Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  The dynamite lobbing was a bit of business that appeared in Gunga Din, so it is possible that Hawks, perhaps unconsciously, was stealing from himself. Officially, however, the idea came from Hawks’s daughter Barbara, accounting for the on-screen story credit to B. H. McCampbell. As Barbara put it, her father “came back from Europe with a basic idea for a Western, but he didn’t know how to resolve the story, to get them all out of jail.” Barbara said she and Don worked out a long story with numerous situations for the characters to confront, but the Warner Bros. legal department never saw the “original McCampbell material,” and the credit was based on an “unpublished story” without documentation.

  The screenplay’s last major transformation took place in December and January. In a script dated January 28, 1958, the Jim Ryan character has been jettisoned and replaced by Chance’s broken-down former deputy Dude and Wheeler’s hired hand, a young fast gun named Colorado who, in his mercenary ways, recalls John Ireland’s Cherry Valance in Red River. Dude is described as “a small man, almost frail-looking,” and was derived, as Feathers was, from Hawks’s and Furthman’s recollections of Underworld, in which the leading character helps to reform his drunken best friend. The opening scene is very different, with Dude, already a deputy, warning cattleman Wheeler about the danger represented by Burdette. The celebrated initial scene of a man in the saloon throwing a silver dollar into a spittoon to humiliate Dude, spurring Chance’s defense of his pathetic friend, was written only at the moment of shooting in June (and was also lifted from Underworld). What’s more, the famous low-angle shot of Chance looking down at a groveling Dude, plus the camera tilt that underlines the connection between the men, were indicated in the script, although it is impossible to know who was behind this rare insertion of camera instructions in a Hawks screenplay. A final draft was worked on through February to modify and refine certain elements, but Hawks was so pleased with the January version that he submitted it to the MPAA, which objected to the “excessive number of specified individualized killings” and the clear indication of “a sex affair” between Chance and Feathers. In response, Hawks promised to downplay the killings by cutting away and not dwelling on them and proposed ending the most direct romantic scene “on a comic note” rather than with an implication that sex was to follow.

  The MPAA also objected to the following ending, in which Dude and Stumpy walk down the street at night while Chance and Feathers are upstairs in her hotel room:

  STUMPY

  Looks like our sheriff just switched from one trouble to another.

  DUDE

  He’s good at trouble.

  Hawks shot this finale, but the censors still didn’t like it, so he substituted his alternate in the release version of the picture.

  Up to and during the shoot, Hawks continued to make small changes, but they mainly consisted of tinkering, almost always for the better. The dialogue in the finished film is uniformly smarter, more assured, and insolent than that in the final screenplay, attesting to Hawks’s continual vigilance in these matters, as well as his constant openness to others’ ideas at all times.

  Hawks’s major contribution in the late phase of writing was devising the opening sequence to eliminate dialogue. The four-minute interlude establishes all the important plot dynamics: the pathetic Dude will do anything for a drink, Chance is still inclined to help his old friend, Joe Burdette kills an unarmed man, and the men are willing to stand alone against the Burdette gang to see justice served. It all seems simple, but that is its beauty; it is a reduction to the essence of filmmaking, to the basic tools and lessons of the silent cinema, a demonstration of total mastery so subtle and confident that the casual observer doesn’t even notice it. It is the kind of artistry that would disappear from the Hollywood cinema over the next two decades as the directors with origins in the silent days faded out, and its elemental strength would never be recaptured. Hawks acknowledged that he deliberately withheld dialogue from the picture until it became absolutely necessary, as a way of “getting back” to the fundamentals from which he may have strayed. At the same time, he admitted that he was inspired to create this prologue by the way television shows hooked the viewer and established a basic dramatic situation through the use of opening teasers.

  In trying to regain “a little of the spirit with which we used to make pictures,” Hawks focused on a few principles. Since The Big Sleep, he had shown increasing disdain for the primacy of a linear, logical plot. He remained committed to the overarching importance of telling a story, but he had now come to prefer almost covertly telling a story through the desires and motivations of his characters. Hawks had been leaning in this direction for more than a decade—particularly in Red River, and The Big Sky—but now the arrival of television was pushing him further away from wanting to rely upon plot. Because of television, he reasoned, audiences were becoming tired of plots, making them feel that they’ve seen it all before. “But if you can keep them from knowing what the plot is you have a chance of holding their interest.” This approach made the writing process more difficult, but also more challenging. It is from this perspective, then, that the remainder of Hawks’s films should be viewed, to judge how well he accomplished this tricky task he set for himself; there is, after all, a fine line between the rigor of concealing a story within characterization and the laziness of not sufficiently developing a story line, and disagreement over which side of the line his late films fall on has persisted ever since they were made.

  Hawks determined to inject comedy into his work when at all possible, something he felt was a hallmark of the movies’ early days more than recently, when, as he said, “I think we got too serious about it.” While in one sense Hawks was becoming more conservative by retreating to the traditional values of the silent cinema, finding solutions in his past work and comfort in established genres, in another he was becoming more daring in his narrative methods. When it worked perfectly, as in Rio Bravo, the result could easily and justifiably be called “classical.” Subsequently, in Hatari!, he went so far in working without a net that it often looked radically modern, while when the elements didn’t gel, as in Man’s Favorite Sport? and Red Line 7000, his style simply looked stiff and archaic. In any case, it becomes clear that, in the final decade of Hawks’s career, his greatest fun came from the challenge of devising fresh and inventive narrative strategies, the antidote to the conventional view that he was tiredly rehashing the same old stories.

  Perhaps surprisingly, given the acrimonious dispute between Hawks and Jack Warner that provoked the director’s lawsuit, there was never a question of this new project being made anywhere but at Warner Bros.; in fact, the film served as a way of settling the suit. Warner was not overly excited by the idea of Hawks doing a Western, but with John Wayne in the package he couldn’t go too far wrong, and the prospect of Hawks shooting much of the picture on the soundstages in Burbank seemed like protection against the director’s going too much over budget or schedule. Hawks set up a new company, Armada Productions, and the deal with Warner Bros. stipulated for the dismissal of Hawks’s breach of contract and fraud suit, the cancellation of the second picture under the old Continental Company deal with Warners, a budget for Rio Bravo of $1.95 million, and $100,000 up front to Hawks, with Warners and Armada splitting the profits fifty-fifty after distribution, production, and advertising costs. To settle the nagging matter of the money Hawks had invested in the Africa script, $50,000 of the Rio Bravo budget was slipped to Hawks in the guise of Continental.

  The fact that the sheriff’s character in the initial treatment was actually called John Wayne left no doubt as to who would play the role. Nonetheless, before Wayne signed, a list of eleven actors was prepared in case of unforeseen circumstances, including Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and Sterling Hayden, but it is impossible to imagine any of them playing Chance with anything approaching Wayne’s authority.

  The other parts were wide open, and the many possible alternate castings of Dude, Fea
thers, Colorado, and Stumpy provide fodder for endless speculation as to what Rio Bravo would have been like had other actors played the roles. Would there have been a painful, Brechtian second level of meaning to Dude’s alcoholic torture if Hawks’s first choice, Montgomery Clift, had played him? Possibly Clift recognized the character’s trials as too close to home, or maybe he just didn’t want to mix it up with Wayne and Hawks and the rest of the macho bunch again, but he turned it down. Ironically, he had just acted with Dean Martin in The Young Lions, and one can only wonder if a hit on the order of Rio Bravo would have helped turn his career and life around in any way.

  At all events, Hawks then made a list of nineteen potential actors for Dude, and Martin was not among them. Heading the list, in fact, was Frank Sinatra; others included James Cagney, John Cassavetes, Richard Widmark, Edmund O’Brien, Rod Steiger, and, surprisingly, John Ireland; a subsequent list also included Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy, Tony Curtis, Lancaster, Douglas, Glenn Ford, William Holden, Henry Fonda, Van Johnson, Ray Milland, and, most intriguingly, Cary Grant. Jack Warner was all in favor of Cagney, but Hawks, despite his great regard for his long-ago leading man, remained undecided. When Dean Martin’s agent urged Hawks to meet his client, Hawks agreed, provided Martin would meet him in his office early the next morning. Martin turned up looking bedraggled; he apologized, explaining that he was working in Las Vegas and had had to get up early, charter a plane, and fly down for the meeting. This effort made a big impression on Hawks, who hired him on the spot. “I knew that if he’d do all that, he’d work hard and I knew that if he’d work hard we’d have no trouble because he’s such a personality.” Hawks sent the actor down to wardrobe, which outfitted him like “a musical comedy cowboy,” whereupon Hawks instructed him to go back and get something that made him look like a real drunk. He did, finding the outfit he wore in the film.

  For the hired gun Colorado, originally envisioned as an older man, Hawks first considered twenty-one possibilities, including Mitchum, James Garner, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Lee Marvin, Lloyd Bridges, Chuck Connors, and Jack Palance. By March, having reconceived the role as much younger, he was looking into such pretty-boy candidates as Michael Landon, Rod Taylor, and Stuart Whitman, and the football player Frank Gifford. But then Hawks had a brainstorm. He had known the former bandleader Ozzie Nelson for some time, and at that moment, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, the family show starring the Nelson parents and their two sons, was at the peak of its popularity. Over the previous year, the younger son, seventeen-year-old Ricky, had also become a rock ’n’ roll singing sensation; after the box-office muscle Elvis Presley had recently demonstrated, it seemed logical that Nelson might have similar pull. Hawks asked Ozzie to send over the most recent episodes, liked what he saw, and signed the boy up, even though Ozzie was demanding $150,000, an astronomical fee for a virtual screen newcomer.

  Although, like Chance, the role of ornery old Stumpy seemed conceived for one actor and one actor alone, there were many initial candidates for it, including Arthur Hunnicutt, Gabby Hayes, Burl Ives, William Demarest, Lee Marvin, Buddy Ebsen, and Lee J. Cobb. But it was no surprise when the part went to Walter Brennan, who, like Ricky Nelson, was now a big TV star because of the downhome program The Real McCoys, which was just finishing its first season.

  Feathers, of course, was the plum, a perfect role for Hawks to fill with a terrific new actress. All the same, Hawks had been away for four years, had no American actresses under contract, and didn’t have enough time to look around and then tutor a complete novice. Therefore, his list of contenders was dotted with actresses who had been around for a while, in addition to the up-and-comers: Rhonda Fleming, Jane Greer, Martha Hyer, Mari Blanchard, Diane Brewster, Beverly Garland, Carolyn Jones, Piper Laurie, Julie London, Sheree North, Janis Paige, and TV star Donna Reed were initially considered.

  Then someone new was brought to Hawks’s attention. For months, Chris Nyby kept telling Hawks about a great-looking young actress he had twice directed on television. Finally, Hawks watched Angie Dickinson in a Nyby Perry Mason episode and immediately had her come see him. He may also have been spurred on by John Wayne, who had recently made a cameo appearance in the innocuous comedy I Married a Woman, with Dickinson as his wife. She had also costarred opposite James Arness in the minor 1956 Western, Gun the Man Down, produced by Wayne’s company, Batjac. The twenty-six-year-old beauty from North Dakota, who had appeared unremark-ably in a handful of films since breaking in in 1954, came in for several meetings with Hawks before shooting a test in which Frank Gifford played John Chance. The test went well, but Dickinson never believed she had a chance against Capucine, Charles Feldman’s protégée and girlfriend. But Capucine’s French accent was too heavy, so Hawks gave Dickinson the good news. Dee told her husband that she was surprised at his choice, and he said, “Good. I’m glad you’re surprised.” According to Dickinson, “He wanted something different.”

  Enthusing to Hawks about having gotten the part, Dickinson confided to him, “I’d always been told, if I could do a picture with George Cukor or Howard Hawks, I’d be in clover.” Hawks said, “Do you know why that is? It’s because we do all your thinking for you.” The lean, leggy actress recalled, “Hawks said, ‘You’ve got a pretty good figure, but it could be better.’ So I got into pretty good shape for the movie. But that was an order.” Hawks and Dickinson also discussed changing her name. Challenged by Hawks to come up with something, Dickinson agonized over it for some time. “I came up with one name,” she said. “I wrote it down, I couldn’t speak it to him. So I gave him a slip of paper with the name on it: Anna Rome. Howard said, ‘I like your own name better.’” To get the part, Dickinson had to sign a personal contract with Armada, which Hawks then split with Warner Bros.; it also gave John Wayne the right to borrow her for one picture and specified Bill Hawks and Chris Nyby as “preferred borrowers.” So while it can’t truly be said that Howard Hawks discovered Angie Dickinson, he certainly gave her her big chance.

  Although it is easy to overlook in retrospect, the cast of Rio Bravo was filled out with television performers to a remarkable degree; given the box-office calculation involved in the casting of Ricky Nelson, this can only have been deliberate on Hawks’s part. Ward Bond, who played the cattleman Wheeler, had to squeeze his work in between episodes of Wagon Train, then one of the most popular shows on TV. John Russell, the veteran character actor who portrayed Nathan Burdette, had just completed the pilot to the eventual successful series Lawman when he reported to Hawks. Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez, who appeared as the Mexican hotel proprietor, had become famous a couple of years before on Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life, and Estelita Rodriguez, who played his wife, was a Cuban-born nightclub singer.

  Hawks called on numerous familiar faces to fill out the crew: the increasingly invaluable Paul Helmick came on as assistant director, Russell Harlan would man the camera (both for exteriors and interiors this time), and Meta Carpenter Rebner, now one of the leading and most senior women in her field, was back as script supervisor after not having worked for Hawks in well over a decade. As usual, Hawks decided to shoot the exteriors first and in March went with John Wayne to Arizona to check out the facilities in Old Tucson, a replica of the original walled city of Tucson built in 1940 by Columbia for the film Arizona. Uninterested in scenic splendors for a story essentially confined to a single street, Hawks found everything he needed here but didn’t want the setting to resemble what had by then appeared in numerous other films, so he had the art director, Leo K. (Kay) Kuter, spend five weeks and $100,000 building a new main street about four blocks long. Ultimately, Hawks found Old Tucson so congenial that he returned for El Dorado and Rio Lobo.

  A longtime mystery for Western buffs has centered on the whereabouts of Harry Carey Jr. in Rio Bravo, billed eleventh as a man named Harold, but no one has ever been able to spot him in the picture. Carey explained, “I really messed myself up with him. I was a full-fledged drinker when they called me over to do Rio Bravo. I
t would have been a ten-week job for me.” Cast as one of the local citizens whose help Wayne’s sheriff refuses in fighting off Burdette’s men, Carey arrived in Tucson for the beginning of shooting and met with Hawks and Wayne to do a costume check and rehearse his first scene. “I was in a cowboy outfit, and Hawks said, ‘I don’t think I want Doby in a cowboy outfit. I want him as a townsperson in a top hat.’ I left for a while and went back to the hotel and had three or four shots of vodka. I was feeling good, and I went back to rehearse the scene with Wayne. I had on a purple-colored cowboy hat, and Duke said, ‘Where’d you get that hat? It’s a good thing we’re just rehearsing.’ Hawks said, ‘Okay, you get a new hat and we’ll shoot that tomorrow,’ and I said, ‘Okay, Howard,’ and I went off. And as I was getting in the car, I heard Duke say, in a very pronounced way, ‘Well, Mr. Hawks … ,’ and I felt awful. It was the only time I called him Howard and it screwed me up with him.”

  Carey’s character was pared down to two shooting days, with Wayne’s dialogue rewritten to say, “We can handle it. Besides, you have a wife and kids.” The scene, along with Carey’s role, was later dropped from the picture, although the actor’s billing was retained. Harold is never referred to by name, but Chance does glancingly refer to local men with “wife and kids” who would be of no use to him in the stand-off. As Carey pointed out, the Rio Bravo cast was full of big drinkers, led by Wayne, Dean Martin, and Ward Bond, which Hawks didn’t mind as long as it didn’t affect their work. Carey’s familiarity with Hawks probably would have been excused, had it not demonstrated that his drinking could adversely affect his judgment.