Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

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Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 14

by Todd McCarthy


  Fox originally bought the novel with the expectation of producing it as a silent, but with the advent of sound, a dialogued script was quickly prepared by Scott Darling and adapted by Beulah Marie Dix. It was a moment for which Hawks was well prepared. Late in 1928, rightly concerned that his lack of stage experience might endanger his livelihood, he conducted extensive tests to figure out how much dialogue a sound feature would accommodate. From a standard-sized book Hawks took five pages consisting of dialogue passages, which he had actors read at a relatively fast pace. The reading took a bit more than six minutes and ran 560 feet of film. He could thereby calculate that fifty pages of straight dialogue from a book would occupy about an hour of screen time, without allowing for any action or pauses. In the test, Hawks’s crew had trouble keeping the microphone at a consistent distance from the actors while they moved around and out of view of the camera. The test was viewed as helpful for Fox in determining how much dialogue could safely be included in a picture, and it taught Hawks that picture dialogue could be delivered quickly, despite early conventional wisdom to the contrary.

  However, no sooner had Hawks shot the first couple of scenes of Murder Will Out than he was told to stop and go back to filming it as a silent. Starring as Trent was a good friend of Hawks’s, silent star Raymond Griffith, whose vocal chords had been severely damaged by poison gas in World War I and who couldn’t speak above a hoarse whisper. Later on, Hawks unconvincingly blamed the change on Fox’s belief that Griffith’s muted voice was unsuitable for sound pictures (he said, “I thought he ought to be great in talking pictures because of that voice,” but the coming of sound did bring Griffith’s career to an end). Had this been the case, with the film just starting, Griffith’s part could easily have been recast. The truth, in fact, was much more damning of Fox: in purchasing the property, the studio’s legal department had bungled by only securing silent-picture rights; sound rights would have to be separately negotiated, at considerable further expense.

  This effectively sabotaged the picture, since the market for purely silent pictures was rapidly vanishing. One can only wonder why the studio went ahead with the project at all at this point, since it was obvious that the film would be a commercial lame duck. “By that time we knew nobody was going to look at it,” said Hawks. “We just kidded the thing … we just had fun with it. I don’t know anyone who ever saw it, because talking pictures took over right then and there.” In response to the dramatic rug having been pulled out from under him, and always tickled by Griffith’s droll, very particular sense of humor, Hawks pushed the Edwardian-era material toward comedy whenever possible—even while cinematographer Hal Rosson retained a moody, melodramatic look spiked by some elegant camera moves, low angles, and macabre special lighting effects, notably in a shot of the evil Manderson silhouetted in black in the foreground and the maid screaming when she sees him. Still, the tone is wildly uneven, with broad, arched-eyebrow acting (especially from a very hammy Donald Crisp as Manderson) conflicting with the very upper-class setting and a campy tone prevailing in the midst of ostensibly serious doings. Griffith plays Trent as a conceited dandy, and the film is riddled with disruptive flashbacks from different characters’ points of view. It could well be that the desultory result here is what set Hawks so resolutely against flashbacks, for he never again used them—and he spoke out against them—during the remainder of his career.

  Perhaps not even Hawks could have predicted how few people would end up seeing Trent’s Last Case, since it was never released at all in the United States and was not even shown to the trade press. Having finished its monthlong shoot on February 15, 1929, the ill-fated picture opened for brief runs in Great Britain on September 23, with one critic rightly stating, “It is a thousand pities that Fox has altered this classic detective novel by reducing it to the level of farce and melodrama. If I were E. C. Bentley, I should not feel flattered.”

  The film understandably vanished from sight and for decades was considered lost, until in the early 1970s a print was found among a large cache of early Fox films in Alaska (among the other titles found at the same time were Hawks’s The Cradle Snatchers and Paid to Love). Therefore, the film apparently had its American premiere on April 24, 1974, as part of a Hawks retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive. Hawks went up to Berkeley for a few days in connection with the event, but when the archive director, Tom Luddy, excitedly told him about the Trent screening, Hawks was dismayed. “You’re not going to show that, are you?” Hawks asked disdainfully. Unable to thwart the screening, Hawks sat in to see this runt of his cinematic litter for the first time, but midway through he couldn’t take it any longer and charged up to the projection booth, where he demanded that the projectionist destroy this one and only copy immediately after the screening. Naturally, his wish was not granted, but the experience was enough to reaffirm to Hawks that Trent’s Last Case was his worst film, an opinion with which it is impossible to argue.

  With Trent a total loss and Winnie Sheehan still offended by the director’s uppity attitude, Hawks’s position at Fox was extremely tenuous by the spring of 1929. Still, he balked at being reassigned to the Life’s a Gamble project that he had resisted directing the year before. Putting Hawks back on the film may have been Sheehan’s way of forcing Hawks’s hand, and for two and a half months, despite having been paid more than $23,000 for the time he was supposed to have put in on the film, Hawks did little or no work on it. Then, for a short time, he was in line to direct Big Time, a vaudeville romance cowritten by the future Astaire-Rogers director Sidney Lanfield. Although snappy and funny in a way that anticipated the kind of lightning direction Hawks would supply for his later comedies, the script was too sentimental for his taste, and he deflected this project as well.

  Finally, on May 14, Hawks was fired, for having “willfully neglected to perform his services in the manner agreed upon.” Hawks later turned the story around, claiming that his contract kept him at Fox, but inactive, for a year and a half. In 1932, he sued Fox for wrongful dismissal, whereupon the studio countersued over Hawks’s failure to fulfill the terms of his contract. Hawks later bragged to Peter Bogdanovich that Fox’s ploy backfired and that the studio was forced to pay him $120,000. But court records indicate that the suits were dismissed with prejudice, with each side required to pay its own legal fees. (Hawks also told Bogdanovich that he never again signed a contract with any studio, a claim that can be disproved time and again by the records of the subsequent years of Hawks’s career.)

  Four days after his ouster from Fox after more than four and a half years on the lot, an unsettled Hawks hired a new agent, Ruth Collier, who later testified to Hawks’s troubled position during that summer: “During the months of June, July, August and September, I made every possible and reasonable effort to secure employment for Howard Hawks as a motion picture director, and in particular, I negotiated with First National Pictures Corporation, Universal Pictures, Pathé, Warner Brothers, United Artists, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Columbia Pictures Corporation and R.K.O.; … during all of this time, and in each of the instances above set forth, I was unable to place Howard Hawks with any or either of the aforesaid companies, and was unable to secure any employment for him.”

  By contrast, Kenneth’s career was very much on the upswing. After having supervised several films at Fox and worked as an editor and story writer as well, Kenneth was promoted to director early in 1929. When David Butler, the original director of Masked Emotions, was needed on another picture, Kenneth was asked to finish the film. A silent George O’Brien melodrama about the apprehension of Chinese smugglers along the California coast, it opened to decent response that July. Then, with his brother having bowed out, Kenneth was given Big Time as his solo directorial debut, to shoot in June, and he did a fine job with it. Lee Tracy and Mae Clarke played young New York vaudevillians looking for their break. The talented pair are on their way up to headliner status when she becomes pregnant, which leads the otherwise thoughtful husband to introduce another
woman into the act. Clarke dutifully instructs the newcomer, portrayed by Daphne Pollard, in the required routines, and before long Pollard begins trying to seduce Tracy. The fateful moment arrives in the form of an invitation to play the Palace: Pollard manages to convince Tracy to squeeze his wife out of the act in order to take the coveted gig. But Tracy is soon sorry, as Clarke walks out on him, leaving him desolate despite having, ever so briefly, made the big time. Soon reduced to working as a waiter in a slophouse, Tracy learns from faithful vaudeville janitor Stepin Fetchit that Clarke has gone to Hollywood. So Tracy rides the rails out west and manages to land a job as an extra in a film in which both Clarke and their precocious kid are starring. He collapses from hunger after they meet on the set, but she finally says, “Come back to me” and sings “Nobody Loves You like I Do” to bring things to a happy close.

  It is easy to see that Howard would have considered the story too sappy for him, but Kenneth made breezy, generally heartwarming fun out of it, thanks in no small measure to the crackling performances of Clarke and, especially, Tracy. Some pretty decent vaudeville routines are presented at length, and although some of the acting is on the theatrical side, it can certainly be said that Howard Hawks did not invent fast dialogue direction, as his brother proved quite accomplished at it here, several months before Howard had ever directed a talking picture.

  There are some distinctive, even memorable humorous scenes: Tracy squealing, spinning, and crowing, “Am I a man!” when his wife informs him she’s pregnant; a lovely camera move in on Clarke’s disturbed face as she teaches Pollard some dance steps; the weird collision of comic styles in a scene between Tracy, who may have been the fastest talker in movies, and Fetchit, who was probably the slowest; a cameo by John Ford as himself; and Tracy’s resourcefulness upon facing his toughest audience, a farmer in a mule-filled freight car who says, “Make me laugh.” Although the film may not be particularly strong on visual style, it boasts a pleasing feel for backstage life and stands as a very creditable thematic precursor to A Star Is Born. It is a fine example of early sound filmmaking not overtly hampered by technical constraints or lack of know-how, and it is solid proof that Kenneth Hawks had talent. Upon its successful release at the Roxy in New York on September 7, Kenneth began preparing his next project, a melodrama called Such Men Are Dangerous, which would go into production toward year’s end.

  6

  A New Dawn

  One cup to the dead already—Hurrah for the next that dies!

  —Bartholomew Dowling

  With producers and the studios convinced that legitimate stage directors were far more qualified to direct sound pictures than most silent filmmakers, Hawks realized over the summer of 1929 that extraordinary measures might be needed to put himself over in this new era of film production. Not that he had any doubts about his ability; it was almost immediately apparent that his natural inclination to underplay, to cut across obvious and conventional effects, and to allow the natural personalities of his performers full reign would serve Hawks even better in sound than they had in silents. Nonetheless, he had to get his shot, and by August he was arranging to do this through a bit of subterfuge.

  At the time, John Monk Saunders was one of the most respected, sought-after writers in the business. A World War I flying instructor who, like Hawks, hadn’t gone overseas, he had heard a lot of war stories from British, Canadian, and French fliers while at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in 1919–20, as well as from Yanks when he lodged at the American Flying Club in New York upon his return. After taking up newspaper and magazine work, he wrote a story in 1923 that became Wings, the first Hollywood picture to depict the war in the air and an enormous commercial success that, in 1927, became the first picture to win the Academy Award. Married in 1928 to the actress Fay Wray, Saunders was a full-fledged member of the Lost Generation, a glamorous, good-looking young man of refined breeding and excellent education who drank a lot and had a strong self-destructive streak. In the summer of 1929, when he was thirty-one, he was just finishing a novel called Single Lady, inspired by a decadent affair he had had that spring with a young heiress named Nikki he met at the Ritz Bar in Paris. In 1931 the novel was produced on Broadway as a musical, Nikki, with Wray as the heiress. Saunders later wrote a screen adaptation of the same material, The Last Flight. This film, directed by William Dieterle in 1931, represents a fascinating treatment of former World War I fliers living in dissolute glamour in 1920s Paris, and its story, spirit, and tone make it the closest cinematic equivalent to The Sun Also Rises, Saunders’s favorite novel. It also made Saunders an obvious choice for Hawks’s next project.

  The idea behind The Dawn Patrol concerned a small group of British fliers continually faced with near-suicidal bombing missions on German targets; the men bear up under the tension through an intense bonhomie and the constant intake of liquor. In later years, Hawks claimed to have come up with the story himself, telling Kevin Brownlow that he paid Saunders “$10,000 to put his name on it because I knew they wouldn’t accept me as a writer of dialogue because I’d never been backstage. And Dick Barthelmess read it and I was assigned to make it with Barthelmess, and it was the biggest grossing picture of the year—Dawn Patrol. After that everything was easy.”

  Hawks recalled things in more detail to Peter Bogdanovich: “I got the idea from a story—I think it was by Irvin Cobb—about an evening with a British squadron that was being hit hard.… David Selznick went to John Monk Saunders to try to buy it. He wanted to give it to Billy Wellman [a former war pilot who had directed Wings], not me, and then when he couldn’t do that, he came to me to see if I’d do it, and I told him I didn’t think he was any kind of guy I’d want to work with because he’d gone behind my back. I said, ‘Didn’t you know I wrote that story?’ And he said, ‘No.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t do it with you if I never make the picture.’ So I made it with Barthelmess at Warners. Funny thing—I almost made it with Jack Gilbert. Gilbert hadn’t made a talking picture, but he was the biggest star we ever had in silent pictures and Louis B. Mayer got me to bring Gilbert in and talk to him. Well, Gilbert went back and told Mayer he’d make the picture without any salary and that’s all Mayer wanted, because he told Gilbert he wouldn’t let him do it if he paid to make the picture. He wanted to humiliate him. I got Mayer by the front of the coat and bumped his head up against the wall and said, ‘Don’t ever make me part of your dirty little schemes again.’ I didn’t stand too well with Mayer for a while.”

  As Fay Wray recalled it, Hawks turned up at their house on Selma just west of Fairfax one Sunday morning that summer with a story idea “that he wanted John to sell because John was most successful with scripts about aviation.” The two men, she felt, would properly share story credit, but Hawks “wanted no authorship credit for himself on the screen or in advertising; he instructed the studio of that choice in writing.” Both Wray and the film’s costar, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., remembered Saunders working on the script at the studio and, subsequently, rewriting dialogue on the set, so Wray was always astonished decades later when she heard Hawks immodestly assume total responsibility for both the story and script. When they ran into each other at the 1966 Montreal Film Festival, she asked him about this, and she was even more amazed at his casual attitude toward giving Saunders screen credit—“I told him to go ahead and take it”—when it had cost him a share of an Academy Award.

  Having accompanied her husband to the Oscar ceremonies in 1931, when The Dawn Patrol won the award for best original story, Wray noted that Saunders’s acceptance speech acknowledged a degree of ambiguity concerning the extent to which he deserved exclusive credit for the film, as it questioned “which came first, the chicken or the egg.” As Wray remarked, “He might have said the chicken hawk or the chicken hawk’s egg. Howard Hawks had been involved with the story, as well as the direction of that film.”

  Nonetheless, Saunders remembered it differently. In a sworn deposition given in August 1930, in connection with Howard Hughes’s laws
uit over material allegedly stolen by the creator of The Dawn Patrol from his film Hell’s Angels, Saunders stated that he had dined with former war journalist Irvin S. Cobb at the latter’s Park Avenue apartment in 1919 and had that night heard the story of “young British pilots in a combat squadron in an airdrome at the front. [Cobb] was impressed by the gallant manner in which each of these young inexperienced and untrained pilots flew out in the morning to face almost certain death in aerial combat with veteran German air fighters. Between themselves and death these young British fliers hung up an alcoholic curtain of laughter, song and card playing. Mr. Cobb said that he would never forget the magnificent courage and spirit which those young Englishmen displayed.” Saunders added that while at Oxford, he had quizzed such pilots specifically about the situation Cobb had described.

  The writer mentioned that Hawks had approached him a year before, saying that “he would like to obtain an air story with a war atmosphere as a starring vehicle for the well-known actor Ronald Colman. He stated that Samuel Goldwyn would buy such a story for the purpose of starring Mr. Colman and would employ Howard Hawks to direct it.… I then told Hawks the idea Mr. Cobb had given me … that I had in mind a story involving that tragic atmosphere of which Mr. Cobb had spoken, that to my knowledge the subject of a British airdrome at the front and the comradeship and attitude of mind of the British pilots had never been shown on the screen and that we had therefore a story which was in background and atmosphere altogether original.… I then gave Mr. Hawks a synopsis of the story which I had in mind [“The Flight Commander”] and which was later produced on the screen under the title of The Dawn Patrol.

 

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