“Well, Jack being the great fellow he was said, ‘Well, if the part is better than the one in mine, certainly, for goodness sakes take it.’ Doug did, and he was such a howling success in it that it established him as a star.”
The experienced stage actor Neil Hamilton was selected for another principal role, Major Brand, whose command Courtney relieves. In search of a cameraman, Hawks talked to Harry F. Perry, who had done considerable shooting on Wings, Now We’re in the Air, and Hell’s Angels, but Barthelmess insisted upon “his own personal cameraman,” Ernest Haller, a polished studio craftsman who was inarguably more experienced.
By February 28, 1930, when The Dawn Patrol started shooting, Howard Hughes was in the final stages of converting his air epic, Hell’s Angels, into a talking picture. The film had begun shooting in September 1927 under the direction of Marshall Neilan. Luther Reed had later taken over before Hughes himself assumed the director’s chair in April 1928. When talkies hit, Hughes rightly judged that he couldn’t risk sending out his nearly three-million-dollar investment as a silent, so he began reshooting it with dialogue, with a partly new cast that included Jean Harlow, under the direction of James Whale; the film finally wrapped in November 1929.
In a move that was both shrewd and shameless, Hawks began interviewing and hiring many of the experts who had just finished working on Hell’s Angels. Among them were Elmer Dyer, the chief aerial cameraman on the Hughes film, who would become a good friend of Hawks’s and shoot the airborne footage in Only Angels Have Wings and Air Force; Harry Reynolds, a mechanical engineer and aviation technician; and Ira Reed, a pilot-actor. There was nothing Hughes could do about this, but when he learned what the Dawn Patrol company was up to, he tried to buy up all the World War I fighter planes he didn’t already own, even though his picture was finished. In Wallis’s view, Hughes, “furious that we dared make a rival picture … raised competitiveness to the level of mania,” sparking a run on the market for old Spads and Camels.
Having heard that The Dawn Patrol contained dramatic incidents that seemed suspiciously similar to some in his picture, Hughes tried various other ploys to thwart the production. According to Hawks, the first time he met Hughes was when the young tycoon turned up unannounced at Hawks’s house one Sunday morning. Hughes, he said, objected to a scene from The Dawn Patrol that resembled one in his film, in which a fighter pilot is shot in the chest and coughs up blood before his plane explodes, and tried to talk the director out of using it. In one account, Hawks said that he replied, “Howard, I make pictures for a living, you make them for fun. I got a hangover. I’m not interested in talking about it.” In a legal deposition, Hawks declared that he told Hughes, “‘Hell, anybody in a war, when they get shot in an airplane, the chest is the biggest target. That’s just the usual thing.’ … I think I used some harsh words about it. Anyway, I refused to do it.”
After this acrimonious initial meeting with Hawks, Hughes plotted to ground the First National project by legal means, but through an illegal maneuver. Hughes induced one of his writers to bribe Hawks’s secretary into giving him a copy of the script of The Dawn Patrol. She informed Hawks, whereupon the studio had two detectives waiting, and they arrested Hughes’s man for theft.
Hawks said that “Hughes called me up and said, ‘Hey, you’ve got my writer in jail.’ And I said, ‘That’s where the so-and-so belongs.’ I said, ‘Why did you try to corrupt a perfectly nice girl by bribing her? If you wanted a script, I’d have given you one. Now I don’t give a damn about it.’”
First National filed for a restraining order to prevent Hughes from any further interference with their production, while Hughes sued for plagiarism in a desperate attempt to postpone the opening of The Dawn Patrol to a time well after Hell’s Angels had played out. Hughes testified that he had had a long meeting with John Monk Saunders at the Wilshire Country Club early in 1929, at which he had described Hell’s Angels to his fellow flier at length, including his ideas for the “munitions bombing” climax. He added that he knew that Howard Hawks “was informed in full detail concerning the motion picture ‘Hell’s Angels’ and the various scenes and maneuvers portrayed in the air sequences and the unusual methods of photography used therein.” In a sworn affidavit, Hughes went on for ten court manuscript pages about how The Dawn Patrol had “copied every detail portrayed in the picture ‘Hell’s Angels,’ in addition to copying the dramatic characterization, sequences, motivation and the greater part of the dramatic incidents connected with the final bombing sequence.”
In March, the company began shooting the English airdrome scenes at Triumfo, off Ventura Boulevard, forty miles west of Burbank, although heavy rainstorms disrupted filming and stretched the stay there to three weeks. The German airdrome sequence, shot at Newhall, took an additional four days. But as the arduous shooting of The Dawn Patrol reached late May, the climax had yet to be filmed. Hughes claimed that late in the month, when he learned that his rivals were preparing to shoot their dramatic finish, the daring raid on a German ammo dump, he objected to the sequence to Hawks, given its similarity to a crucial episode in Hell’s Angels. Hawks, Hughes said, told him that he could change the scene “without affecting the value of the picture … and that he would make the change as the photographing of that sequence had not been commenced.” The next day, however, Hawks told Hughes that Hal Wallis had refused to make any changes, thus taking the onus off Hawks. Furthermore, Hughes complained, the bombing sequence wasn’t even shot until after May 27, 1930, “when Howard Hawks and other First National executives attended the opening of Hell’s Angels.”
In fact, upon wrapping the picture within days thereafter, Warner Bros., which released all First National products, rushed The Dawn Patrol through final editing and into release. The film premiered on July 10 at the Winter Garden in New York to excellent reviews and even better business; it was standing room only for the entire first week, smashing the house record with a take of $51,200. Reliable figures on its eventual earnings don’t exist, but the film was a tremendous success, one of the biggest hits of the year. After the tremendous hoopla of his Hell’s Angels premiere at Grauman’s Chinese in Hollywood, Hughes returned to the cutting room to make some refinements on his film. Its second engagement, in a tighter version, didn’t begin until July 18, in Seattle, head-to-head with The Dawn Patrol, after which it fanned out across the country to strong public response. Still, the weighty $2,500,000 gross fell at least $1.3 million short of what Hughes had spent on his pet project over nearly three years; however, Hughes expected to make a profit from foreign revenues.
As far as the court case was concerned, Hawks’s later self-serving explanation was that Hughes reached him by phone at a golf course, saying he wanted to play with him, a proposal Hawks refused because of the lawsuit. “I’ll call it off,” Hawks claimed Hughes said, whereupon Hawks supposedly beat Hughes on the links with a 71 to Hughes’s 72. In fact, the matter was resolved by a single judge at one sitting. Wallis recalled, “I sat with Jack Warner in Judge Cosgrove’s chambers, U.S. District Court, while he ran Dawn Patrol and Hell’s Angels. His judgment was unequivocal. No plagiarism was involved. As it turned out, both pictures did extremely well and probably helped each other out.” Nonetheless, Hughes and Hawks had managed to break the ice, and they soon realized they had more than a few things in common: golf, women, pictures, and a well-developed contempt for the Hollywood establishment and conventional rules. It wouldn’t take long for these two lanky, taciturn men to start talking about working together.
Convinced on the eve of The Dawn Patrol’s opening that it had a success on its hands, on July 8 First National signed Hawks to a three-picture deal at $25,000 per film. (For good measure, John Monk Saunders was simultaneously signed to a contract.) During the shooting, however, studio executives, and Wallis in particular, hadn’t been so sure that Hawks knew what he was doing. Yes, the aerial footage was excitingly effective, but Hawks had kept his actors on a very tight leash, directing them to speak thei
r often bitter, ironic, clipped dialogue in a very stylized way, without the heightened histrionics customary in the earliest sound films. Hawks later said, “Actually, The Dawn Patrol was the first dramatic talkie made without a lot of overacting. It was very quiet. During the shooting I had thirty or forty communications from the front office saying I had a marvelous chance to make a good scene and didn’t do anything with it. It was just a different way of playing it, you see. I was saying that they had been emoting too much and by underplaying we got away from that.… After that it was easy. Nobody asked me if I knew it. It was just a new form of acting, and that doesn’t happen very much. People liked the scenes because they were underdone, because they were thrown away. Nobody emoted in the pictures that I made.”
Hawks admitted that, of his three leads, Hamilton was the least willing to toe the line, and that he “was probably a little ‘on stage.’” Barthelmess fell into the method easily, and Fairbanks wasn’t a problem because, being young and relatively new to acting, “You could control him.” In terms of its dialogue delivery, The Dawn Patrol does stand apart from the majority of films made in the 1929–30 period, but so do a few others, most notably Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause and Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco, in which the dialogue, if not at all naturalistic, did not sound projected as if from a theater stage. Today, the dialogue in these films, including The Dawn Patrol, sounds just as artificial as drawing-room chatter, but in a different way, a way more comfortable because it points in the direction that the best screen dialogue of the coming decade would take—fast, terse, hard-bitten, and unfancy.
In terms of its expression of what would become known as the Hawksian world, The Dawn Patrol is far from fully elaborated, but it did introduce any number of themes and motifs that the director would develop in subsequent years. The pressure-cooker principle set is something that would appear again in many films, from Ceiling Zero, Only Angels Have Wings, and To Have and Have Not to Rio Bravo and Hatari!, from which the characters venture out on hazardous missions into an unpredictable and hostile world; there is also the pronounced feeling of living for the present alone, an attitude made explicit here by Barthelmess’s statement that the past “seems like it never happened”; the sense of camaraderie among a group of men brought together for a single purpose, a bond furthered by off-hours drinking and singing (the parallel between Hugh Herbert’s drunken braying in the motorcycle sidecar and a scene in Hatari! is striking); the preference for individual initiative over official orders as a means of achieving a desired goal, best expressed here by Barthelmess and Fairbanks’s daring dawn attack on the German camp, the film’s most exciting and impressive sequence; the quasisuicidal mission, something that would appear repeatedly in Hawks’s films through the mid-1930s; and the mutual respect of fellow professionals, even if life has pitted them as enemies, signaled here in Barthelmess’s gallant salute of recognition to the German pilot who shoots him down (played by Hawks himself) and summed up most explicitly some thirty-five years later when John Wayne, in El Dorado, tells his nemesis, Christopher George, after shooting him, “You’re too good to give a chance to.” Between the writing of the initial treatment and the final screenplay, Hawks toned down the element of rivalry over women between Courtney and Scott, diminishing it from the Girl in Every Port I-got-there-first motif to a passing reference to how the two men had competed for the same girl in Paris. And on a very personal, less thematic note, one can hardly miss the arrival of Scott’s kid brother, a less expert flier who, despite his older brother’s efforts to warn and protect him, gets himself killed in a plane.
Even though Hawks never fought in the European war, his film caught the fatalism and waste of a generation as strongly as did Journey’s End, The Last Flight, or any other film on the subject. Although no one mentioned it at the time, it also positioned him as the closest thing to a Hemingway of the cinema, in the way he eloquently and poetically defined his characters through their attitude toward what they did. Instinctively, Hawks expressed the novelist’s famous maxim of grace under pressure; he would continue to do so, with increasing skill and complexity, for several decades.
7
The Criminal Code
Hawks’s new First National deal provided for him to be loaned out to other studios. Right after The Dawn Patrol opened, Universal crowed about how it had snared the town’s newest hot director to make an aviation picture. But Harry Cohn had already approached Hawks about doing a picture for his low-rent studio, Columbia. In terms of financing and prestige, Columbia was a significant cut below the true major studios, such as MGM and Paramount, but above some of the thinly capitalized companies that wouldn’t survive the Depression. Columbia couldn’t afford to sign major stars to long-term contracts, so Cohn instead sometimes placed his chips on directors he thought might bring in a good picture. He’d recently used Victor Fleming, who may well have recommended Hawks to him and did tell Hawks that Cohn was someone he might want to talk with. After initially trying to snare Lewis Milestone, at the moment one of the two or three most sought-after directors in town, something told Cohn that Hawks might be worth the gamble.
Urgently searching for material that would be appropriate for sound pictures, Columbia bought the rights to Martin Flavin’s stage play The Criminal Code, which opened on Broadway on October 2, 1929. The grimly bitter drama, which was well received critically and ran for a respectable twenty-two weeks, was part of a new movement in theater and films keyed to exposing prison conditions and advocating penal reform. Centered on a reform-minded new warden and a young man doing time for an accidental killing, the play was designed to demonstrate how abhorrent conditions, along with a “code” that demanded prisoners not rat on each other, could drive an essentially decent man over the edge to become a killer. Hawks knew that the character of the warden “was based on a district attorney in California who was sentenced to prison, and they had to put him in the prison hospital to protect him because the place was full of men he had sent up—and I’m quite sure he’d framed a lot of them. Finally he said, ‘I can’t take this any longer. I want to go out into the yard.’ He went out into the yard, and the scene we did in the picture was just what had happened, except that [the actor Walter] Huston was the warden. He walked right out among them, daring them, and no one made a move.”
Flavin made four unsuccessful attempts to adapt his work to the screen for Columbia, but as soon as Hawks was signed (for thirty thousand dollars, compared to Walter Huston’s forty thousand), the director brought in his frequent collaborator Seton I. Miller, who helped Hawks turn the property around in less than a month. (Fred Niblo Jr. also received screenplay credit, but there is no record of his specific contributions to the picture.) Hawks and Miller felt that the play’s first two acts worked well but that the third act fell completely flat. For starters, they removed the prominent character of a prison doctor who becomes taken with the young prisoner’s case and argues for an improvement in his big-house job and conditions. But the most crucial change they made involved taking the murder weapon out of the hands of the young man (Phillips Holmes) and putting it into those of another prisoner, Galloway (played by Boris Karloff), thereby allowing for a happy ending (the young man is able to pursue his romance with the warden’s beautiful young daughter) but also effectively removing the pre–New Deal left-wing social determinism from the piece. This change, Hawks said, was not invented by him or his writers but by some actual convicts whom the director asked for advice; similarly, numerous ex-cons helped populate the prison for the movie. Hawks also strengthened the camaraderie of the prisoners, especially in his emphasis on “the convicts’ code of not squealing” and built up the comic elements. “I loved the scene with Walter in the barber chair staring at the fellow shaving him. ‘Don’t I know you?’ And the man said, ‘You do.’ ‘I sent you up, didn’t I?’ He said, ‘You did.’ Walter said, ‘I don’t remember what for.’ And as he lifted Walter’s chin, he said, ‘For cutting a guy’s throat.’ I liked that. I let the s
cene run a hundred feet—just watching Walter’s eyes. It was the first time I discovered almost any tragedy can also be very amusing.”
For Hawks, the greatest pleasure of making The Criminal Code was collaborating with Walter Huston, whom he said was “the greatest actor I ever worked with.” Constance Cummings, who was cast as his daughter at the last minute and was also terribly impressed with her costar, remembered Hawks spending most of his time with Huston, to the point where she felt left out of the otherwise virtually all-male cast and crew. Phillips Holmes, a young pretty boy who enjoyed a brief vogue in the early 1930s before vanishing from the scene, was as bland and ineffectual as ever, one of the few painfully sincere performances to have been allowed through in a Hawks film.
Beginning September 23, 1930, the film shot largely in sequence on six- and sometimes seven-day weeks through November 8. With rewrites continuing apace, Hawks worked for the first time with cinematographer James Wong Howe for the first three weeks, mostly on the early scenes in the warden’s and the D.A.’s offices, the police station, and Spelvin’s Café, a big scene shot on the Universal lot. When Howe left to shoot another picture, Ted Tetzlaff came in for the remaining four weeks to photograph all the prison scenes, including the five days spent on the spectacular prison-yard set, where Huston wades in amongst the convicts.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 16