Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  By April they were well into the script. Hecht and MacArthur’s Chamalis character was not entirely unlike Tony Camonte, a crude, unattractive thug whose law is the only law and whose illegal activities thrive in the anarchic atmosphere his rule-by-terror creates. In order to win the favors of the beautiful new arrival, whose fiancé he murdered in a gambling dispute, Chamalis gives her a lucrative job running the fixed roulette table, where returning prospectors are routinely cheated out of all their gold, then shot if they protest. Hecht and MacArthur can also easily be spotted in the character of the crusading newspaper publisher, Colonel Marcus Aurelius Cobb (political crusaders being otherwise entirely absent from Hawks’s work), whose killing sparks the rise of the moralistic vigilantes and the downfall of Chamalis.

  After Scarface and even Viva Villa!, Hawks had good reason to believe that joining forces once again with Hecht, on a subject with an outsized, violent man at the center of a turbulent, colorful world full of action, stood a strong chance of succeeding. In fact, it did extraordinarily well at the box office and was Hawks’s biggest hit since The Dawn Patrol. But it was far from being this creative team’s most copacetic collaboration. In mid-April Hawks wrote a rare letter, to Goldwyn literary assistant Merrit Hurlburd. He stressed that his idea all along was “that the Barbary Coast, being an unusual background, should have a story that could only happen here.” It was also Hawks’s idea that the strongest drama and suspense would derive from the two young lovers being in constant danger of death because of Chamalis’s power. Again, this element only made it into the finished film in the final reel or so. Although he felt that they were writing under “a great deal of pressure and great haste,” Hawks nevertheless claimed to be “really happy about it.” He was ready to come home, however. “I’m so sick of New York and rotten weather, I’ll do anything to hurry getting out of here.”

  Athole visited New York once during her husband’s long stay, leaving the kids at home with their grandparents, and the separation actually did the marriage some short-term good. Despite Howard’s general obliviousness to her needs and problems, Athole still loved him and desperately wanted to keep the family together. After the long absence, Hawks was happy just to get home.

  Hawks and his writers ran through five complete drafts of the script in New York, and now Goldwyn was itching to get rolling. Allotted a $762,315 budget and a thirty-seven-day shooting schedule, Hawks had limited say in the casting. To join Hopkins and McCrea, Goldwyn borrowed Edward G. Robinson from Warner Bros. to play Chamalis—like his Mike Mascarenas in Tiger Shark for Hawks, another embittered man who loses a woman to a younger guy. Hawks had intended Adolph Menjou to play the newspaperman who solicits Hopkins on the boat, functionally the same role he had filled in Morocco, but Goldwyn imposed the pompous Frank Craven. David Niven got his screen start here in the tiny role of a Cockney sailor who crashes through a bordello window into the mud, but the highlight for Hawks was his discovery of Walter Brennan. Only forty but looking a good deal older, Brennan was an unknown playing bits and extra parts until a production man brought him to Hawks’s attention. Hawks burst out laughing at the sight of the gangly actor in costume, whereupon Brennan asked him how he wanted him to do his test: “With or without?” “With or without what?” Hawks asked. “Teeth,” Brennan replied. Hawks told him to keep his dentures off, and the part of the wharf rat Old Atrocity, scheduled as a three-day role, kept being expanded until Brennan worked for six weeks and made a name for himself. He won an Oscar on his next Hawks picture, Come and Get It, and the actor and director eventually did six films together.

  Filming started on June 17 and was marked by a good deal of acrimoniousness, most of it triggered by Miriam Hopkins. From the outset, Robinson found Hopkins “puerile and silly,” a snob of the first order who was always late, kept altering her dialogue, complained about everything, tried to upstage her fellow actors at all times, and wouldn’t even feed her offscreen lines to her costar, a customary courtesy. No one, including Hawks, had a clue as to how to bridle the little prima donna, although Robinson was able to vent his anger at her in a scene that required him to slap her; he slapped her very hard indeed.

  The set was also divided into deeply opposed political camps, with Robinson, Hecht, and MacArthur carrying the liberal banner and Hopkins, Hawks, McCrea, Brennan, and Harry Carey among the anti-Roosevelt conservatives. Although Hawks surely did not become involved, Robinson reported, “The arguments on the set were appalling; as a result, there was little socializing among us. There was a good deal of polite freezing and occasional bursts of rage.” Hawks rewrote on the set more than usual, both to expand Brennan’s part and in an attempt to improve Hopkins’s dialogue. Hecht derisively described the action of the film as “Miriam Hopkins came to the Barbary Coast and wandered around like a confused Goldwyn Girl,” and the two writers were upset enough at the “imbecility” of Hopkins’s new dialogue to try to remove their names from the credits. All of this complaining, plus the continual problems of dealing with Goldwyn, made the film “a lot of trouble” to Hawks, who finished it in forty-four days, seven days over schedule and $10,118 over budget.

  One amusing way to look at the film is to view Joel McCrea’s highfalutin New York poet as a stand-in for Hecht and MacArthur, a young man who comes to California to stockpile loot and is ready to return East when he is waylaid by a beautiful woman and a childish big boss who plays by his own rules and can be seen as all the studio chiefs the writers ever worked for rolled into one. The film’s one outstanding scene has Brian Donlevy’s malevolent enforcer character, on his way to commit another killing one night, suddenly surrounded by a number of vigilantes. With a gun in his back, Donlevy is marched onward through the fog and muddy streets as the vigilantes conduct a mock trial that is preordained to end with Donlevy strung up by a rope. The scene has terrific quiet menace but, as Graham Greene astutely observed in his review of the film in the Spectator, it closely resembles a memorable passage in René Clair’s 1930 film Sous les Toits de Paris, which was widely seen in the United States.

  Although the film is nominally entertaining in a bland way, Hawks dismissed it as “a lousy picture, a contrived thing done more or less to order.” The film’s popularity can probably be explained by the large dose of conventional melodrama and the application of the Cecil B. De Mille approach of wallowing in sin and decadence for most of the story before allowing the forces of virtue and righteousness to triumph in the end. But the film is remarkable, and close to unique, in that there is virtually no trace of Hawks in the direction. Even in the handling of the dialogue or inanimate objects, areas where the director normally left his imprint regardless of a picture’s overall quality, one would be hard-pressed to single out things that identify Barbary Coast as Hawks’s work. The lack of a stronger underlying streak of sexual innuendo is also surprising, especially given Hawks’s original intent to ape Morocco. Ray June’s darkly atmospheric night photography is a plus, but the film also suffers from a dearth of any secondary female characters. The film overall stands as evidence that, at that time, a strong producer could effectively override the influence of a strong director. Certainly, the record shows that, with the possible exception of William Wyler years later, no director ever prevailed artistically over the dominance Samuel Goldwyn maintained over his own productions. As Hawks was soon to learn the hard way, a director ignored the will of Sam Goldwyn only at his own immense peril.

  15

  Flying High: Ceiling Zero

  If Barbary Coast demonstrated how lugubriously the studio system could work, sacrificing all for the bottom line, Ceiling Zero showed how efficiently and beneficially it could function at its best. Hawks finished his work for Goldwyn in early August, signed to do Ceiling Zero a month later, was shooting by October 7, and was attending its sneak preview on December 19. In fact, in the seventeen-month period between July of 1935 and November of 1936, Hawks would shoot and open four pictures—Barbary Coast, Ceiling Zero, The Road to Glory, and Come and
Get It. This was not unheard-of for directors who were part of the assembly lines at major studios and accustomed to knocking out three mediocre films for every decent one. But for a director who shuttled to different studios for each picture, whose films were major productions involving big stars, and who was intimately involved in the writing of his films, it stands as an exceedingly impressive achievement.

  Of all the sound films Hawks made, Ceiling Zero was the least premeditated and consumed the least of his time. All the same, it could not be more Hawksian. The film sets the mold for any number of important themes, concerns, motifs, and stylistic traits Hawks would pursue and elaborate on in his best films over the next thirty years. It is here that his interest in the material (flying), his sympathy for the characters (adventurers), the pace (fast), and the cohesion of action based in a principal setting all come together for the first time. Ceiling Zero, a hit in its time, was seldom seen during the years when Hawks’s critical standing was being built up by revisionist film historians, and it therefore has a reputation as a rather minor entry in the director’s oeuvre. But the film played a major role in helping Hawks find his groove, determine what he could do best, and discover ways to treat male-female sparring that set him distinctively apart from other directors, in ways that still seem modern and audacious.

  As it happened, Hawks saw the play Ceiling Zero on Broadway during its modest thirteen-week run at the Music Box in mid-1935. Hawks’s interest was piqued because the play starred his old Scarface friend Osgood Perkins (as Jake Lee, the role Pat O’Brien would play on-screen) and was written by Frank “Spig” Wead, a former lieutenant commander and veteran World War I flier from Annapolis who became a writer only after an accident landed him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. (John Wayne played Wead in John Ford’s 1957 biographical film The Wings of Eagles.) Although Hawks liked the play, which concerned daredevil airmail pilots in an age of dawning aviation conformity, he had nothing to do with setting it up as a motion picture, only coming onto it after several other directors proved unavailable.

  A reader first brought the play to Hal Wallis’s attention in late December 1934, and two more Warner Bros. readers, one of them the future illustrious screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, recommended it soon thereafter, with the proviso that the leading character of Dizzy Davis was “very censorable” and that “his conflicts with women would have to be toned down considerably.” Wead sold the play to Warners in June for $21,000 and agreed to adapt it himself for an additional $6,750. High on the project, Wallis pegged it as the next costarring vehicle for the popular team of James Cagney and Pat O’Brien, who had already done three pictures together at the studio, and then set out to find a director. Wallis’s wish list consisted of Tay Garnett, William Wellman, and Victor Fleming, but when none of them was available on short notice, Wallis very reluctantly agreed with Jack Warner and the picture’s designated producer Harry Joe Brown that Hawks was the most suitable director for the job. Signing on the first week of September, Hawks said he liked Wead’s script very much, then proceeded to start revamping it thoroughly with only a month to go before the fixed start date.

  Wead’s three-act play is set entirely in the operations office of Federal Air Lines at Hadley Field in Newark. The key men have been close buddies ever sine their military flying days, but their situations in life are now all quite different: Jake Lee has forgone flying for a responsible desk job supervising the airline’s eastern division and has settled down into an agreeable marriage with Mary; Dizzy Davis, the wild man of the air, is a relentless skirt-chaser and an old combat ace who flaunts regulations and represents the old breed of free-spirited, maverick pilots and who, unbeknownst to Jake, was once involved with Mary; and Texas Clark, an outstanding pilot and a former roommate of Dizzy’s, has had his old ways mightily curbed by his wife, Lou, who resents Dizzy’s irresponsible influence. Then there’s Mike Owens, formerly one of the boys but a victim of an accident that has left him brain-damaged; with the mentality of a child, he pathetically makes the rounds of the office, polishing the door handles, a stark reminder of the potential wages of their profession.

  This, then, represents the classical Hawksian grouping of professional men involved in a dangerous job that holds out the prospect of tragedy on a daily basis. Their camaraderie and mutual respect are based on how well they do that job, and there is no room for those who can’t cut it: in the opening scene a young, college-educated pilot is fired after he panics when flying through bad weather and parachutes to safety while letting his expensive plane crash. A pretty young girl (with a man’s name—Tommy) is allowed into the group, protectively by Jake and Tex, wolfishly by Dizzy, only because she aspires to the same standards as the men do; when first seen, she has just completed her first solo flight, and her only stated goal is to fly as well as they do. Everyone else, regardless of their qualities, is an outsider, either a potential detriment to the continuity and excellence of the group (represented, in this case, particularly by intrusive government regulators and bothersome corporate minds) or simply irrelevant. The comradeship among these men is playful and kidding, even to the point of containing amusingly homoerotic overtones (taking cigarettes from each other’s mouths, frequent touching, even, in the film, Cagney kissing O’Brien on the mouth); it is also rambunctiously competitive and expressive of the friendship. One might see it as adolescent; another, the ultimate way in which men can relate together while performing a job.

  Hawks had demonstrated an affinity for these attitudes before in isolated ways, and in Ceiling Zero the intricacies of the relationships, and the means of expressing them poetically, are not worked out with the sophistication and depth that Hawks would later achieve. But in Wead’s play, Hawks at last found the structure to ideally accommodate his concerns in the most concise, dramatic manner.

  Once signed to direct the film, Hawks activated Wead’s adaptation in numerous ways that both made it more exciting and better expressed some of his own concerns. Two female characters were cut out, one an air hostess named Jane, another an over-the-hill woman named Birdie who was Dizzy’s common-law wife. In both the play and the film, the irrepressible Dizzy puts the moves on Tommy from the moment he sees her, but one early exchange between them went way beyond what Hays would allow:

  DIZZY

  Would you like to have me give you some instruction?

  TOMMY (eagerly)

  Will you teach me to fly upside down?

  DIZZY

  A couple of hops from me and you’ll be on your back most of the time.

  Hawks indicated that Wead was a major womanizer during his ambulatory days but that, incapacitated by his accident, he could only write about men like himself. In the play, Dizzy keeps coming on to Tommy time after time, but Hawks felt that Cagney made such an excellent pass at June Travis’s Tommy the first time, only to be turned down, that any further aggressive attempts would appear “ridiculous.” The director therefore called upon the entire crew to compare notes on what Dizzy should do next to win Tommy over. A diminutive property man chimed in to say, “You know, if I got turned down I’d say, ‘OK, I got off on the wrong foot. I’m not going to do it again, I promise. Just let’s go on.’ And then if I want to start something I say, ‘Now, look, I promised to behave, but you’ve got to behave.’ And all of a sudden, the girl is making the passes.” Hawks said, “So we did it that way. But that was just a single phase of it. The other scenes were in the play and they were good. We rewrote only the romance.”

  The romance was, indeed, vastly improved by moving out of the airport control office and into an Italian restaurant, where the interplay among the principals in a couple of scenes is especially lively. One of the most libidinous lines ever to get past the vigilant Hays Office is delivered when Tommy, on her first night out with Dizzy, slips out on him to avoid an awkward scene later. Now available for the rest of the night, Dizzy eyeballs the fat Italian woman who helps run the establishment and makes a suggestive remark to her. At this, the ample pro
prietress falls into convulsive laughter, upon which Dizzy remarks to Tex, “She thinks I’m kidding.”

  Consuming much of the play’s second act, and omitted from the film, is a very long talk in which Dizzy is ostensibly coming on to Tommy but which has him spewing forth pages of dialogue extolling the virtues and thrills of flying.

  The third act was also improved for the film. In the play, Dizzy has another long speech in which he explicitly states Wead’s theme, that the real days of airplane pioneering are over. The playwright also has Mary forthrightly tell Dizzy that she’s never gotten over him, whereupon she kisses him, just in time for Jake to walk in. Jake then says that he wanted Dizzy to come back to Newark just to confirm his suspicions about him and Mary. Hawks masterfully changed all this by deflecting the direct questions and building up implication and innuendo. In the play, Dizzy’s suicidal run at the end, during which he tests out the new deicers designed to make winter air travel safer, is thus motivated out of guilt for having betrayed his closest friend. In the film, the act becomes more existential, Dizzy’s way of realizing that time has passed him by; as an irresponsible pilot who, just to have a date with a girl, shirked a flying assignment that killed his replacement, Dizzy now admits that he’s not a professional who is worthy of the group. In the manner he would always prefer, Hawks found a way to state through action and inference what Wead could only say in words. How Hawks transformed Ceiling Zero stands as an excellent example of how a strong director could make an independent piece of material his own in the classical Hollywood era. Ceiling Zero remains recognizably Frank Wead’s work, but it also becomes thoroughly Hawks’s as well because of the way in which the director kept pushing, twisting, and deepening it. Both Wead and Hawks benefited, in that the playwright’s work was significantly improved and the filmmaker discovered how to say things important to him more effectively.