Victor Kilian, cast as Sparks, had served in the trenches for Hawks on The Road to Glory. But most of the other actors—Thomas Mitchell, fresh from Stagecoach, as Jeff’s best friend, Kid; the genial Ruman as the Dutchman, the owner of the establishment; John Carroll, Allyn Joslyn, and Noah Beery Jr. as some of the other fliers—were appearing in their one and only Hawks film. Unlike John Ford and some others, Hawks was not interested in building a stock company and tended to reuse leading actors rather than supporting players, with the exception of Walter Brennan.
After seven more days of tests, production started in earnest on Monday, December 19, on the Columbia Ranch with the scene of Jean Arthur’s Bonnie Lee arriving at the port of Barranca (now spelled with two r’s). Filming was scheduled to run forty-two days, until February 8, with release set for May. After six days of interior scenes on the Dutchman’s set, which occupied stages 8 and 9 on the Columbia lot, it was back to the massive waterfront mock-up for five days of crowd scenes that carried the company through the New Year. Cinematographer Walker recalled that Hawks said next to nothing to him before filming began about what he expected from him. “He would leave the visual planning to me, then would come over to correct certain things and make suggestions. After the first day, he said, ‘I like that mood, let’s try to keep it.’” During the week of shooting with dozens of extras on the Barranca set, the crew had tremendous problems with wind and weather under the tarp, and Walker was very impressed with the way Hawks handled it all. “Nothing bothered him, he said very little, there was no small talk. He told me tersely what he wanted, and everything remained very calm.… At one point when we were waiting out a problem, we were walking along, he with those long strides of his, and I said, ‘You just take these things so calmly. I think it’s wonderful, but how do you do it?’ Hawks said, ‘I learned a long time ago when big trouble comes along and I let it get to me, I’d lose my breakfast. I never saw anything in this business that was worth losing your breakfast for.’”
One day Capra dropped by the set to visit Hawks and Walker and saw something that forever after defined Howard Hawks to him: “They were shooting a scene with some wind machines and a lot of heavy equipment and there was a lot of black smoke in the studio. I was friendly with Howard—as friendly as you could get—so I went over and I saw that everybody coming out was black and covered with smoke. But when Howard came out, he was absolutely untouched. His pants were pressed, his hair was in place and he didn’t have a spot on him. I said, ‘My God, even the smoke won’t touch him.’ That was Howard.”
As much as he could, Hawks shot the picture in sequence in order to enhance the dynamics of group interaction. Cary Grant and the rest of the men were terrific and provided no problems, but, just as he had been unable to communicate effectively with Katharine Hepburn on Bringing Up Baby, he encountered heavy resistance to his methods from another pro, Jean Arthur. Questionable to begin with in the role of a showgirl knocking around Latin America, Frank Capra’s greatest leading lady was simply too wholesome, irrepressibly upbeat, and unironical to fit comfortably into Hawks’s world. She was not adept at improvising with the quicksilver Grant, and when Hawks would try to direct her to act in the sexy, subtly simmering way that he liked, she simply refused, saying, “I can’t do that kind of stuff.”
Hawks didn’t hide his disappointment and resentment, and the feeling became mutual. At the end of the shoot, Hawks said that he told Arthur, “You are one of the few people I’ve worked with that I don’t think I’ve helped at all. Someday you can go see what I wanted to do because I’m gonna do this character again.” In a typically self-serving story, Hawks claimed that several years later he returned home to find Jean Arthur waiting in his driveway. She had just seen Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not and, according to Hawks, contritely confessed, “I wish I’d done what you’d asked me to do. If you ever make another picture with me, I’ll promise to do any goddamn thing you want to do. If a kid can come in and do that kind of stuff, I certainly could do it.” In later years, Hawks admitted that Arthur was “good” and attributed her inability to follow his direction to “a quirk.” To see how Arthur is wanting in Only Angels Have Wings, and to realize how a certain sexual spark is missing as a result, one has only to imagine any number of other Hawks actresses from different eras in the role, not only Bacall but Louise Brooks, Carole Lombard, Frances Farmer, Barbara Stanwyck, Ann Sheridan, or Angie Dickinson.
Hawks had just as much trouble with Rita Hayworth, but ironically, with an inexperienced actress he was able to get what he wanted; as Joseph Walker remembered, she “would do anything Hawks told her to do.” Hawks personally didn’t find her “terribly sexy,” but did find that “she had a sex quality that came across … on the screen,” so he emphasized that aspect of her personality at the expense of anything else. His choice certainly worked spectacularly well in terms of the film as well as her future, but at the time the hopeful actress felt that Hawks condescended to her and didn’t take her seriously. “It was a difficult film for me,” she later said. “I hadn’t been in a big ‘A’ picture before and I was really frightened. Cary Grant was so lovely and kind to me. He said, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be okay.’” She added, “Mr. Hawks asked me to do certain things that I was very unhappy about, but between Cary and Hawks I did it. Cary is more genteel about things. Hawks is quiet. You can hardly hear him speak when he talks to you, but he’s kind of hard.” So bitter was she about Hawks’s insensitivity to her that decades later, when the film historian John Kobal was preparing a biography of her and mentioned that he was going to talk to Hawks about her, “she froze, and suddenly, out of nowhere, she asked in a voice tingling with hostility, ‘Why?’”
For his part, Hawks realized that she was shy and hadn’t yet developed a performer’s ego and that it would be a mistake to “ask for things that were beyond her.” Instead, he posed her in the sexiest possible ways and tricked her to make her effective in scenes he realized she wasn’t up to. He introduced her with dramatic brilliance, having all the men stop what they were doing and just stare as she comes down a flight of stairs. In her first solo scene with Grant, she was obliged to come into his office to begin a conversation that would summon up their past together. In the first rehearsal, having been given no instruction by her director, she entered very quickly and just looked blankly at Grant, prompting Hawks to laugh. He then suggested she try it slowly: come in, close the door, and lean back against it so that her form-fitting dress would do its work. “She did and she looked awful good doing it because she had that … dancer’s quality … of assuming a position,” Hawks said. He then had her say, “Like my hair this way?,” telling the audience all it needed to know about their past; she and Grant kiss, after which she says, “I’m not so sure we should have done that.” The finished scene carries a suggestive dose of the female insolence that Hawks would fully realize with Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not six years later.
Hayworth had a scene in which she was supposed to cry, but try as she might she couldn’t make it convincing. Hawks solved the problem by moving the scene outside, turning the rain machines on, and letting the water drench her face. Most difficult of all for her was a long drunk scene in which she and Grant were supposed to discuss their past. When Hawks and Grant agreed that she wasn’t “up to being a good drunk,” the director told Grant to simply tell her, “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” and pour two pitchers of water and ice cubes on her head and then say a line while she reacted hysterically, upon which they could dissolve to a shot of him drying her hair and telling her to blow her nose. Later, while suggesting that Hayworth, “at her best, was slightly … unreal,” Hawks admitted, “I’m not sure Rita ever really knew what it was all about.”
Making changes constantly on the set with Furthman and the actors, Hawks worked at a deliberate pace, with the shooting schedule bulking up accordingly. By February 8, the day he was to have finished, the end was nowhere in sight. If Harry Cohn was concer
ned, he had nevertheless agreed to Hawks’s nonnegotiable stipulation, and was forbidden from coming onto the set. First-unit filming didn’t end until March 24, after seventy-three days, or thirty-one days over schedule. The film, however, was far from complete. Several other units were engaged to shoot portions of the picture, and a lot still had to be done. The ever-reliable Richard Rosson, with Russell Metty on second-unit camera, shot some night footage at Metropolitan Airport in Van Nuys. Later, Rosson flew to Las Vegas to photograph some snowy mountains, and most of the aerial footage was shot by Elmer Dyer; Hawks’s good friend and Hollywood’s top stunt pilot, Paul Mantz, flew the planes, working around Salt Lake City, and St. George, Utah; and Riverside, Bishop and Muroc Dry Lake in California, among other locations. Roy Davidson did all the miniatures, which included the freighter at sea as well as all the (obviously fake) plane takeoffs and landings.
Hawks returned to do retakes with Cary Grant and Victor Kilian as late as April 13. For unknown reasons, Charles Vidor (who, seven years later, would direct Rita Hayworth to her best performance in Gilda), and not Hawks, was called in to direct two days’ worth of retakes and added scenes. Vidor made the interior scene of the mountaintop lookout with Barthelmess, Don Barry as the injured Tex, the doctor, the father, and the boy, as well as a process scene of Cary Grant and Rita Hayworth in the plane. Vidor also did a retake of a scene between the two in the Dutchman’s, which was not identified in the production log; some of this material did not end up in the finished picture. Just before the release prints were struck, Hawks, making use of the precedent Frank Capra had set at the studio, managed to have his title-card credit changed from his usual “A Howard Hawks Production” to the possessive “Howard Hawks’” for the first time.
On May 10, a mere twelve days after the final scenes were shot, Only Angels Have Wings had its invitational premiere at the Pantages in Hollywood. Victor Fleming, just having returned to work on Gone with the Wind that day after a week’s illness, turned out to see his friend’s latest creation, as did many celebrities and most of the important cast members. Richard Barthelmess threw a party at Café LaMaze afterward, which Hawks attended. The official world premiere took place the following day at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Except for some carping about the casting of Jean Arthur, the reviews on both coasts were flat-out raves. While calling the film a “standout,” Variety’s Abel Green noted the similarity to Flight from Glory and reported that Barthelmess’s entrance, marking his return to the screen after a three-year absence, was greeted with applause by the opening-day Radio City crowd. In Hollywood, and no doubt elsewhere, men were reported going nuts over Hayworth, issuing wolf whistles and shouting when she was on-screen. Never having had any luck creating a star at his studio, Harry Cohn took note, signed her to a new contract with a raise from $250 to $350 per week, and heeded Hawks’s advice to wait until public reaction set in before rushing her into another picture. In short order, she landed on the cover of Look magazine and started receiving fan mail. Despite her miserable time on the set, the film marked Rita Hayworth’s breakthrough.
Only Angels Have Wings was heavily promoted by Columbia, particularly in the national magazines, but with the opening of the New York World’s Fair on May 3 essentially killing film business in the city that spring, the picture did just a “pretty good” $143,000 in its two-week Radio City run. Throughout most of the country, however, it proved a lively draw with notable staying power and ended up earning well over $1,000,000 in revenues, in the imprecise box-office accounting of the day, fulfilling Columbia’s hopes for it as the company’s third top grosser of the year, after Capra’s You Can’t Take It with You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It was shortly announced that Only Angels Have Wings would be one of twelve titles to represent the United States at the first-ever Cannes Film Festival, set to open on the French Riviera on September 1, 1939. However, events in Europe that summer would delay the inauguration of the festival by seven years.
The distilled, microcosmic nutshell of a world Hawks created in Only Angels Have Wings has been called “a boy’s own land,” an “operetta seaport” that is “removed from reality, like the land of Tolkien’s Hobbits.” It has also been described as “a Racine tragedy,” a “heady atmosphere of primal struggle” in which “Grant almost seems the high priest of some Sartrean temple,” “a self-sufficient hermetic society with its own values” in which Hawks finds a setting “ideal for the expression of his metaphysic.” It is, in fact, all these things, depending on how seriously one chooses to take the picture. The critic Dave Kehr has convincingly proposed the picture as representing “the equilibrium point” of Hawks’s career. “The themes he was developing throughout the 30s here reach a perfect clarity and confidence of expression, without yet confronting the darker intimations that would haunt his films of the 40s and 50s.” It is also true that Only Angels Have Wings finds Hawks simultaneously operating at maximum effectiveness as an entertainer and a commercial filmmaker on the one hand and a philosopher and intuitive artist-poet on the other. Even those who can’t take the film seriously are forced to acknowledge its snappy, cynical, and suspenseful “White Cargo melodrama” qualities, as well as the dazzling allure of Cary Grant, who never looked better or so fully expressed his hard, dark side. The vast majority of more general viewers, including the critics and audiences of 1939, who enormously liked it but weren’t about to start thinking of it as great art, could reasonably consider it a prime example of what Hollywood could do best, one of the most exhilarating films of what has often been called the best year in American film history.
Critics who began looking deeper into the director’s work from the 1950s onward have found in Only Angels Have Wings one of the richest mines in all of Hawks. His ability to compress, to take a story that originally occurred over a period of many weeks and reduce the action down to little more than twenty-four hours; to boil down to essences; to convey meanings through gestures, physical objects, and composition; to obliquely state what in other hands would be blatantly put was never greater. His adolescent notions of stoicism and refusal to fear death were more clearly expressed here than in any of his other films: none of the later characters live so continuously in death’s shadow, and nowhere is there a scene that so concisely states the stubborn denial of it as the famous “Who’s Joe?” exchange. The manner in which Hawks delineated the importance of integration into the group achieved a standard here that Hawks often strove for in his later work and sporadically achieved but never surpassed. In terms of the purity with which it expresses its director’s attitudes and personality, his quasi-existential, closet-romantic impulse to assert the importance of individual self-definition against the dark void of the outside world, Only Angels Have Wings can fully support the serious claims that have been made for it as “a completely achieved masterpiece.” One can also use it to assess the limitations of his world and sensibility, and the film starkly puts to the test how deep and profound pulp material can ultimately be. The film greatly benefited from the renewed zest and romantic optimism Hawks was feeling at the time, as he was just in the initial throes of falling in love with Slim, the most important woman of his life.
The extent to which Howard Hawks lived in a fantasy world, however, can be seen in his imagining that Only Angels Have Wings was good because of some notion of documentary realism. In fact, the second-unit sequences of actual planes flying, the only recognizable exterior shots in the entire film, actually yank one out of the action, so disconnected are they from the artificial world of Barranca. The film contains a tremendous amount of truth and insight into people and behavior, but virtually no reality. Not since the greatest of the Sternberg-Dietrich collaborations—Morocco, Shanghai Express, The Scarlet Empress, The Devil Is a Woman—had so much distilled visual poetry, daring behavioral stylization, and eccentric, undiluted personal philosophy come through with such brazen but covert force in a first-class Hollywood entertainment.
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His Girl Friday<
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None of his many interviewers ever thought to ask Howard Hawks about the identity of the young woman who read the part of Hildy Johnson at Hawks’s request one night after a dinner party. Nor has anyone ever stepped forward to take credit for giving the performance that convinced the director that a sex change would lend a special angle to a remake of his favorite play. Nor, in fact, has anyone else ever mentioned having been present at this legendary evening at Hawks’s home. So we have only Hawks’s word that this event actually took place, with Hawks, the antithesis of the fast-talking, harddriving verbal type, playing the manipulative editor Walter Burns to the Hildy of some sweet young thing. But the story is good enough that one would like to print the legend, for it led to one of the greatest American screen comedies, an arguable improvement on its brilliant source material, a high point in Hawks’s own career, and a culmination of the 1930s screwball genre from a man who was there at the start of it all some six years before.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 37