Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  But Hawks knew that no matter what he did, Red Line 7000 was essentially unsalvageable. His basic reaction to this fiasco was to plunge immediately and deeply into the Western El Dorado. Due to John Wayne’s busy schedule, filming would have to start on October 11, making this the fastest turnaround between pictures for Hawks in some twenty-five years. Therefore, Hawks was well and otherwise occupied when Red Line 7000 had its world premiere at the Plaza Theater in Charlotte on November 9, 1965. Marianna Hill, Norman Alden, Gail Hire, and James Ward flew in for the occasion, and the picture actually did reasonably good business on the expected circuits in the South.

  It was a different story when the picture hit major urban markets. Noting that it opened in New York City on a double bill with Beach Ball, starring Edd Byrnes, the Supremes, and the Righteous Brothers, the New York Times’s critic Bosley Crowther struck a common chord when he lamented, “It is dumbfounding that a filmmaker as distinguished as he could make a film as vulgar, witless and outrageously ponderous as this.” Most aislesitters agreed wholeheartedly with Crowther, as did Hawks and his inner circle. Paul Helmick bluntly said, “It’s a lousy picture.” Cissy Wellman admitted, “Jimmy Caan, all of us would like to burn it.” Aside from the obvious casting problems, Hawks blamed the failure on his jumping from one story to another, since “just as soon as you got interested in two people, you left them and got involved with someone else, and you couldn’t get the momentum back again.” To his credit, he assumed full responsibility for the debacle: “I just messed it up. It’s as simple as that.”

  Not quite everyone agreed. Over the years, some devoted Hawksians have done contortions trying to assert that the film is great simply because the film’s situations and motifs were so quintessentially Hawksian. In a long exegesis, Robin Wood went so far as to claim that Red Line 7000 was possibly “the most underestimated film of the sixties”; the way he continually refers to the film’s “intensity” and modernity and ignores the poor acting and artificial look, makes one wonder if he saw the same film as everyone else. Rather more convincing was the critic Richard Thompson, who, writing in the highbrow journal December, dealt with Hawks’s own disillusionment with the film and paralleled the inexpertness of the cast with the immaturity and unprofessionalism of most of the characters. Thompson’s persistent enthusiasm and decision to teach the film to students in Melbourne after moving there from the United States accounts for the rabid Red Line 7000 cult that exists to this day in Australia.

  Still, Peter Bogdanovich is closest to the mark in saying that “theoretically it’s a good movie,” as those who defend it are forced to ignore too many glaring shortcomings, even beyond the acting: the technical quality is pathetically poor, with a truly unpalatable mix of raw documentary footage, awful process work, and phony “exteriors” shot in the studio, most notably the announcer’s tower and the spectators in the stands; the characters are largely uninteresting and shallow; and the movie is ostensibly more rooted in the real world than most Hawks films, and yet weirdly detached from it. To paraphrase Jacques Rivette: You only have to watch Red Line 7000 to know that it is not a good film.

  For El Dorado, the title Hawks gave to the adaptation of The Stars in Their Courses, Leigh Brackett felt she had outdone herself. “I wrote the best script I have ever written,” she proudly said, “and Howard liked it, the studio liked it, Wayne liked it, and I was delighted.” The story told of a Duke, “a meticulously dressed Englishman” (and not the John Wayne character) who is helped out of a jam by “rugged” Arch Eastmere, “one of the most dangerous hired guns on the range,” when he is attacked in a bordertown cantina by the gunslinger Nelse McLeod and his gang. To return the favor, the Duke accompanies Arch to the town of Eldorado, where the powerful rancher Mark Lacy has hired Nelse McLeod to grab, by force, water rights controlled by the rancher Randal, whose son Hallock is the local sheriff.

  Arch owes Hallock a favor. Acting as Hallock’s deputies, Arch and the Duke help fight off McLeod’s men and prevent them from blowing up a cliff on the riverbank. After becoming partially paralyzed from an old bullet wound, Arch “sacrifices his life to see that justice is done. Arch doesn’t want to live the rest of his life as a helpless, paralyzed man. With Duke’s help, he attacks and kills McLeod before he is cut down by hired guns himself. Duke turns Lacy over to the sheriff and the townspeople learn of his guilt for the first time. In death, Arch turns out to be the hero of Eldorado after all.”

  What specifically motivated Hawks to reject Brackett’s initial script and force her into what she derisively called The Son of Rio Bravo Rides Again is not entirely clear, but it was probably a combination of reasons. For starters, when he read Brackett’s script, Hawks was struck by how tragic it was. “I read it and said, ‘Hey, this is going to be one of the worst pictures I’ve ever made. I’m no good at this downbeat stuff,’” he told his writer. It is easy, and perhaps accurate, to speculate that Hawks, whose position as a reliable box-office director was beginning to be questioned in Hollywood, was simply anxious to retreat to the safe ground of Rio Bravo, to fall back on what he knew would work. But Hawks may also have rejected Brackett’s script because after the 1930s, he had generally avoided killing off his leading characters once he’d developed interest and sympathy in them. Or he may have realized that his tendency to make his material more comic when working with Wayne would run counter to the contours of the grim, deterministic novel.

  Hawks was far from shy about recycling discarded ideas from Rio Bravo. Put on the defensive about stealing from himself, as he phrased it, Hawks noted that Hemingway did it all the time (certainly not as blatantly as Hawks did) and argued that “if a director has a story that he likes and he tells it, very often he looks at the picture and says, ‘I could do that better if I did it again,’ so I’d do it again.… I’m not a damn bit interested in whether somebody thinks this is a copy of it, because the copy made more money than the original, and I was very pleased with it.”

  The first person he met resistance from was Brackett. “I have been at swords’ points with him many a time because I don’t like doing a thing over again, and he does. I remember one day he and John Wayne and I were sitting in the office, and he said we’ll do such and such a thing. I said, ‘But Howard, you did it in Rio Bravo. You don’t want to do this over again.’ He said, ‘Why not?’ And John Wayne, all six feet four of him, looked down and said, ‘If it was good once it’ll be just as good again.’ I know when I’m outgunned, so I did it.” Brackett wasn’t happy about it and did her best to apply little zigzags to Hawks’s blueprint. “Amazingly enough,” Brackett noted, “very few people, except film buffs, caught the resemblance.”

  Hawks’s way of bending the material to his own ends is visible in the first few minutes of the film. Instead of beginning with a violent attack in a cantina, the picture gets under way by firmly establishing what is by far the most important element in the story to the director: the friendship between the gunslinger (Wayne’s Cole Thornton, formerly Arch Eastmere) and the sheriff (Robert Mitchum’s J. P. Harrah, formerly Hallock). Their initial conversation is held while Harrah aims his rifle squarely at Thornton until he convinces his old friend not to go to work for the expansionist-minded rancher (Ed Asner’s Bart Jason, formerly Mark Lacy). Within moments, the script has drawn upon several previous Hawks films: the pre–Civil War back story and postwar Texas setting call to mind Red River, Harrah’s discovery that Thornton knew his girl Maudie (Charlene Holt) before he did is taken straight from A Girl in Every Port, and Maudie’s recapitulation of her past (she was a penniless gambler’s widow before Thornton took her under his wing) could pass for a biography of Feathers and John T. Chance in Rio Bravo.

  The one significant scene retained from the novel and initial screenplay was Thornton’s shooting of the rancher’s son, whom he took to be firing at him, and the wounded boy’s ensuing suicide. Thornton’s subsequent action of taking the boy’s body back to his father’s ranch and telling the man what happened is on
e of the most powerful expressions of a stoic’s handling of death in all of Hawks, and as Robin Wood observed, its spare, beautifully articulated gravity makes one long to see the completely serious film Hawks chose not to make.

  From there on, the narrative and character lines can be drawn directly back to Rio Bravo, with the situations or attributes generally reversed. This time the sheriff is the drunk who needs to be looked after by the gunslinger; the young newcomer on the scene (the novel’s Duke character transformed into James Caan’s Mississippi) can’t shoot a lick, although he does throw a mean knife; the mercenary outlaw Nelse McLeod is a nonpareil professional whose men are dunces rather than the usual tough customers, and the ending once again involves an exchange of prisoners (Brackett refused to write this unless Hawks promised not to use dynamite again). Hawks also prominently lifted from The Big Sleep the scene in which Thornton forces a man out a door, only to have the man shot by his own men expecting someone else.

  Through it all, the focus is on pain, disability, aging, and the fear of losing one’s powers and abilities. Even though Hawks had dealt since his very first film, The Road to Glory, with characters’ infirmities, injuries, and fears of not living up to what they once were, the explicit way he confronts issues related to human frailty and deterioration—from the vantage point of nearly seventy years—is what gives El Dorado its special poignance and highly personal feeling. Even if it may not be as accomplished as Rio Bravo or several of Hawks’s earlier films, it still comes within shooting distance of what critics, and auteurists in particular, warmly regard as an old-age masterpiece, a summing-up film that shows that a great director always retains the potential to express himself eloquently. Hawks even threw the highbrows a bone this time in the form of the Edgar Allan Poe poem “Eldorado,” from which the film draws its title; part of it, as spoken by James Caan in the picture, reads:

  “Over the Mountains

  Of the Moon,

  Down the Valley of the Shadow,

  Ride, boldly ride,”

  The shade replied—

  “If you seek for Eldorado.”

  The verse has always been interpreted as Hawks’s most concise statement that since there is no El Dorado, with a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the key to human endeavor lies not in the goal but in the search itself. Typically, the director discouraged even this modestly intellectual analysis, maintaining that he included the poem, which he knew thanks to a Mexican jockey who used to recite it, only because he and Brackett liked it.

  With a few days off to labor on Red Line 7000 rewrites, Brackett worked right through the late summer and fall of 1965 on El Dorado, trying to give her boss what he wanted. As opposed to how it had been on his last three pictures, the casting fell into place perfectly. Due to receive a flat $750,000 with an additional participation that would bring his haul to at least $1 million, Wayne was looking forward to working with his old friend again. All the same, the star had undergone the biggest crisis of his life since their adventure in Africa, surviving a battle with cancer and the removal of half of his left lung in September 1964; rebounding with vigor, he then made The Sons of Katier Elder and Cast a Giant Shadow before reporting to Hawks.

  To play the sheriff, Thornton’s best friend, Hawks could use only someone capable of holding his own with Wayne, a man with something resembling the same physical and charismatic stature. Robert Mitchum is an actor Hawks should have worked with years before, so perfectly does his combination of authority and nonchalance fit into the director’s world. Their paths had crossed, technically, more than twenty years earlier, when the young Mitchum played a bit in the Hawks-produced Corvette K-225, and Hawks had wanted him for The Big Sky, only to be double-crossed by Howard Hughes. It is also easy to imagine the actor taking on Matthew Garth in Red River, Dude in Rio Bravo, or the second lead in Hatari! that Hawks had to split in two. Mitchum said that Hawks simply called to ask him to be in the picture. When Mitchum asked what the story was, “He said, ‘There is no story, just you and Duke.’ I said, ‘That’s fine with me. Just tell me when to be there.’” Mitchum signed on for $300,000.

  Carrying over from Red Line 7000, Hawks knew he wanted to use James Caan as the slightly off-center knife tosser who throws in with Thornton and Harrah, and he intended to give Charlene Holt, after two warm-ups, her big chance on this picture as the woman fancied by both men. Disappointingly, Walter Brennan was unavailable to reprise his patented old-coot part, so Hawks paged Arthur Hunnicutt, so good in The Big Sky, to fill in. Once again drawing from television, he got Johnny Crawford, who had a following from The Rifleman, to appear as the young man who kills himself after having been shot by Thornton. Edward Asner, then just starting his Hollywood career, was cast as the evil rancher Bart Jason, the Western stalwart Paul Fix was the doctor, and a few regulars, such as Robert Donner, John Gabriel, Diane Strom, and Anthony Rogers, also turned up. Hawks put Olaf Wieghorst, whose Western paintings are featured under the opening credits, before the cameras as the Swedish gunsmith who supplies Mississippi’s shotgun.

  For the second female part, of the impetuous MacDonald daughter who puts the bullet in Thornton’s back, Hawks picked a fabulously sexy girl he had originally tested for Red Line 7000, only to decide that she wasn’t yet ready to act a part. However, Hawks signed Michele Carey and started grooming her, so that by the time her next chance came around she could handle it. A child piano prodigy who began modeling in Denver and had done The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and a couple of other television roles before auditioning for Hawks, Carey may have looked and sounded very contemporary, but her impetuous attitude and bareback riding in skintight pants definitely added some spice to the picture. As Hawks enthused, “She’s earthy, and girls like that who can act are hard to find these days.”

  As filming drew near, Paramount approved a budget increase to $3.85 million, but production head Howard W. Koch was worried. Knowing Hawks’s reputation for slowness, Koch wrote to the company president, George Weltner, in New York, cautioning that they should by no means count on the picture being ready for release the following summer. After the director’s substantial overages on his two previous projects for the studio, Koch had imposed a provision giving Paramount the right to take over the picture if Hawks exceeded the budget by 10 percent. Obviously, he admitted, such a move would involve “practical difficulties,” adding that “business judgment would have to be carefully considered if we decide to take over because of the involvement of Wayne and Mitchum and the unavailability of substitute directors to complete a picture of this stature.” Koch concluded that he believed in the film, but that Paramount even imagined that Hawks could be pushed off a film at this stage of his career, or that his stars would abide such a move, is incredible.

  Russell Harlan was busy on the protracted shoot of Hawaii, so to photograph El Dorado, Hawks reached way back into his past, and no one was more surprised than Hal Rosson himself that Hawks wanted him for the job. The lone surviving Rosson brother, he was a year older than Hawks, and had retired in 1958. Many of his contemporaries were still working on top productions, but Rosson, who went all the way back with Hawks to Quicksands in 1923 and had also shot Trent’s Last Case, really believed he had put away his light meter for good before Hawks convinced him to return. Rosson recalled that Hawks said, “‘Oh come on, come back,’ and I said, ‘You don’t want me,’ and he said, ‘Yes I do.’ So I went back, and I was out of my mind I ever quit.” As he acknowledged, “I would do anything for Howard Hawks, and I enjoyed doing it. It was fun.”

  With Old Tucson redressed once again so it wouldn’t too closely resemble its appearance in Rio Bravo or any other picture, Hawks led the company to Arizona and starting filming on October 11, 1965. Oblivious to the fact that Paramount was watching him closely, he took his own sweet time as usual, and Leigh Brackett was on hand a good deal of the time to supply revisions; as Robert Donner put it, “the script was written in sand.” Johnny Crawford, accustomed to the eye-on-the-clock rigors of televisi
on shoots, was astonished at Hawks’s casual approach. “The atmosphere on this set was totally relaxed and ponderous, and I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, this is the way I thought it would be.’ I had read stories about powerful filmmakers who were like that.… What a luxury. Also what a cost. But I really enjoyed it.” One day, according to Crawford, when the company was set to shoot his death scene at a ranch south of Tucson, some clouds moved in about noon. “Hawks looked up at the clouds and said, ‘It looks like the sun’s going to be behind the clouds for quite awhile,’ so he and John Wayne jumped in their car and drove off for Nogales. We spent the rest of the day on location and they never came back.”

  To Crawford, Hawks “didn’t seem like a man who was under any great amount of pressure. He seemed to be a very relaxed, confident, down-to-earth kind of a gentleman. A real gentleman. My first day on the set, Howard Hawks introduced me to Wayne and they invited me to sit with them at lunch. I was just thrilled. They were very interested in me and made me feel very special, asking me questions about The Rifleman and Chuck Connors just like anybody else. There were no airs about them.”

  As the majority of the story’s action was to be played out at night, Hawks instructed Harold Rosson to study the nocturnal paintings of Frederic Remington, of which the director had several in his collection. In particular, Hawks wanted to catch the slashes of light that the painter often featured pouring out of doors and windows onto the street, and Rosson used yellow light to accomplish this, making sure to wash the actors with white light to avoid a jaundiced look. Encouraged by his boss’s slow pace, Rosson took ever longer to set his lights, until it finally became too much, even for Hawks. “Trouble was,” he said, “people started talking about an Academy Award, and he got slower and slower and slower and slower until it drove me crazy.” All the same, Hawks defended Hally, as he called him, against the others’ griping. “He’d say, ‘Hally, you’re doing just fine,’” Robert Donner recalled. “And Howard let it be known that if anybody had any problem, he was the guy to talk to. He was a stand-up guy and if you were his guy, that was it.” After El Dorado, Rosson retired for good.