Hawks’s passion for cars was at the root of his next film. As the sorry changes were being wrought on Scarface, Hawks was plotting to make his return to First National very much on his own terms. The Barker: A Play of Carnival Life, by Kenyon Nicholson, had been produced on Broadway in 1917 starring Walter Huston as a barker who is living with a younger woman. When his son comes to visit, the father doesn’t want him to discover the arrangement, so the older man has his girlfriend recruit a friend of hers to seduce the son. Hawks liked this basic situation and decided to fold it into the sort of competitive story between two men that he instinctively favored.
More involved in yachting and boating of late, thanks to Athole, than in auto racing, Hawks initially considered setting the story in the milieu of speedboat racing, with James Cagney and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as the leads, but he soon returned to the sport he knew better. As the resulting film, The Crowd Roars, eventually turned out, the story concerned an older, experienced race-car driver who takes his green-but-avid younger brother under his wing. The change from father-son to brother-brother could easily be interpreted as an autobiographical move on Hawks’s part, a way of portraying his relationship with Kenneth on-screen. However, Hawks’s original workup of the story, in which the characters are unrelated, shows that there’s nothing to this analysis; the story is more an expression of how women can disrupt the close relationship between close male friends. Joe Greer, a “hard-boiled veteran of the racing game; four-time winner at Indianapolis,” arrives with his buddy Spud Smith in Wichita, home of racing hopeful Eddie Murphy. After Eddie impresses him with his skills, Joe asks the kid to drive his number-two car in a race the next day. When Eddie wins, Joe invites him on the remainder of the tour, which ends in Los Angeles with the winter racing season.
Back in L.A., Joe’s mistress, Lee, quickly comes to resent Joe’s preoccupation with Eddie, whom Joe now feels is a potential champion. When Joe and Lee split up, Lee goes to stay with her friend Anne Morton—“a pretty girl, no virgin”—to persuade her to hook Eddie, then sink him. Instead, after a wild party, Anne falls in love with Eddie after sleeping with him, which finishes off Joe and Eddie’s friendship. In the next race, Eddie races against Joe furiously; trying to avoid Eddie, Joe’s buddy Spud crashes and dies, whereupon the guilt-ridden Eddie disappears.
Suddenly, it’s Indy 500 time, and everyone converges there. Eddie and Anne meet again. During the race, Joe breaks an arm but keeps driving, but after Eddie, Anne, and Lee meet him during a pit stop, Eddie takes over in Joe’s car. Haunted by the black smoke of an accident he is forced to pass through again and again, as he did when Spud died, Eddie spins out, but he’s okay, and the foursome, reunited and grinning, head off “already planning next year’s race.”
In October 1931, shortly before he reported back to Hughes to rewrite material for Scarface retakes, Seton Miller was paged by Hawks to help him with the story; this would be their eighth, and final, collaboration. At once, the character relationships changed: Joe Greer and Eddie became brothers, and Lee is introduced at the outset, traveling with Joe and Spud. With his initial success, Eddie quickly becomes so cocky and obnoxious that Lee comes to hate him, and she isn’t pleased when her friend Anne falls in love with him rather than getting him out of the picture. Instead of being Eddie’s fault, Spud’s death is laid at Joe’s feet, and Joe then becomes a derelict. Wandering into Indianapolis, he runs into Lee in a hash house, and Joe watches his brother doing well in the race until Eddie breaks his arm. Joe jumps in to drive while Eddie takes the mechanic’s seat, and as they spin out, the upbeat “wait ’til next year” ending remains.
Ever since seeing him for the first time, Hawks had wanted to work with Cagney, whose electric performance in The Public Enemy had shot him to stardom. With gangster films now out and Warner Bros. wanting to modify the star’s image somewhat from the bantam tough guys he’d been playing, The Roar of the Crowd, as it was known during production, seemed like a good fit. To turn the Hawks-Miller story into a full screenplay, the studio’s new production chief, Darryl F. Zanuck, turned to the lot’s star writers, Kubec Glasmon and John Bright, who had written the previous four Cagney films. Hawks was about to leave for Indiana with cameraman Hans F. Koenekamp to shoot some background racing footage in Indianapolis, so Glasmon and Bright joined them, stopping in South Bend on the way to attend the Notre Dame–University of Southern California football game, soak up some atmosphere, and meet some actual race drivers.
Older and more conservative Glasmon was a mentor to Bright, a brash young left-winger who was responsible for a fair share of the proletarian fire that ripped through Warner Bros. films of the early 1930s. Unsurprisingly, Hawks took an immediate dislike to him, and Bright returned the compliment. While in Indianapolis, Glasmon and Bright stayed at a fleapit they called the “Hotel Cesspool” in order to hang out with the drivers, while Hawks stayed at the mansion of Fred Dusenberg, the maker, with his brother Augie, of the most elegant new car in the country. Dusenberg readily agreed to loan quite a few racing cars for use in the picture, and Hawks slyly managed to induce him to throw in a new Dusenberg for himself in exchange for the publicity.
Bright heard a true story from a racer about how a jealous driver had caused the death of a friend during a race and related it to Hawks, who was unresponsive. Bright was later amused to learn that Hawks had told the story to Zanuck as if it were his own, whereupon Zanuck recounted it back to Glasmon and Bright as if he had thought it up. This would be a typical example of Hawksian credit-taking if such an incident had not already been present in the treatments originally written by Hawks and then Miller.
While Hawks and Koenekamp remained in Indianapolis to shoot some racing footage, Glasmon and Bright were ordered home to knock out a draft. In their presence, Zanuck dictated a nine-page, single-spaced letter to Hawks that contained all their combined ideas about the script, a document that reveals Zanuck’s leading role in making Warner Bros. films the sharpest, most vibrant, and fastest-paced of the early 1930s. Zanuck posited that although the story “may be lacking in plot twists, such twists are not essential with so colorful a background and such a sound foundation for a dramatic, human story.” He also insisted that the script be cut down by a third, to no more than one hundred pages. The dialogue, he felt, “is lacking in the sparkle and the quick wit of the modern picture … we should tell our story in the modern manner of compressed drama.… What we want to achieve is the rapid story progression that we had in The Public Enemy and you had in The Dawn Patrol.” To this end, he made dozens of specific points and suggestions and was vigilant about discarding clichés. He also felt that Anne shouldn’t fall in love with Eddie after spending just one night with him. “The next sequence is after a lapse of time, and gives her time to fall in love with him. Otherwise he would have to have a terrifically long donniker to have her fall in love with him overnight.” He also expressed alarm over the budget, pointing out that even The Dawn Patrol, one of Warners’ biggest hits of the previous year, “made a net profit of less than $200,000—and pictures are not making anywhere near as much as they were when The Dawn Patrol was released.”
After doing one rewrite of the first draft, Glasmon and Bright were ushered off the picture. Niven Busch, a twenty-eight-year-old writer just in from New York, where he had written for Time and the New Yorker, was brought in to rewrite during the shoot. For some reason, Zanuck believed Busch was supposed to be great with dialogue, although Busch had never written any in his life. Every evening after shooting, Busch would go to Hawks’s Bedford Drive house, where “with unerring accuracy [Hawks] would describe how the [next day’s] scene should go. I’d make rough notes, and then I’d go back to my apartment in Hollywood, with my memory fresh, [and] I’d write the scene, which would take me till after midnight.” The next morning, Busch would be on the set with the fresh pages. Aside from the dialogue Cagney changed (and, in Busch’s opinion, mostly improved) to suit his style, Busch claimed that all the dialogue in the picture
was his. Busch, who went on to write such Western landmarks as The Westerner, Duel in the Sun, Pursued, and The Furies, also appeared in the film briefly as a gambler, ad-libbing a scene with Cagney.
Although he admired Hawks’s talent, Busch admitted that he was hardly awestruck and “sort of felt [Hawks] was covering up something.” Later on into the shoot, when he was feeling more confident, Busch dared to suggest that a scene ought to be written differently than the director was advising. Hawks stopped him with “his reptilian glare. The man had ice-cold blue eyes and the coldest of manners.” As Busch recalled it, Hawks then said, “‘Niven, we have no time to waste. I want to explain something to you. What we’re writing and shooting is my adaptation of a play by Kenyon Nicholson called The Barker. It played on Broadway for two years. I have taken it out of a carnival setting and put it on the racetrack. It’s working very well. Nobody is going to understand its source. Now, here is The Barker.’ And he pulls out of his back pocket a tattered, coverless Samuel French play edition. He opens it and he says, ‘Here is the scene we’re shooting tomorrow. Write it the way it is here, but don’t use the same words!’” Busch later asked him if he wasn’t worried about a plagiarism suit, but Hawks replied that there was nothing to worry about since Warner Bros. already owned The Barker.
The first day of production was a night shoot on December 7 at Ascot Motor Speedway that lasted from 6:30 P.M. until 4:30 A.M. Thirteen race cars were photographed in action at what was known on the circuit as the “killer track” because, since its construction in 1924, it had claimed the lives of twenty-four drivers, more than any other track in the nation during the same period. Two additional outings were made to Ascot, and the worst mishap occurred when the car driven by Leo Nomis turned over and injured him. On the weekend before Christmas, Hawks and the crew also traveled to Ventura Race Track up the coast, although fog, low clouds, and wet conditions severely limited what could be shot there.
Originally, the sexy Warner Bros. contract player Dorothy Mackaill was cast as Lee, Cagney’s mistress, with Hawks’s playmate Ann Dvorak on-board as the temptress Anne. Just before shooting, however, Hawks decided he didn’t care for Mackaill and brought in one of the studio’s busiest young actresses, the spunky Joan Blondell, who had appeared repeatedly opposite Cagney of late. Once they got down to work, however, Blondell announced, “I can’t play a neurotic,” and Dvorak decided, “I can’t play an ingenue,” so, with Hawks’s agreement, they swapped roles without even telling the studio.
Shooting six-day weeks right through the holidays, with only Christmas and New Year’s Day off, and wrapping February 1 after twenty-six days of filming, longish for a Warners film of the time, Hawks enjoyed himself thoroughly, mostly because of the cars and Cagney. His adolescent interest in cars revived, Hawks recruited a dozen professional racers, including 1930 Indy winner Billy Arnold, to appear in the picture, and nothing like the wild action they created had ever been seen in feature films before. Both Dusenberg brothers came to the shoot to see what Hawks was up to with their cars, and Augie created a special tow bar that allowed one car to pull another and then release it automatically at a desired moment. In one scene, the dust becomes so thick that it’s obvious the drivers can’t see through it, creating considerable suspense, although no one got hurt filming it. For another sequence, gasoline was poured over a section of the track, and the resultant fire made for an equally exciting spectacle. The racing scenes are decidedly the highlights of the film, and so intense did they seem in their time that at the opening-night show caught by the New York press, several women became hysterical when Frank McHugh was burned and killed. “This is no movie for weak-hearted people,” the New York Graphic advised.
Hawks adored working with Cagney because the actor was always coming up with things that surprised him on the set. Most “personality” actors, like Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, and John Wayne, delivered pretty much what their director knew they would. But Cagney “had these funny little attitudes, you know, the way he held his hands and things like that. I tried to make the most of them, and I think we did pretty well even though I didn’t know how he worked.”
Even though Cagney’s Joe Greer is a hard-living, fast-talking guy in the manner of his earlier characterizations, this was generally considered a “reformed” role for the actor, after his portraits of bootleggers and killers. But while the racing footage was widely admired as exciting, the scenes in between were found rather routine, even dull by many reviewers. Today, the premise of an older brother having to hide his girlfriend from his younger brother seems like a bit of a stretch, and as Eddie, Eric Linden, like Phillips Holmes in The Criminal Code the year before, gives one of the rare bland “ingenue” performances in a Hawks film.
What’s more, it is clear here that Hawks hasn’t yet found his own formula for presenting women on the screen. Ann Dvorak, while good at what her cast-off lover role demands, plays a complainer, a woman who mopes about her sad predicament after being dumped by Joe. As such, she is highly atypical for a Hawks character; her type, like Eddie’s, will quickly be banished from his world. The level on which The Crowd Roars promises to be most interesting, that of the rivalry between two adventurous brothers, also proves pretty much of a washout; the older brother is so dominant, and the relationship so unequal, that there is nothing particularly interesting or complex about it.
10
Tiger Shark
A Midwesterner, Howard Hawks never felt the call of the sea. However, he did heed the call of fashion, and as sailing became the rage among picture folk, Hawks yielded to the urgings of his wife and bought a yacht. Athole had done considerable sailing off Long Island before coming to California, and after Hawks bought a sixty-foot Norwegian sloop (which he named, naturally enough, the Sea Hawk), Athole became a very good sailor. With a good deal more time to devote to it than her husband, who in any event preferred golfing, flying, and hunting, Athole even took up boat racing. On one occasion during a race around Catalina Island, Athole’s brother Doug fell overboard, and witnesses credited Athole with saving Doug’s life, as she expertly brought the boat back around and fished him out before it was too late. Docked at San Pedro, the Sea Hawk was often taken on family outings to Catalina on weekends. Hawks was game for a while, learning the rudiments of sailing and enjoying the social side of it. But he would often get seasick and “never took to it too much,” in their son David’s view. Finally, taking the helm one day, Hawks made a navigational error and Athole corrected him. Furious at being faulted by his wife, Hawks never went sailing again.
Nevertheless, Hawks was to spend a good deal of time shipboard through the first half of 1932. On February 1, immediately upon wrapping The Crowd Roars, First National announced that Hawks would make “a fish story” called Tuna. First, however, Hawks and Athole would take a much-needed vacation together. After the breakneck schedule that saw him complete The Dawn Patrol, The Criminal Code, Scarface, and The Crowd Roars within two years’ time, Hawks needed a breather. Their marriage also needed some attention. Although raising Peter, now seven, and David, now two, was gratifying and more than filled her time, Athole felt seriously neglected by her always-busy husband. “She would get upset if he wouldn’t be home at 6 P.M., even if it was just because of late work at the studio,” their daughter Barbara later said, and Hawks was rarely home by 6 P.M. Athole had basically recovered from the serious breakdown she had had the summer before, and at least she could be reassured that Howard’s fling with Ann Dvorak was over, presuming she knew about it at all, since the actress was engaged to the British-born actor Leslie Fenton and would marry him in March.
Within a week of his finishing The Crowd Roars, Howard proudly packed up his new brand-new kelly green, four-door, dual-cowl, soft-top convertible Phaeton Dusenberg—very possibly the most beautiful automobile in America at that time—whereupon he and Athole set out up the coast for San Francisco. There, they boarded the U.S.S. President Lincoln for the four-day voyage to Honolulu.
E
nsconced with his wife in a lanai at the Royal Hawaiian, where the couple had honeymooned, Hawks was in a mood simply to relax under the sun, swim, and have a few drinks. He had brought along Houston Branch’s twenty-three-page story outline for Tuna, as his hefty expense account was predicated upon his promise to Zanuck that he would work on it while he was gone, but Hawks was of no mind to worry about it. If Hawks thought, however, that he’d be getting away from it all, he was in for a surprise, as Hollywood was a lot closer than he could have imagined.
Who should suddenly turn up at the bar of the Royal Hawaiian but King Vidor, Myron Selznick, Joel McCrea, Dolores Del Rio, and Clyde De Vinna? RKO’s big, exotic romance Bird of Paradise was intended to shoot in Hawaii, but the local authorities were on a morality kick, and if, where, and for how long the company could film was open to question. Among the Bird of Paradise contingent was the thirty-one-year-old screen-writer Wells Root, a Yale man and former Time magazine drama critic who had been brought along to polish the dialogue. Selznick introduced Root to Hawks, who mentioned his own script predicament to the writer. The next morning, Selznick was on the phone to Zanuck, and suddenly Root had a new job.
As Vidor’s demands on Root’s time were minimal, the writer put himself at Hawks’s disposal. “Howard said, ‘Meet me on the beach and we’ll talk about the story.’ But Howard didn’t want to talk about the story. He’d say, ‘I don’t feel like thinking about it today,’ and that would be that. Really, he felt he was there on vacation, and he didn’t intend to work on a screenplay. Four weeks went by and we didn’t have a single line. I was getting nervous, because I was just a young writer, but he was so smooth and so pleasant about the whole thing.” Observing the Hawkses as a couple, Root found Athole “very quiet, reserved and composed.… She was a perfect lady, and a good complement to Howard in that respect.”
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 22