks was one of the first to see the true potential of film as an art form. His use of black and white is a good example of why Hawks was one of cinema's first artists. Hawks used black and white to raise questions of morality. My favorite example of this can be found in Scarface. Tony Camonte, is a goofy, brutal gangster who ascends to power by killing everyone in his path. Camonte is overprotective of his sister. He falls for he boss's girlfriend. He seems almost human when he isn't murdering people. After he takes complete control of the mob in his city, he stands in front of a window, the bright light of the outside shining in. Against the light, all we see of Tony is a dark silhouette. Hawks wants us to consider Tony's nature. Is he a violent man with complex motivation? or rather is he a single-minded thug, completely corrupted by evil? The image of Tony against the window is used to raise this question, as it is symbolic of the latter theory.

Hopefully I've done Hawks justice with this post. Keep a look out for the next edition of this feature, where I'll be taking a closer look at the Japanese master of animation Hayao Miyazaki.