Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Years later, Hawks assessed it by saying, “It didn’t have any fun in it. It was pretty bad. I don’t think anybody enjoyed it except a few critics.” He was, he said, under the delusion that “the thing to do was to be dramatic.” He was quickly disabused of this notion by Sol Wurtzel, whom Hawks greatly respected and who issued him the following directive: “Look, you’ve shown you can make a picture, but for God’s sake, go out and make entertainment.” It was advice Hawks took to heart and that he heeded, not only on his next picture, but for the rest of his career.

  Directing three films in a year and writing the story to a fourth, as Hawks did in 1926, was nothing unusual during the silent era. Most pictures ran little more than an hour, directors were often assigned to projects literally moments in advance of shooting, and postproduction time was minimal, given the absence of a soundtrack, meaning that pictures could be in theaters very soon after filming was completed. The way Hawks remembered it, he had no sooner finished shooting The Road to Glory than he went home and wrote something intended to be entertaining and commercial. On January 28, he submitted a five-page outline for Fig Leaves which he divided into eight sequences. A sex comedy about the early tests and trials of a marriage, the story begins in the Garden of Eden, where the couple goes through their morning routine: they are awakened by a coconut-and-sand alarm clock; Adam breaks the morning newspaper, a stone tablet, into two halves—whereupon Eve complains, “I have nothing to wear”; Adam leaves for work in a brontosaurus-drawn conveyance; and Eve is visited by a friendly snake.

  As the film leaps ahead thousands of years to contemporary New York City, the serpent transforms into Eve’s next-door neighbor Alice, a flapper who insists, “It is every woman’s right to have pretty things to wear.” Hawks has his heroine secretly become a model for fashion designer André, who, despite his effeminacy, tries to seduce Eve, who wants no part of him but likes wearing beautiful clothes. When Adam and his buddy Eddie coincidentally arrive at the shop to fix the plumbing during an elaborate fashion show and see Eve parading around in very skimpy garb, Adam says he doesn’t want to see her again. But when Eve gets back to the apartment and finds Alice wearing her fur coat from the shop, the two women begin fighting, to Adam’s vast amusement, and Eve kicks her conniving neighbor out. Back in the Garden of Eden, Eve is seen shooing the serpent out with a broom; she and Adam make up, and “Adam suggests that Cain and Abel are holding a sale and Eve may find just what she wants.”

  It was a slight, clothesline of a premise with very little story, very likely inspired in part by the successful sex comedies De Mille and Neilan had done, but with sufficient opportunity for amusing scenes, energetic spats, and visual distractions. Appeal to the female audience was considered particularly important by executives at the time, and Fig Leaves had that in abundance. Writers Hope Loring and Louis D. Lighton quickly elaborated Hawks’s rough story into a full screenplay without changing any essential elements; George O’Brien and Olive Borden, Western stalwarts who had just acted for John Ford in Three Bad Men, were cast as Adam and Eve; and Hawks was shooting his second picture by March.

  The sexual sparring and light comedy was handled buoyantly enough, and while the film is a perfectly agreeable example of silent-era romantic comedy, it is more interesting in the way it plants the seeds for various Hawks motifs that would flower in his sound comedies. There is the woman-animal connection that would reappear in Bringing Up Baby, Monkey Business, and Hatari!; the first of many instances of female impersonation in Hawks’s films; the introduction of the sort of “theatrical” behavior, in André’s extravagant gestures, which would later be seen in John Barrymore’s Oscar Jaffe in Twentieth Century and often in the later comedies; and sexual role-playing and, by extension, playacting, which would become a principal way for men and women to define and redefine their relationships, perhaps nowhere so much as in His Girl Friday and Monkey Business but also in Ball of Fire, I Was a Male War Bride, and elsewhere. In a broader sense, Fig Leaves gives the first taste of the sort of physical expressiveness Hawks liked in performances and of the lively, good-humored give-and-take between men and women that became a hallmark of his work.

  At the time of its release, however, the picture was most noted for the splashily striking production values of the prehistoric and fashion show sequences. The Rube Goldberg devices concocted to adorn the Garden of Eden are disarmingly clever, and the exaggerated animals—dinosaurs, the snake, and a giant ape—seem so homemade as to be endearing. Hawks said he and the cinematographer, Joseph August, had fun devising a way to dissolve between the story’s two time periods, at a time when lap dissolves hadn’t yet become commonplace: they took a beer bottle with a flaw in it, began by shooting through the clear portion, then turned it so the flaw would blur the image.

  But what most reviewers commented upon were the fashion sequences. With extravagant sets by William S. Darling and William Cameron Menzies and costume designs by Adrian, who would shortly become one of the most celebrated practitioners in his field, the fashion parades, which were shot in two-color Technicolor, were spectacles without precedent in pictures, a cinematic equivalent to Ziegfeld’s stage revues. Fox publicity boasted that Borden’s costumes alone cost fifty thousand dollars, and Variety noted that the salon setting “gives opportunity for the display of a group of lingerie models which comes within an ace of having the sex kick of a nightclub show.”

  It is impossible to ascertain precise box-office figures for films released in the 1920s, but it is clear that Fig Leaves, which opened in July, was a hit—Hawks fantasized that “It got its cost back in one theater”—thereby assuring its director’s career in silent pictures. In his late-in-life interviews, Hawks had a tendency to downplay and even dismiss his silent work, but he did like Fig Leaves. When he saw it in France in the early 1970s, his first viewing since he’d made it, he found it “amazingly modern.”

  In August 1926, another film opened that had Hawks’s name on it, but only as the author of the original story. In fact, the finished film Honesty—the Best Policy, directed by Chester Bennett from a scenario by L. G. Rigby, Hawks’s collaborator on The Road to Glory, seems to have borne only a partial resemblance to the idea Hawks himself submitted, since it was considerably reworked in the interim. Since the picture apparently no longer exists, it is impossible to say for sure, but on the basis of the few contemporaneous assessments of it, it seems to have been something of a mishmash. Certainly, what Hawks and Rigby cooked up together is even more contrived than The Road to Glory, one of the least promising pieces of material ever to have carried Hawks’s name.

  Dangers of a Great City, which the two men developed virtually simultaneously with The Road to Glory, between October and early December 1925, is a crime story about Bob Dare and Nancy Kay, a pair of robbers evading police captain Randall in San Francisco. Surprisingly, the two are not romantically involved, as, Nancy insists crime, for her, is strictly business.

  The police almost nab them at a glamorous masquerade ball, but the two manage to escape. Leaving Bob behind, Nancy makes a getaway and, after a long chase, Nancy and Randall both crack up their cars. A suddenly considerate Nancy then drags the badly injured cop out of danger, and incredibly, Randall now declares his love for Nancy. When Nancy tells him that he’s got to do his duty and take her in, Randall weakens and says she can go free anyway.

  Back in San Francisco some time later, Bob has managed to capture Randall and is about to shoot him when Nancy convinces him to spare the detective. Randall tells Bob that if he really loves Nancy, he’d better take her away and settle down.

  The story becomes increasingly unbelievable as it unfolds, and there is the major problem of which characters, if any, merit sympathy or interest. Fox wasn’t happy with the material, and Hawks dropped off the project after three drafts. The picture was shot in early spring 1926, with Rockliffe Fellowes as Randall, Pauline Starke as Nancy, and Johnnie Walker as Bob, and was released that August with a framing story, directed by Alb
ert Ray, about a young author who is trying to win publication for his story from a publisher’s “jury” of office stenographers. The crime story is intercut with brief comedic scenes of the attractive listeners reacting to the suspense-filled tale.

  The patch job, devised long after Hawks left the project, appears not to have been terribly successful. Describing it as “a picture of strangely mixed purpose,” Variety complained that just as serious excitement was being built up by the central narrative, the film undercut itself by returning to the “short-skirted girls [tying] their legs around chairs.” The film was not one of Fox’s big attractions of the year.

  Thus far, Hawks had only worked on pictures for which he himself wrote the stories. However, Fox’s commitment to its steady grind of productions meant it didn’t have time to wait around for directors to come up with their own ideas, so Hawks was assigned to a script he always said he never would have chosen to do himself. In good measure because of Hawks’s own exaggerated descriptions of it, Paid to Love, which is little-seen even among Hawks aficionados, is one of the director’s most misrepresented works, in that it is thought of as the director’s one, failed stab at an art film. Although beautifully crafted, it is nothing of the kind, resting instead firmly in the tradition of comic Ruritanian romances that stemmed from operettas and were so popular in Hollywood in the 1920s and early 1930s. It also introduced some major motifs that became hallmarks of Hawks’s work for the rest of his career.

  Paid to Love originated at Fox as a thirty-two-page treatment written early in 1926 by Harry Carr, a longtime Los Angeles Times columnist. A second approach, by Benjamin Glazer, turned the French leading lady into an American. But the decisive treatment was developed by writer Seton I. Miller. A smart, well-read twenty-four-year-old from rural Washington State and fresh out of Yale, Miller had just arrived in Hollywood earlier in the year to work as a technical adviser and actor on MGM’s feature Brown of Harvard, which incidentally dealt with rival Yale. He then joined the screen-writing staff at Fox, where Paid to Love was his first assignment. At least superficially, Miller and Hawks were a good match because of their mutual West Coast–Ivy League backgrounds, a similar literary bent, and a shared taste for racy, modern, hard-surfaced stories, and the fledgling writer became the rising director’s most frequent early collaborator. Miller would work on eight of the next ten films Hawks made, through 1932.

  On Paid to Love, Miller came up with the character of an American diplomat-financier who takes the king of a small nation to a bawdy Paris nightclub to find the introverted crown prince Michael “a real hotsy totsy wild woman.” Miller also introduced another character, Prince Eric, Michael’s playboy cousin, whom the public prefers, and generally made the story far more mischievous, sophisticated, and fun. The young former newspaperman and titles writer William M. Conselman was brought in to add further polish and provide a less contrived ending, and a top cast was assembled that included George O’Brien as Crown Prince Michael, the beautiful Virginia Valli as Dolores, and William Powell as Prince Eric.

  Paid to Love has always had a reputation as Hawks’s most stylistically atypical film, the one time he experimented with elaborate tracking shots, expressionistic lighting, and fancy cutting. This impression was particularly furthered by Hawks himself, who admitted allowing himself to be influenced by the German expressionist master F. W. Murnau. “It isn’t my type of stuff,” Hawks said, adding that, as far as artsiness was concerned, “at least I got it over in a hurry. You know, the idea of wanting the camera to do those things. Now the camera’s somebody’s eyes.”

  One of the most influential European films of the time for Hollywood filmmakers, including Hawks, E. A. Dupont’s Variety, opened in the United States in late June; so impressed were the executives at Paramount, for example, that they not only bought the American rights to the picture but showed it to employees as an example of how movies should be made. Murnau, whose The Last Laugh had earlier impressed film professionals with its supple camerawork and seamless storytelling, arrived in Hollywood with great fanfare at the end of July to commence his celebrated Fox contract with Sunrise. His presence on the lot was greatly felt, and his influence is difficult to overestimate. The awe in which the German directors were held was at its peak at the very moment Hawks started shooting Paid to Love at the beginning of August 1926, and it may be this atmosphere that Hawks was thinking of when he said that he tried to out-Murnau Murnau on the picture.

  The irony is that, while this may be Hawks’s most visually stylish picture, graced with lovely shots and very impressive production values, it is far from radical or even the least bit extreme in its technique; the camera-work of L. W. O’Connell, who, the following year, would shoot Murnau’s Four Devils, merely seems to have a bit more range and appear less locked down than in Hawks’s subsequent work. Although not an important film, Paid to Love is amusingly suggestive romantic fluff, entertaining in precisely the way it intends to be. The story is rife with role-playing—the entire plot, in fact, pivots on the idea that the two leads initially present identities other than their true selves. In terms of Hawks’s career, as the title itself would indicate, it is significant as the vehicle that introduced a prototype of one category of the Hawksian woman, the vagabond showgirl–quasi-prostitute– kept woman who would appear in any number of pictures, from Barbary Coast, Come and Get It, and Only Angels Have Wings to Ball of Fire, To Have and Have Not, and Rio Bravo. In Paid to Love, this character, Dolores, is first seen performing at the exotic Café des Apaches in Paris, where she is engaged to “make love” to Michael in order to “arouse his interest” in women, a development that will inspire the confidence of the American financier who will make no further loans to the small Mediterranean country of San Savona unless a line of succession is assured.

  Hawks has fun portraying American discomfort with formal European traditions, and his purely visual presentation of Prince Michael’s lack of interest in the opposite sex is as superbly simple as it is uncharacteristic: a floor-level tracking shot follows the shapely legs of a maid; the lecherous Prince Eric turns to appreciatively stare at them, but after the legs are shown again, an oblivious Michael doesn’t bother even to glance at them. This sort of male character, who ultimately succeeds with women despite either apparent lack of interest or simple awkwardness, always amused Hawks, and it was a characteristic he pushed on occasion in his work with Cary Grant and particularly with John Wayne in his late films. The connection between the old king and Dolores is initiated by her taking a lit cigarette from him, apparently the first of countless such exchanges in Hawks’s films, and there is further cigarette play later in the picture. Given the director’s keen interest in automobiles, the sight of Michael working on an engine block in the middle of his huge, elegant living room registers as a humorously personal touch. There is also a highly erotic close-up of Valli’s Dolores after she has kissed Michael, a shot more akin to the way William Daniels would shortly be shooting Garbo for Clarence Brown or Sternberg would one day film Dietrich than to anything else in Hawks’s canon. With her hair cut short and combed wet and back, Valli looks rather like a boy with a woman’s body. The most outrageous moment of all comes when the leering Prince Eric slowly peels a banana while watching an oblivious Dolores getting undressed. Overall, there is a lovely pictorialism to the film that is impossible not to enjoy, although its self-consciousness may be what felt alien to Hawks.

  Hawks completed Paid to Love in mid-September. Normally, it would have been expected to come out before the end of the year. For unknown reasons, however, Fox sat on the film for nearly a year, by which time Hawks had directed two more features. Hawks said that the studio held it back “because they thought it was so interesting” but also maintained that by the time it came out, in late July 1927, “everybody had done everything we had done in the picture,” resulting in a flop. This makes little sense as an explanation, but there is really no reason that can account for such a protracted delay, except, perhaps, an overabu
ndance of George O’Brien titles on the release schedule. The reviews were on the mixed-to-positive side, with special kudos reserved for Valli and the visual qualities, but the director’s perennial derision of the film was no doubt prodded by its relative commercial failure.

  Hawks’s protests years later that sophisticated, European-style sex dramas were not his cup of tea perhaps should not be taken too seriously, for there is further evidence that he was enormously influenced by the likes of Murnau, Lubitsch, Dupont, and the entire Continental wave then washing over Hollywood. As soon as he finished making Paid to Love, Hawks undertook one of the most surprising and overtly emotional projects of his career, Budapest. Written by Hawks, the story was fleshed out by Seton Miller into a very detailed, scene-by-scene, forty-six-page adaptation dated January 12, 1927, that bears the intriguing alternate title The Satyr. It is, in fact, the commanding story of a big man brought low, a tale of war and sacrifice, a study of how the toughest and most egotistical of men is transformed by love. It contains several prominent motifs that would surface in later Hawks films: the leading character literally becomes crippled, the central female character is a beautiful entertainer who inspires a rivalry among three men, and one man willingly sacrifices his life to save another man, a gesture that recurs in Hawks’s early work. But it also possesses an emotionally sincere, deeply felt quality that is unusual for him, as well as a vivid illustration of how a man can possess both an exceedingly hard outward personality and a heart capable of infinite tenderness and generosity.