Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Tiomkin had come to Rome to score Land of the Pharaohs only under heavy pressure from Hawks, since he was desperately afraid of flying. He adored the director, however, and the prospect of creating what was to become the most expensive musical score ever done for a motion picture up to that time was too much to resist. Tiomkin composed a striking, sometimes brutal score with an emphasis on brass and choral chanting; strings were used to underline the appearances of Nellifer.

  During his August visit to Rome, Warner was mollified by Hawks and pleased with what he was able to see of the picture itself. Land of the Pharaohs was the subject of a seven-page spread in the September 20 issue of Life magazine; five days later, Hawks saw the complete first cut of the picture, which ran two hours and twenty minutes. Confiding to Feldman that “the picture seems better than I thought,” Hawks continued to encourage Warner about its progress and sent him a story, written in his own hand, which he said he would like to film next, about a man in Newgate prison awaiting death, who marries a girl so that she can inherit a fortune and is subsequently pardoned and shares in her wealth.

  Warner let this one pass without recorded comment, but on a personal level, the two men continued to get along amicably. Warner had his camera department procure a 16mm Cine-Kodak “Royal” movie camera with a 25mm lens, which Tiomkin brought over for Dee’s use, while Hawks personally picked out a new Bentley, which he arranged for Warner to receive.

  A few weeks later, Hawks wired Warner that the film was all cut and ran two hours and fifteen minutes. He added, “Dee also has been busy lately in production boy, weight eight pounds running time 24 hours!” Gregg, named after Hawks’s friend Gregg Toland, was born on October 22 by Cesarean section at Rome’s International Salvador Mundi Hospital. Hawks, at fifty-eight, was delighted to have another son.

  Hawks delivered Land of the Pharaohs to Jack Warner in early November, eleven months from the time writing on it had begun. On November 16, his boss responded:

  On Friday I cabled you that the first running of The Land of the Pharaohs was enthusiastically received by everyone.…

  In going over the future as far as you are concerned … this is the way we see it.… Unless we get an important subject, we would not want to make a deal at this time. We believe that stories such as “Dreadful Hollow” … would be a waste of time. The picture would end up as the bottom half of a double bill, and all the effort put into the making of it would be wasted.…

  I am not going to tell you that [Pharaohs] hasn’t a chance of recouping its cost and making an important profit but when you spend $2,800,000 for a picture plus the cost of prints, advertising, distribution, foreign dubbing and all that goes with it, you really have to gross a tremendous sum before making any money. In our opinion, the motion picture industry is in too precarious a position for us to take this chance now. However … if you come across a subject which can be made in … England as an Eady Plan quota picture … we would be interested.

  Because of the many years we have known each other, I do not want to make any statement which will put you in the position of keeping you from doing something else where you can get an attractive deal. However, we are interested in making a deal provided we can set the budget and not exceed it within reason.…

  Can assure you that our Company will not a leave a stone unturned on Pharaohs. I hope that it will come off as you put in a lot of hard work to make it all possible. You deserve high praise for having accomplished an important task.

  To recover from the laborious year, Hawks played a lot of golf, made little excursions out of Rome, and then took his family on a long trip through Europe. Leaving Rome for Switzerland in early November, they picked up a new Mercedes and drove through Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France (with a stop in Paris), then went on to Klosters, near St. Moritz, where Hawks and his wife skied nearly every day and had so much fun that they stayed on through February. During that time, the next step in the creation of Hawks’s vaunted critical reputation was made; in the February 1955 Cahiers du Cinéma, the great film theoretician André Bazin published an article entitled “Comment peut-on être Hitchcocko-Hawksien?,” which addressed the question of how such commercial directors as Hitchcock and Hawks could be discussed as serious artists, an issue that would be taken up in the United States some ten to fifteen years hence.

  On May 6, Warner cabled that the first sneak preview of Land of the Pharaohs, the night before at the Encino Theater in the San Fernando Valley, had been “excellent.” The film was judged a bit too long, however, and Hawks, acting with the advice of his brother Bill, quickly approved a list of twenty-two cuts, all minor and designed merely to speed up the action. Both Warner and Feldman felt that the next preview, at the Huntington Park Theater on May 26, was “wonderful,” and Feldman told Hawks to expect about $4–5 million as his cut of the profits on the picture. Equally confident, Warner began showing the film to the press; considering the eventual reception of the film, many of the initial reviews were surprisingly good. Billy Wilkerson, the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, went so far as to send the following telegram to Warner: “Up to last night I felt the greatest spectacle of all time was Griffith’s Intolerance but your Land of the Pharaohs makes it look like a two-reeler.”

  Still, despite all of Warner’s sustained enthusiasm through the shoot and the expectations that Land of the Pharaohs would emerge as one of the blockbusters of all time, the company finally realized that this was not a film that was going to play for months and win Academy Awards. Going the opposite route, Warner Bros. developed a sensationalistic campaign keyed around such tag lines as “The Barbaric Love That Left the Great Pyramid as Its Landmark!” and “Her Treachery Stained Every Stone of the Pyramid.” The epic did strong business in its initial West Coast openings on June 24, playing, of course, the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles, but dropped off rather sharply in subsequent weeks. When it spread out to major cities around the country over the next couple of weeks, the same pattern was repeated—solid openings, but no legs. Feeling guilty over having let Hawks down, Faulkner agreed to appear at a Warners cocktail party for the premiere in Memphis and submitted to interviews to help promote the picture. One of the other writers, Harold Jack Bloom, was appalled by the final result and felt that Hawks had blown a real opportunity to make something unusual.

  Reposing at the Villa Capri in Cannes, Hawks was buoyed by the initial returns, but it was shortly clear that his original hopes were to be excruciatingly underrealized. Perhaps it was the fact that the story was pagan, rather than Biblical; maybe it needed a real star or two; possibly Warner was right in suspecting that the public was surfeited on ancient exotica for the moment, and no doubt Hawks was onto something when he observed, “I should have had somebody in there that you were rooting for. Everybody was a son of a bitch.” In any event, the public proved royally indifferent to Land of the Pharaohs. When it finally opened in New York City on July 26, it was at the Mayfair Theater, not one of the more high-end houses in town; in five weeks there, it grossed a lackluster $89,500. The highest it ever rose in the national box-office rankings was number four, during the week including July 4. An accounting five years later showed that the budget had run to $3.15 million. With prints, advertising, distribution expenses, and the rest, the film had ultimately cost Warner Bros. $5,716,120. U.S. and Canadian rentals amounted to $2,001,481, and the total worldwide was $4,181,909; this left Warners $1,534,211 in the hole for its trouble. All Hawks ever received for the picture was $100,000 plus expenses, or less than he had been earning a decade earlier when he was chafing under the frustrations of a Warner Bros. studio contract.

  There was an ultimate irony. After taking a look at it, the new Nasser regime in Egypt promptly banned Land of the Pharaohs because, in its opinion, the characterization of the bearded Vashtar and his oppressed tribe made it appear that a Jew had designed the pyramid. Then, in 1959, the film ended up being reissued on the bottom half of a double bill with Helen of Troy.

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  Sojourn in Europe

  The conventional wisdom concerning Howard Hawks’s mid-1950s layoff from filmmaking—at three months short of four years, the longest hiatus between shoots in his entire career—is that he was licking his wounds after the crushing disappointment of Land of the Pharaohs, that he took time off in Europe to reassess what went wrong and didn’t return until he had a very clear idea of how he wanted to proceed. This impression was fostered by Hawks himself, who claimed that he soured on the film business during that period and said, “I thought I would quit, and I did for a while.”

  While there is no doubt that Hawks needed to regain his enthusiasm and get a better fix on the stories he wanted to tell, the fact is that Hawks aggressively, even desperately tried to get films made all through this period. Even while he continued to live lavishly at the most fashionable addresses, Hawks suffered financial setbacks that made his situation even more urgent. But a combination of insufficiently prepared scripts, a balky star, a major standoff with a studio, a broken leg, and missed deals translated into a protracted dry spell that coincided with the deterioration of his third marriage.

  Despite the tremendous rigors of the shoot, all through the post-production and prerelease period of Land of the Pharaohs, Hawks was consumed with ideas and possibilities for new projects to begin as soon as possible. Yet again, his thoughts returned to The Sun Also Rises. Refusing offers for the rights from Robert Hakim and Orson Welles, Hawks told Feldman that he now wanted Marlon Brando to play Jake Barnes and that he believed filming would have to span a year; he would send a unit to Spain in the summer of 1955 to shoot the running of the bulls, then return the following year with his actors, since it would likely be impossible to safely cover both at the same time. Feldman kept telling his friend that making an “important deal” would be no problem, but Hawks failed to make any progress on a script, and the following year, he sold it to 20th Century–Fox. “I thought it was hard to do,” Hawks confessed. “Zanuck paid through the nose for it, then six months later he called me up and said, ‘Howard, how were you gonna make that?’ I said, ‘Darryl, I’ll be glad to tell you for $100,000.’” Under heavy censorship constraints, Zanuck went ahead anyway, with Henry King directing a turgid 1957 adaptation distinguished only by a couple of the performances.

  The producer Sam Spiegel, fresh from winning an Oscar for On the Waterfront, began pursuing Hawks to direct a film from a novel he owned called The Bridge on the River Kwai. Hawks discussed story ideas for this prisoner-of-war thriller with the writer Carl Foreman, whom he liked despite having despised High Noon, and proposed numerous changes and new characters from Pierre Boulle’s novel. “I wanted Noël Coward to play a fairy that thought of marvelous ways of killing the enemy,” he said. Years later, he maintained, “I couldn’t stand Sam Spiegel so I left it.” But in early 1955, he revealed his true reservations to Feldman: “I don’t believe I’ll do it. First, I think it’s a good story, probably get great reviews as a picture but I don’t think it will make money. It’s a war story, no dames, expensive and too damn much work for no gain.” Instead, in the same letter to his agent, he proposed another idea: “What would you think of doing The Last Days of Pompeii. It’s a good yarn, very well known, and could have an amazing ending with the volcano and fire.”

  Hawks and his family spent an extended Christmas holiday in the Alps, mainly at Klosters but occasionally venturing to St. Moritz, where more of the international crowd gathered. “Dee and the baby are fine and if I could find a story everything would be perfect,” Hawks confided in a rare note to Feldman. “It’s about time,” he admitted, “to think of something else.” New financial pressures also weighed on him, as in February, Hawks was commanded by the court in California to once and for all pay Athole $52,382 in back alimony, which he finally did in May. Installed back in Paris at the Royal Monceau Hotel the following month, he was joined by Feldman, who spent nearly two months there largely occupied with attempts to set something up for Hawks. In response to Warner’s letter about the optional second picture, for which Hawks had already been advanced $35,000, Hawks proposed two ideas to start as early as the summer. The first was a romantic drama, The Daughter of Bugle Ann, which he felt he could shoot in Ireland on a relatively low budget with Richard Burton and a yet-to-be-discovered actress. The other was an American female pioneer story, Rugged Land of Gold, which was meant to star Audrey Hepburn, one of the rare established actresses with whom Hawks was ever keen to work. The feeling was evidently mutual, but Hepburn’s heavy schedule and the lack of a script conspired to thwart it. There was also talk of Hawks collaborating with Irwin Shaw, a prominent American in Paris, on a story for Cubby Broccoli, who had just launched his producing career in London. Most intriguing in terms of its atypicality was a project called “I’m Going to Have a Baby.” Derived from Martha Martin’s “I Will Live and Have My Baby,” which was published in the Ladies Home Journal, the story dealt with a young woman who becomes stranded in the wilderness shortly before she is to give birth. In its theme and potential for transcendent meaning, it somewhat recalled Hawks’s lost first film, The Road to Glory, and was unusual for him in that it focused exclusively on one person cut off from group interaction. None of these ideas made it to the script stage.

  Consuming the lion’s share of Hawks’s and Feldman’s attention was a story much more obviously in the director’s line. All Hawks had was the basic idea, a loose account of one season in the lives of hunters who capture animals in Africa for zoos. Without being developed in the least, it contained all the basic Hawksian elements: a risky, adventurous profession being carried out in a remote location, endless opportunities for group interplay and interdependence, the possibility of introducing one or more women into a basically male environment, and a commercially appealing subject with plenty of room for major stars. Other pluses for Hawks included the opportunities for a prolonged stay overseas and an exciting shoot, although a studio head might look at the same circumstances rather more skeptically.

  To play the leading role of the chief hunter, Hawks thought of no one but Gary Cooper. The two men hadn’t worked together since Ball of Fire in 1941, and their relationship cooled somewhat after the actor unwisely turned down Red River. Nonetheless, Cooper always maintained that there was no one he loved working with more than Hawks, provided the project was right. Back on top again after his Oscar for High Noon, Cooper was currently greatly in demand among top directors, having just signed to do Friendly Persuasion for Wyler and Love in the Afternoon for Wilder. During a stay in Paris in April, Cooper met numerous times with Hawks and Feldman. Despite a certain hesitancy about the story, the actor trusted Hawks enough to agree to appear in Africa—pending his approval of the script. This was enough for Hawks to announce the news to the press in May, a month before Land of the Pharaohs was due to open. With that, he repaired for the summer to Cannes, where he, Dee, and Gregg took an apartment at the Villa Capri while Harry Kurnitz tried to develop a first draft of the script.

  Over the next year, a desultory and degenerating scenario unfolded, typical of the film business, perhaps, but unusual among Hawks, Cooper, and Warner, three men who had known each other for so long. In September, Cooper made it clear that, despite his handshake with Hawks, he was in no way committed to Africa until he saw a finished script. Hawks prodded Kurnitz to at least get through a first draft, whereupon he immediately commenced a second, with many changes planned to beef up Cooper’s part and increase the quotient of comedy. In early October, Cooper flatly told Feldman that he wasn’t interested in the project, which prompted a quick withdrawal by Warner, who was in no mood to embark upon another African adventure with Howard Hawks. Still, Feldman and Hawks persisted, submitting a second draft to Cooper while privately approaching John Wayne and William Holden to gauge their interest. Having already spent some forty thousand dollars on the script and research, Hawks threatened to sue Warner Bros. for breach of contract. Through the winter, Feldman badgered Cooper persistently whi
le awaiting a new draft from Hawks, which was not forthcoming, until Cooper finally and definitely told him, “You know I am crazy about Howard. You know I want to do a picture with him, but I don’t want to do this story.” At this, Hawks decided he had no choice but to sue Warners for reneging on its deal, which sent Jack Warner into a fury since it was his contention that his agreement to produce Africa was entirely dependent upon Cooper’s involvement.

  Meanwhile, numerous other possibilities were coming Hawks’s way. Out of the blue, Dino De Laurentiis, one of Italy’s hottest young producers, who at that moment was making War and Peace with King Vidor, approached Hawks with another Tolstoy adaptation, Resurrection. Hawks got into advanced talks with British investors to shoot a picture in England and made a serious attempt to acquire the rights to two properties previously filmed by Warner Bros., The Mask of Dimitrios and Somerset Maugham’s “The Letter,” in which he wanted to star Ingrid Bergman and Richard Widmark. When Bergman turned out to be booked for more than a year, he considered using Jennifer Jones.

  Late in 1955, after the French release of Land of the Pharaohs, Hawks sat for the first of what were to be several long interviews with the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, which had “discovered” him two years before. Hawks was interviewed by three fanatical admirers: Jacques Becker, the distinguished director of the classic Casque d’Or, and two film critics in their twenties who had just begun directing shorts, Jacques Rivette, the author of the enshrinement of Monkey Business, and François Truffaut. The discussion mainly centered on Land of the Pharaohs, but then turned off into more theoretical areas, in which Hawks greatly impressed the eager French cinephiles with his thoughtfulness and well-articulated opinions.