Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Carey quit drinking in 1963 and had his last contact with Hawks in 1976, when Hawks lent Carey a print of Red River for a show for schools about Wayne and John Ford. “He was a strange man, but he treated me like a million bucks,” Carey said, despite the Tucson rupture.

  The cast and crew of ninety-one people headed for Arizona in late April, with most staying at the Santa Rita Hotel in Tucson, and filming began on the planned fifty-five-day shoot on May 1 with scenes of Wheeler and the rest of his men, including Colorado, arriving in town. The only actor who needed any special preparation for his role was Ricky Nelson. Hawks assigned his daughter Barbara, an expert horsewoman, the job of teaching the teenage idol how to look good in the saddle, even though the riding he had to do in the film was very rudimentary. Realizing that Nelson had no special skills as an actor, Hawks decided to give him something to do with his hands, notably rubbing the side of his nose with his index finger to show he was thinking, as Clift had done in Red River. The director also forced him to roll and smoke cigarettes, which Nelson hated. Ironically, Hawks himself was off cigarettes at the time, in his umpteenth attempt to give them up, and he told Angie Dickinson, “Everybody hates me because I’m so impossible when I’m trying to quit.” Hawks was skating on thin ice handing such a prominent role to someone so inexperienced, and he just got by thanks to the terse dialogue and his own skill at directing young performers (usually women) to project an insolence more left unspoken than said. Also, the film was so strongly carried by the four other leads that it didn’t particularly need support from Nelson the way Red River relied upon Clift or even the way El Dorado derived comic mileage from the relative newcomer James Caan. On May 8, Nelson’s eighteenth birthday, Wayne and Martin gave him a gift of a three-hundred-pound bag of steer manure, then, as a rite of passage, tossed him into it.

  Nelson’s awkwardness is evident in the stiff, posed way he stands and his not knowing what to do with his hands, but Hawks felt Nelson did well enough in the picture and was convinced that his presence added enormously to its box-office draw. The two men did have a major disagreement, however, over what songs Nelson would perform on-screen. Disliking Dimitri Tiomkin and Paul Francis Webster’s tune “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me,” Nelson wanted to use a number Johnny Cash had written for him, “Restless Kid.” Nelson recorded the Cash number as well as another song, “Cindy,” at Capitol Records, but only the latter made it into the film, as Hawks, Tiomkin, and even Ozzie Nelson joined forces and prevailed upon the kid to see things their way. Dean Martin ended up singing “My Rifle” with a little harmonizing from Nelson. Hawks’s decision to have Nelson and Martin sing in the film has often been ridiculed, but Hawks tossed off the objections simply by saying that the crooning “entertained me.” Hawks also had a song in mind for Feathers, a tune called “The Bull by the Tail” (one of the film’s earlier titles). But when he played it for Angie Dickinson, “I had the balls to tell him I didn’t like it,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Everybody “yesses” me all the time,’ and I think he was impressed that I told him what I thought.”

  With the script long since in very fine shape and the majority of the cast and crew utterly in its element, the production proceeded in a very relaxed, smooth manner. From the beginning, Hawks needed very few takes to get what he wanted, often just one. Unlike on Land of the Pharaohs, he knew just how all these characters should talk, but he obliged Wayne, Brennan, and the others when they wanted to alter their dialogue a bit to make themselves more comfortable. He let scenes run to indulge his whims and tastes, such as showing Wayne make a long approach toward Ward Bond just because he liked the star’s inimitable “big cat” walk. Hawks needed to give Wayne only the minimum indication of how he wanted a scene to be played, and the actor always came on time, prepared and able to memorize new dialogue within minutes. Even more than he had twelve years earlier, Hawks loved working with Wayne. “He never squawks about anything,” the director said. In the role of John T. Chance, Wayne wore his customary neckerchief and the Red River D belt buckle Hawks had made for him. Through most of the story, he also carried with him, almost as if it was part of his anatomy, the unique pump-action rifle he had first used in Hondo.

  Hawks was pleased when Dean Martin justified his faith in him. As he later did with Robert Mitchum, Hawks saw through the actor’s nonchalance and could tell that he really was taking his work seriously. Martin privately was advised by his Young Lions costar Marlon Brando on how to get to the bottom of his character, and Hawks gave the actor some critical direction that set him unerringly on track: initially afraid that Martin was going to do a sort of “nightclub drunk,” Hawks told him he “knew a guy with a hangover who’d pound his leg trying to hurt himself to try and get some feeling in it.” Martin said he knew exactly what Hawks was talking about and did it right the next time out, without even rehearsing. Making things considerably easier was Wayne, who, as usual, was generous with his costar. The two men warmed to each other at once, played chess together constantly between scenes, and remained lifelong friends. Hawks was impressed with how hard Martin worked and ended up considering him “a damn good actor, but he also is a fellow who floats through life.… He has to get some kind of a hint, … otherwise, hell, he won’t even rehearse.”

  Surprisingly, the only actor Hawks had any trouble with at all was Walter Brennan, whose work for him had always been pure gold. On the first day, Hawks found the character actor, who was now sixty-three, merely recycling his hokey folksiness from The Real McCoys. The director rode him mercilessly until he finally left the set with John Wayne. When they returned, Brennan was so riled that he easily delivered the “crabby, evil, nasty old man” Hawks was looking for, albeit with an irrepressible vein of eccentric humor.

  But Hawks needed to engage in very little of this sort of scene-making. As John Russell observed, “Hawks’s game-playing was mostly with management, not on the set. He loved getting management steamed.” As always, studio brass were not welcome on the set, and Hawks ran a disciplined but relaxed set that allowed for plenty of extracurricular activities. One weekend, Hawks, Wayne, and the entire inner circle drove across the border to Nogales to watch their director friend Budd Boetticher film a bullfight for a documentary. The director hoped to get shots of Wayne with the great matador Carlos Arruza in the ring for a nice publicity angle, but when Duke went out and doffed his hat to the crowd, he was, as Boetticher put it, “as bald as Eisenhower”; Wayne had spent the entire weekend so plastered that he’d forgotten to put on his hairpiece. No one else minded, however, as people seemed only to care about seeing Ricky Nelson, who drove the crowd into a frenzy. John Ford, fresh from finishing The Last Hurrah, dropped by the location on May 19 to see how the Duke was faring with Hawks this time out. Unbeknownst to Warner Bros., Ricky Nelson took part in a Tucson Speedway stock-car race the following week, and Hawks even allowed Sheb Wooley, of “Purple People Eater” fame, to play a bit in the opening scene. Dean Martin took off for New York one weekend to participate in his second annual telethon for the City of Hope. Dee and Gregg were around a good deal, and Hawks found time to help his son with some midgetcar races. Visiting journalists, of whom there were quite a few, noted that Rio Bravo was a real “Big Guy” film: Wayne and John Russell were six foot four, Hawks and Ward Bond were six three, Ricky Nelson was six one, and Dean Martin was six feet.

  The only consistent complaint made about Rio Bravo is that it dawdles in its storytelling, that it lacks the economy and snap of Hawks’s best earlier films. But while this was to become a legitimate problem in some of his later films, with Rio Bravo the lingering over scenes stemmed directly from Hawks’s desire to elaborate his characters and their relationships as fully as he could. Any rewriting Hawks did on the set was to deepen the sense of group interaction, to give further layers to their exchanges; to most people’s minds, the resulting richness far outweighs the picture’s casual tempo. For example, Hawks often used the exchange of inanimate objects, notably cigarettes, to communicate feelin
gs between his characters. John Chance’s continual rolling of cigarettes for Dude silently conveyed his willingness to keep helping his friend. At the same time, it is Chance’s need for a light that prompts Colorado to go into the hotel, thus leaving the sheriff alone and vulnerable to the three gunmen who stick him up. After losing track of it in recent years, Hawks rediscovered his “three-cushioned dialogue” that stated important matters in indirect ways, especially in the relationship between Chance and Feathers.

  Indeed, Hawks hadn’t attempted one of his patented sultry girls-with-a-past roles in well over a decade, and he clearly was stimulated by doing so again. Unlike numerous other films, there could be no pretense here of trying to integrate the female character into the men’s central activity, that of guarding the jail. John Chance literally has to commute between the jail, at one end of the street, and the hotel, at the other, to see Feathers. Once again, the woman is a vague combination of showgirl, gambler, and quasi-outlaw-prostitute, someone who has clearly been around but simultaneously can fall wholeheartedly and uncynically for the hero.

  In Angie Dickinson, Hawks found one of the sexiest actresses who ever starred in one of his films, and he made sure to show her off to tantalizing advantage. Hawks personally supervised every detail of Dickinson’s wardrobe, as, the actress said, “he wanted the clothes to be not the typical stiff things women from that time usually wore. He wanted soft, flowing, feminine clothes.” The trick was to be able to play up Dickinson’s allure while still pairing her convincingly with Wayne, who almost always seemed a bit awkward, even comical, in romantic scenes. Hawks pulled this off by teasing Wayne through the Feathers character, making knowing fun of the actor’s discomfort by building it into the character. This proved so effective here that Hawks carried it to an even greater extreme in Hatari! As he had in Red River, Hawks again served up a watered-down variation on Bacall’s immortal “It’s even better when you help” line when Feathers, upon finally kissing Chance, says, “I’m glad we tried it a second time. It’s better when two people do it.” But her comic exasperation works beautifully, compared, for instance, to Joanne Dru’s protestations in Red River, and she is given one key scene—throwing a flowerpot through the window when an unarmed Chance is threatened by three badmen, saving the sheriff’s neck.

  By the time Dickinson reported for her first day of work on May 19, temperatures coincidentally started to rise on location, hitting well over one hundred degrees on most days from that point on. Dickinson was only in Tucson for nine working days, as virtually all of her scenes were interiors; in the finished film, her only exterior is at the end of the flowerpot scene. Her first night there, she was given a rite of passage by the men. “They had me join them for dinner,” she recounted, “and they cast me as the victim by trying me out on mountain oysters, and I loved them. So I passed.” As a fabulously sexy woman on location with a virtually all-male cast and crew, Dickinson was obviously highly conspicuous. But it didn’t bother Dickinson because the situation was essentially the norm in those days. “All films were like that, you rarely had many women around. Wardrobe and hair people were the only women. But it didn’t ever bother me. I was just so thrilled to be a part of it.” Dickinson spent most of her time on the set with Ricky Nelson, just sort of wandering around the desert location. As far as her feelings for Hawks were concerned, she said, “I felt intimidated and comfortable at the same time. Intimidated, but only properly so, respectfully. After all, he’s the big boss. I wasn’t afraid.”

  Still, Dickinson wasn’t pleased with her first day of work, on an introductory scene of her character getting off the stage, which didn’t make it into the film. “I hated my costume and I was intimidated in the acting because I felt I didn’t look good. It was a very tough first day, with five or six takes of every shot. I just thought the laugh Howard wanted me to do was out of character. I have such a hearty laugh.” She gradually learned that Hawks wasn’t about to act things out for her. “He didn’t want to show me how to do it. If he showed me what he wanted, it wouldn’t be my own original approach. He was looking for me to be original. It made it tough because you didn’t know what he wanted.… When he liked something, the most he would do was smile and nod his head. It was difficult and frustrating, but a thrill.” Dickinson added, “I think he liked me, but I don’t think he had a thing for me. I was so hung up on the fella I was with that I wouldn’t have noticed.” In general, Dickinson described Hawks personally as “pleasant and polite, but not overly friendly” with her. But as a director, she felt he was “subtle and classy.”

  For the climactic scene of Burdette’s men being blown out of the barn with dynamite, the art director, Kay Kuter, put lots of colored paper inside to intensify the look of the explosion, but when the place blew on the first try, all the flying colors made it look, in Hawks’s words, “like a big Chinese firecracker. We all started to laugh.” Kuter had to rebuild the entire structure for a retake, which went according to plan.

  On May 28, the company finished work in Tucson after twenty-four days—on schedule, something unheard of for Hawks. Shooting resumed in the jail set on Warner Bros. stage four in Burbank on June 2. For the next seven and a half weeks, filming proceeded in quiet, surefooted, good-natured fashion, which vastly enhanced the profoundly lovable nature of the picture; faced with the evidence on the screen, it is inconceivable that a film such as Rio Bravo could have resulted from an unhappy, stressful, strife-ridden shoot.

  Now that they were back in the studio, concentrating on the more intimate scenes between handfuls of people, Hawks encouraged the actors more than ever to contribute, asking what they thought their characters would do in given situations. Brennan was the most adept at this, while Wayne was best when his lines were set and he could place the full force of his personality behind them. Hawks continued to rewrite and rearrange dialogue, often with the help of the ever-present Furthman, but not in significant ways, and he only rarely made more than two or three takes of any given shot, so assured were he, his actors, and his crew. A couple of exceptions were two key scenes with Wayne and Dickinson. Hawks found the scene in which Chance tells Feathers she has to leave town particularly difficult to stage, and Wayne had a lot of trouble with it as well; Hawks actually favors Dickinson considerably in the cutting, covering up Wayne’s rare uncertain work in the scene. The final scene, in which Feathers interprets Chance’s threat to arrest her as his way of saying he loves her, was also a big problem, and Hawks had the actors try it four or five different ways. Dickinson recalled, “Finally, Howard said, ‘This time, half-way through, why don’t you start crying?’ So, with no preparation, we did it that way and that was the one we used.” When filming was completed on July 23 in sixty-one days, Hawks was, amazingly, only six days over schedule.

  Not holding his participation in High Noon against him, Hawks brought Dimitri Tiomkin in to write the score, which included the song for Ricky Nelson as well as one Dean Martin sings in jail. Most memorable, however, was “De Guello,” the haunting theme for trumpet that was supposedly played by General Santa Ana’s men at the Alamo and that Joe Burdette uses to spook Chance and his crew. The profoundly beautiful refrain is heard softly in the background at night and certainly sounds as though it could be authentic. Surprisingly, Tiomkin made it up when Hawks decided that the actual song was terribly banal. John Wayne liked it so much that he appropriated it for The Alamo.

  Folmar Blangsted, the editor, got a rough cut assembled in less than three weeks, and the first screening in August convinced everyone at Warner Bros. that they had a big hit on their hands. Although the film was ready for release by late 1958, the studio decided to hold it back until March 18 of the following year, when it opened at the Roxy in New York City. Two days later, it took the country by storm, snaring the number-one spot nationally in its first week of release with giant numbers almost everywhere. It then lodged at number two for two weeks, behind Some Like It Hot, and enjoyed a sustained life through the spring. By the time it was don
e, Rio Bravo amassed rentals of $5.2 million, making it the tenth biggest box-office film of 1959 and the second highest earner of Hawks’s career, after Sergeant York. It also did enormous business overseas, where Ricky Nelson was extraordinarily popular.

  It almost goes without saying that Rio Bravo was not perceived as a serious piece of work at the time of its release. Even when they were directed by John Ford, John Wayne Westerns were only grudgingly praised by the critics of the time, for whom lofty intentions and aspirations counted for much more than storytelling talent and mise-en-scène. If a filmmaker then threw the likes of Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson into the mix, there was simply no hope that the film would be taken as anything other than an efficient popular entertainment. Besides, when was the last time Hawks had tackled material that was challenging or reputable? Since World War II, he had seen fit to do a mystery, a couple of Westerns and comedies, a musical and a quasimusical, a science-fiction cheapie, and a lousy epic. In the literary-oriented critics’ minds, the last time Hawks had tackled truly ambitious subject matter was Sergeant York and, perhaps, Air Force. More-over, Hawks’s interests seemed to have gotten more generic and trivial since the war, while Oscar favorites such as George Stevens and William Wyler had become more brooding and deliberate.

  All of this may help explain why Hawks, by the mid-1950s, had been relegated to the second tier of Hollywood filmmakers by much of the establishment, and why his reputation was in need of resuscitation by critics and buffs in the 1960s. Despite his track record and the absolute control he exercised over his projects, Hawks was viewed as being closer to the level of Michael Curtiz or William Wellman, fine directors who nonetheless worked mostly on assignment, than to the most respected figures of the moment, such supposedly finicky and meticulous filmmakers as Wyler, Zinnemann, Stevens, or Kazan. Rio Bravo, for instance, was not nominated for a single Academy Award, but the following year, even Wayne’s rambling, verbose, undeniably deeply felt The Alamo was nominated for seven. The Alamo got attention partly because of Wayne’s personal popularity but more because it was a grand, self-important picture that was “about” something bigger than just another Western standoff.