Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  As for his inclination to tinker with his script right up to the moment it was shot, Hawks explained it to a visitor on the set with great precision: “I don’t change dialogue, I ‘word’ it how I feel it should be read. It’s an instinct, I suppose, but it’s how you tell a story.… To me, the difference between a good director and a bad director is how they tell a story.… My method is to—once I’m into a story—reword it.” Overhearing this, John Wayne said, “You sure as hell get carried away,” and added that as relaxed as a Hawks shoot seemed, “When the grey fox turns his steely blues on you, you get to work. No messing around.”

  Hawks’s way of working and rewording dialogue was illustrated for the public and posterity in a film called Plimpton! Shoot-out at Rio Lobo, a promotional documentary that was shown on ABC-TV to coincide with the feature’s release. It was arranged for George Plimpton, the well-known New York writer, editor, and professional dilettante, to play one of four gang members who come into a bar and threaten the sheriff, John Wayne, and Jennifer O’Neill at gunpoint, only to get mowed down. Plimpton would have one line: pointing his rifle, he was to say, “This here’s your warrant, mister.” The documentary shows Plimpton arriving on the set, watching some tests, and, upon doing a few readings for the benefit of Hawks and Wayne, being advised by Hawks to get rid of his Harvard accent if he wanted to keep the line. The easterner is amusingly seen practicing his walk, mounting a horse, riding, and shooting a gun, up to the filming of his big scene. At the last second, Hawks tells Plimpton that after days of practicing his line as written, Plimpton is to point the gun and say, “I got a warrant right here, Sheriff.” After the general hilarity dies down, Plimpton manages to get out the new line and is then yanked backward by a wire when his character is shot by Jorge Rivero.

  For a while, Hawks seemed to get along well with Jennifer O’Neill, as they were seen walking around the set arm in arm and Hawks seemed to relish telling his stories to her. At a certain point in Tucson, however, Hawks saw the familiar pattern repeating itself, of an inexperienced actress suddenly deciding that she could behave like a star. Furthermore, as he watched dailies, he realized that on-screen she was “dull” and was bringing nothing to the picture. They had a major falling out, and afterward he wouldn’t even speak her name, always calling her things like “a damn fool” and “stupid dame” in interviews. O’Neill felt compelled to settle some old scores in her autobiography. She claimed that it was apparent from their first meeting that Hawks was “deteriorating fast mentally” and “a bit senile.” In the end, she concluded, “it was rather sad to see this once-renowned director losing his touch.”

  In the event, Hawks responded to O’Neill’s behavior as he had with other actors, by cutting her part down. All through the story, O’Neill’s character acquits herself outstandingly when things are on the line, managing to shoot the gang leader, Whitey, played by Robert Donner, in the bar, and gutsily driving a wagon onto the compound of Jack Elam’s crazy man and figuratively disarming him. By any normal Hawksian standard, she had proved herself good enough to accompany the men on their big third-act mission. But because Hawks was fed up with his actress, he rewrote the script to give some key climactic action to Sherry Lansing.

  “Jennifer O’Neill was supposed to kill the bad guy, but Howard got mad at her so he had me do it,” Sherry Lansing acknowledged. For this reason, Lansing got to share, with John Wayne, the final scene, and the final shot, of Howard Hawks’s long screen career. “Howard was yelling at me to try to get me to cry for the last scene,” she said. “Duke went up to him later and said, ‘Howard, you should lay off, she’s pretty good. You should take it easy on her.’ Howard said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, she can take it.’” The climactic scene has Lansing securing revenge by gunning down the evil sheriff who has scarred her face, then hobbling off with Wayne, who has been shot in the thigh. “Mr. McNally, you … you make a person feel awful … ,” she begins, whereupon Wayne replies, “Please don’t say comfortable.”

  Lansing chomped at the bit of Hawks’s often stern attitude with her. “I was standing around chatting with one of the grips and he told me, ‘I can’t talk to you too long or I’ll be fired.’ I think there was an unwritten code that you didn’t fool with Howard’s women.’” She was also put off by the way Hawks “talked glibly about his relationship with Kitty. He was very proud of her and he talked about her all the time, as if they were close,” which couldn’t have been further from the truth.

  Despite all this, Lansing valued her experience on the picture, which was her last as well, because of the glimpse it gave her as to how filmmaking used to be. “It was much more fun,” she insisted. “It wasn’t life and death. He had a bigger-than-life attitude toward movies and life in general. It wasn’t a ‘serious’ business the way it is today.” After the shoot was over, Lansing admitted to herself that she hated acting and quit. “Howard started writing something else he wanted me to do,” she said. “I didn’t want to do it, and he started to get fed up with me. He thought I was being silly. He could be very abrupt.” Lansing subsequently went on to become the first woman to run a motion picture studio, and she was saddened by her last encounter with Hawks: “When I got my first executive job at MGM, I called him up to tell him where I was, and all he said was, ‘You could have been a great actress’ and hung up.”

  It was clear to his collaborators that Hawks realized that the film wasn’t working out the way he had hoped. “He knew it wasn’t too good,” the editor, John Woodcock, admitted. “He’d come out of dailies and say, ‘That’s a terrible scene, cut as much of it out as you can.’” Pierre Rissient came from Paris to spend several days on the Tucson location and reported, “You could feel that Hawks was letting the thing go. There was no intimacy or complicity between him and anyone on Rio Lobo. … I’d say he had already given up.” After speaking with the veteran cinematographer at length, Rissient was sure that William Clothier was ready and willing to put considerably more effort and artistry into his work, “but he was made aloof by Hawks’s attitude.”

  Rissient noted that John Wayne “was his own master” on the set, and Peter Bogdanovich, when he visited, was surprised by Hawks’s extremely casual attitude. “Duke would actually direct the other actors some of the time,” Bogdanovich observed. “And he would say, ‘Isn’t that right, Mr. Hawks?’ And Hawks would say, ‘Sure, Duke.’” Hawks told Bogdanovich of a chilling moment when John Ford, who had directed his last film in 1965, came to visit the set in Mexico. Bogdanovich recalled Hawks saying, “‘Jack came down and we all had lunch. Everybody left and we were alone, and he just looked at me and said, “You S.O.B.” I said, “What, Jack?” And that’s all he said.’ I think it had to do with the fact that there was Hawks, still directing Wayne, whom Ford had been so associated with, and Ford couldn’t work anymore.”

  Hawks’s lack of evident care shows in the finished film, which has all the visual élan of a TV movie of the time and isn’t even distinctly recognizable stylistically as the work of Hawks. Many shots are lazily and clumsily reframed via zooms, and the camera often seems to readjust in an almost surprised way to the action and characters as they move. The lighting is not flattering to anyone, and one early-morning campsite scene, with the characters waking up, looks as though it was shot at high noon.

  The company finished in Tucson and moved to the Studio Center in the San Fernando Valley. The facility had originally been Republic Studios, where John Wayne had made dozens of B Westerns in the 1930s and 1940s, and when someone asked Duke where his old dressing room was, he replied, “Dressing room? I didn’t have a dressing room. I had a hook.” Hawks worked out of a makeshift office in a trailer, a far cry from his resplendent bungalow in the old days of Warner Bros. and his spacious quarters, complete with a shower, at Paramount. Hawks gave his young actress friend Sondra Currie a small role as a hooker in the saloon, but she was all but cut out, visible only fleetingly. With the old censorship codes having broken down since he had last made a film, Ha
wks staged a repeat of the scene he was forced to cut from El Dorado, with Jorge Rivero barging in on a shirtless Sherry Lansing. Again, it was coyly staged, with Lansing strategically wrapping her arms around her breasts throughout the episode, during which she attempts to induce Rivero, a total stranger, to stay with her.

  Hawks completed his final motion picture the second week of June, and “the minute he finished he headed for Palm Springs,” John Woodcock recalled. “He gave me carte blanche in the cutting,” trusting his editor to do his best and eliminate anything embarrassing. Hawks liked a few scenes, particularly the train robbery and its aftermath, but he felt that “with the main girl such a dud, scene after scene just backfired.… If you got passable scenes, you were awfully glad.” On another occasion, he expressed his opinion of Rio Lobo more succinctly: “I didn’t think it was any good.”

  When it was released at the very end of 1970, the film was generally recognized as a flat, below-par effort by both Hawks and Wayne. Given the built-in audience for virtually any John Wayne picture, it did reasonable business, but less than Cinema Center had hoped for and less than any of the three previous collaborations between the director and star. Rio Lobo generated $4.25 million in rentals, which earned it twentieth place among pictures for the year. By way of comparison, Wayne’s next vehicle, a thoroughly average Western called Big Jake, earned rentals of $7.5 million, while the hip revisionist Western Little Big Man, released at exactly the same time as Rio Lobo, pulled in $15 million.

  A few hardy souls spoke out for Hawks’s last film. Most prominent among them was Roger Greenspun, the second-string critic for the New York Times and an arch-auteurist, who wrote that Rio Lobo was “close enough to greatness to stand above everything else so far in the current season.” The review raised eyebrows in many quarters and provoked angry letters to the paper; in retrospect, with Hawks’s critical reputation scarcely riding on the verdict, it is easy to see why. While not oblivious to the film’s shortcomings, Greg Ford, in a scholarly Film Heritage essay, plausibly argued that if such artists as Matisse, Faulkner, and Wallace Stevens could be allowed many recapitulations of the same subjects, why not Hawks?

  Still, however charitable one might care to be, the evidence of decline is too obvious to ignore. The film’s lack of creative spark, of inspiration, of energy, of any driving force is palpable in every scene save for the train prologue. As shoddy as the visuals is the blandly utilitarian dialogue, much of which sounds dubbed in. If one were to compare the talk here with that in virtually any picture Hawks made before the 1950s, the staggering difference, in both words and pacing, would be instantly apparent. In fact, the dialogue is so functional, and the dramatic developments so basic, that one is put in mind of a silent film, albeit with little of the visual or storytelling economy. Wayne’s preference for relaxation over action shows in his exceedingly “comfortable” performance, which may possess the authority but has little of the toughness of his work in Rio Bravo. Some detractors have gone so far as to call Rio Lobo a Hawksian self-parody, but it’s not quite sharp enough for that. The film truly does feel tired and unengaged, with the repetition of previous situations and conceits this time played out to diminishing returns. Few great directors ever went out with a bang; like most of them, Hawks, at the estimable age of seventy-four, sort of faded away.

  39

  From Sand to Dust

  The transformation of Howard Hawks from working director into living legend had its seeds planted in France in the 1950s, began taking noticeable shape in the 1960s, and assumed a life of its own in the 1970s. The first full-length critical study, Howard Hawks by Jean-Claude Missiaen, appeared in 1966, and the following year, for a BBC-TV series called The Movies, Peter Bogdanovich and Nicholas Garnham made a pioneering, hourlong documentary, Howard Hawks: The Great Professional, in which Hawks tells a number of his most familiar stories. While shooting the interview in Palm Springs, Bogdanovich had what was, for him, the harrowing experience of riding in a dune buggy with twelve-year-old Gregg at the wheel and getting stuck in the desert on a blistering day. “I started walking back for help,” Bogdanovich recalled, “and I realized I didn’t know where I was. Eventually I’m not feeling very well. There’s a tiny bush. I’m going to get sunstroke, and I’m trying to figure out how to put my head under this bush. Then I hear a motorcycle and up rides Howard. When I got within hailing distance, I could see he looked terribly worried. Howard was riding through the sand and he looked very grim, like a man who knew tragedy. It was the most serious moment I ever saw him in.”

  In 1968, Robin Wood, the author of a previous volume on Hitchcock and one of the few brilliant critics ever to devote his career to film analysis, published a book on Hawks’s films that still stands as the best critical investigation of the director’s work and one of the most persuasive studies of any filmmaker. Succinct but fully argued, passionate but steeled by a rigorous critical method, Wood’s intellectual, highly influential book did more to legitimatize high regard for Hawks than anything other than Andrew Sarris’s installation of Hawks in the pantheon of great Hollywood directors in his landmark book The American Cinema that same year. Even then, Sarris felt compelled to point out that “Howard Hawks was until recently the least known and least appreciated Hollywood director of any stature,” citing Hawks’s conspicuous neglect in the standard film histories published up to that time. Perceptively noting that “Hawks has lived a tightrope existence, keeping his footing in a treacherous industry for more than forty years without surrendering his personal identity,” Sarris remarked on Hawks’s concern for professionalism, his functional, eye-level visual style, and his ability to stamp “his distinctively bitter view of life on adventure, gangster and private-eye melodramas, Westerns, musicals, and screwball comedies, the kind of thing Americans do best and appreciate least.” His conclusion: “That one can discern the same directorial signature over a wide variety of genres is proof of artistry.” From a critical point of view, Wood and Sarris decisively confirmed Hawks’s new standing, not just as an accomplished popular entertainer but as an American artist of the first rank. Hawks remained a major focal point of critical debate in Peter Wollen’s enormously influential 1969 volume, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, and 1971 saw the publication of another full-length study, by Jean Gili.

  If Hawks ever read much of this adulatory analysis is unclear, but he willingly fostered the worship of critics by sitting for countless interviews about his career. His number was listed in the phone book, and he would tell anyone who called just to come on over. On the subject of himself, Hawks was inexhaustible, recounting the same colorful stories as if for the first time and outlasting interlocutors perhaps a third his own age; Joseph McBride remembered, “When I left Hawks’s home after one of our visits, which seldom lasted less than five hours, I always felt exhausted, and he always looked great.”

  Hawks also played host to young directors who idolized him, unhesitatingly dispensing opinions and advice. The first of these was Bogdanovich, whose fealty to the master was such that he included excerpts from Hawks films in his first two features—The Criminal Code in Targets, Red River in The Last Picture Show—and blatantly, but unofficially, used a Hawks classic, Bringing Up Baby, as the basis for his third, and most successful, film, What’s Up, Doc?

  Bogdanovich remembered screening Targets for two director friends, Jean Renoir and Hawks, and felt that their reactions “shows the difference between the two men.… Renoir said, ‘It is as good as the best Hitchcock,’ and that’s all. I showed the picture to Howard one night, just to him. He sat there. I sat there. Finally, he said, ‘Well, the acting’s not too good.’ ‘I know. Some of it.’ ‘Some of those scenes go on a little too long.’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘But the action’s good, and that stuff’s hard to do.’ I lived on that for years. When we show the clip from The Criminal Code, there’s a line, ‘Howard Hawks directed that,’ and he snorted when that came on. He liked and appreciated the Red River clip in The Last Picture Show. When I sent him
the What’s Up, Doc? script, I didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks. I was in the first day of rehearsal and the a.d. came up and said, ‘It’s Howard Hawks.’ I got on the phone and he said, ‘I read your script. You didn’t steal the leopard, and you didn’t steal the dinosaur. But it’s pretty good. Who’s in it?’ I said, ‘Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. I know they’re not Hepburn and Grant.…’ He said, ‘That’s for sure. But don’t let ’em be cute, and you’ll be fine.’ That was it. He got a kick out of its having been stolen from Bringing Up Baby. Then he went down to South America and came back and said, ‘I’ve got some pictures for you,’ and he’d taken pictures of the theater marquees where What’s Up, Doc? was playing. He loved that it was a hit.”

  When the up-and-coming director William Friedkin was living with Kitty Hawks in New York for a couple of years in the early 1970s, the three spent some time together, which represented the possible beginnings of a rapprochement between a father and daughter who had scarcely ever seen each other. Friedkin naturally asked the old man what he thought of his films. Bluntly, Hawks said that he thought both The Night They Raided Minsky’s and The Boys in the Band were “lousy” and warned Friedkin that he’d better make something entertaining if he wanted to keep getting work. Hawks said that he recommended that Friedkin “make a good chase. Make one better than anyone’s done,” and Friedkin confirmed that this piece of advice led directly to his decision to make The French Connection, for which he won an Oscar.

  On a more personal and distressing level, when Kitty Hawks and Friedkin were in Los Angeles one February, Hawks invited them to dinner for her birthday. Friedkin recounted, “We met him at one of his favorite restaurants, Chianti, on Melrose. Kitty gave him a big hug and we noticed that he had a brown paper bag with him, like a grocery bag. We sat down and he said, ‘Kitty, I’ve got something for you,’ and she got very excited, not imagining what it could be. And he gave her the bag and she reached in and pulled out two men’s shirts, and she just burst into tears.” Kitty’s lingering resentment of her absent father flooded to the surface once again, and while they saw each other sporadically, especially once Kitty moved to Los Angeles and became an agent, the two never reached any kind of accord.