by Mark Cousins
It is hard to believe that these diverse movies were overseen by one man. Hawks directed forty films in forty-three years, often producing and writing them as well, contributing to other projects, and switching between genres. How could someone capture Chicago gangsters’ cynical lust for power, invent screwball comedy’s breathless near madness, pare the Western down by removing much of its action and focusing on its friendships and camaraderie or make the sisterly tenderness of Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe so engaging? His own dismissive answer to these questions in interviews was that his formula was “make a few good scenes and don’t annoy the audience”. Film writers have attempted to answer these questions by searching for a unifying view of life and people deep in films. Companionship and professionalism are undoubt-edly important elements in many of them, from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to Rio Bravo. Hawks’ women are often tough; his men are sometimes humiliated during the course of his films; he repeats almost identical sparring dialogue in several. His films with Humphrey Bogart reveal a broader inclination towards men who are unexcitable and slow to react.
This might be a settled view of life, but there is little agreement over what that “view” constitutes. One distinguished critic describes Hawks as “the greatest optimist the cinema has produced.”21 Another refers to his “distinctively bitter view of life,”22 and such ambiguities carry over into his private life. Lauren Bacall (100), whom he cast aged eighteen in To Have and Have Not, points to his casual anti-Semitic remarks made in a studio system run by Jewish executives. Others suggest that this great womanizer might have been bisexual. Whatever the complexities, they never ripple the surface of his style. Hawks was a closed romantic realist of the purest kind, its poster boy and patron saint. His films take place in a parallel universe in which people are psychologically real, but history has been suspended. Despite making movies throughout America’s Great Depression in the 1930s, his characters mostly have jobs. He almost never used a flashback in his films, using dolly shots only where necessary and seldom filmed from other than shoulder height. There is nothing of Mizoguchi’s elaborated tracking in his work, nor of Griffith’s intercutting, nor of Expressionism or Impressionism. He added nothing to the language of cinema and did not vary the schema in any way whatsoever. “The old grey fox” (as he was nicknamed because of his silver hair), with a slow, throaty laugh, was a canny producer of his own work, a great judge of public taste and a reluctant interviewee, who dismissed penetrating questions. He encouraged the perception that he was nothing more than a “good all rounder”, but French critics admired him from Scarface onwards. Future director Jacques Rivette wrote a seminal Cahiers du Cinéma article on him in 1953, “The Genius of Howard Hawks”, and thereafter his reputation in Europe grew. The enigma of his greatness, which was plain to see, but difficult to define, fuelled critics’ theoretical enquiries into the nature of creativity within the studio factory system.
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Hawks discovered Lauren Bacall and honed Humphrey Bogart’s screen persona.
I have written that Hawks added nothing to the language of cinema, but a closer look at the films of the 1930s reveals this not to be wholly true. Twentieth Century starred distinguished dramatic actor John Barrymore as a theatre producer who is on a train with an actress (Carole Lombard) and tries to convince her to return to Broadway (101 top). Hawks wanted to use a new way of natural, but fast comedy acting, which he adapted from Chaplin and Keaton. His instructions to Carole Lombard on Twentieth Century were as follows, “I told her if she acted, I’d fire her … she would just throw lines at him so fast that he didn’t know what to do sometimes. It was so fast, I didn’t know what to do sometimes.”23 In an inter-view with Joseph McBride, Hawks said, “I don’t think John Barrymore had made a complete idiot out of himself until he did Twentieth Century.”24
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Twentieth Century’s new, faster acting style was influenced by Chaplin and Keaton.
Bringing Up Baby, based on a Hager Wilde story, developed this further. A sci-entist who is to be married, hears that a dinosaur bone has been discovered. A millionairess will help him purchase it for his museum if he accompanies her to Connecticut to deliver her pet leopard, Baby (101, bottom). She falls for the scientist, but the distinctly dangerous leopard makes the path of true love far from smooth. Eventually, back at the museum, the wedding is called off and the millionairess arrives with the bone. Nothing is demure in this mayhem, but Hawks’ ignoble universe, which brought down Barrymore, similarly humiliates Cary Grant’s apparently stuffy scientist. Hawk’s plain words describe the situation, “You take a professor, and you use the girl’s part to knock the dignity down.”25 What was innovative here was not only Hawks ensuring that “the woman had the dominant part”,26 but that throughout the film Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn overlapped each other’s dialogue. This had not been done so emphatically before and it added to the realism of film acting in comedy and drama thereafter. Bringing up Baby is singled out by its kinetic energy, and its insane touches fuelled the 1950s American comedy of director Frank Tashlin and actors Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin.27 Its spirit was revived by director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich for What’s Up Doc (USA, 1972) (102).
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Bringing up Baby continued their accelerated style and added elements of surrealism.
War movies and serious dramas were the other Hollywood genres of the mid–1930s, but will be dealt with later, in the light of the Second World War. The next surprising fact in this story, coming as it does after a discussion of closed romantic realism’s master filmmaker, is that although US studio filmmaking throughout this period more or less conformed to the Hays Code and the political, religous and corporate forces of the day, there were times in the 1930s when closed romantic realism broke some of its own rules. Momentarily, it shattered the illusion of a sealed-off parallel universe, like ours but more enjoyable and emphatic. Three exam-ples illustrate this: the comedies of Laurel and Hardy, the musicals of Busby Berkeley and the melodramas of Joseph Von Sternberg.
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Peter Bogdanovich recreated the world of screwball comedy in What’s Up Doc? USA, 1972.
Laurel and Hardy did not start working together until 1927. Their first significant pairing was Putting Pants on Philip (USA, 1927), in which Laurel plays a Scotsman who must swap a kilt for trousers. As the tailor approaches, he goes all weepy and a scrum ensues. Hardy thinks of himself as a courtly, genteel Southerner, an aspiring sophisticate (103) who insists that a man in a skirt is indecent. He has Chaplin’s delusions of grandeur, but combined with the grace of a bull-in-a-china-shop. He eases Laurel aside and says, “Let me do it” and the world collapses. Laurel piles in on top and looks bewildered.
Laurel and Hardy were two little boys, they were afraid of their wives and they had no foresight, insight or hindsight. There was no surprise in this comedy, just the pleasure of anticipation. It was obvious that they would fall down the manhole, but they were too busy greeting people on the street and raising their bowler hats to avoid this. They fell down the hole and then down another hole and the more expected it became, the more the laughter grew. In the short Big Business (USA, 1929), for example, the comic duo are trying to sell Christmas trees to a resistant home-owner (James Finlayson). He will not buy the tree and so Laurel and Hardy decide to trash his house. Their childish “That’ll-teach-him-Stanley”, “Too-right-it-will-Ollie” spite is infectiously joyous. At one point, Laurel throws vases for Hardy to bat. Finlayson reciprocates by bashing their car to bits. The 1920s had three master comedians, but only as I write about Laurel and Hardy, their successors, do I laugh.
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Screwball was fast but Laurel and Hardy’s slow and signposted approach to comedy was equally popular. Putting Pants on Philip. USA, 1927.
Laurel was the innovator of the two. He had, like Chaplin, worked with the famous comedy troupe of Fred Karno in the UK and for a while was Chaplin’s understudy. Stand on the ordinary street where Laurel
was born in a small house in Lancashire and then in a small Santa Monica apartment in California, overlooking the glittering Pacific Ocean, where he ended his days, and you will know everything about the Hollywood dream. Visit the Laurel and Hardy Museum in Ulverston and you will discover old men and young girls giggling over reruns of their films. Amid the gales of laugh-ter, at the end of mishap after mishap, amid the chaos, Hardy looks at the camera, straight down the lens for 10–15–20 seconds (104). The stare implies, Can you believe that it’s come to this? Why am I always the fall guy? This is not closed romantic realism. Hardy’s look (sometimes mirrored by Laurel) bridges the gap between the audience in the auditorium and the screen on which the mayhem unfolds. In the 1940s and 1950s, comedian Bob Hope would also look into the lens, make wisecracks to the audience and even comment on the absurdity of the storyline. As comedy such as this is anarchic in spirit, it could be argued that it is more likely to break rules, even stylistic ones. The case of Laurel and Hardy illustrates how complex this point is, however, because whilst their adventures usually result in mayhem and destruction, there is nothing in their comic personas that is in itself anarchic. By comparison, mainstream film drama seldom addressed the audience directly, since the whole logic of Western storytelling was to draw the audience into the action, making them forget that they were outside it, watching a movie. In 1903, one of the gunslingers in Porter’s The Great Train Robbery looked directly into the camera and shot at the audience, but this was long before the screen became a closed parallel world of narrative. A rare example of a 1930s film which did have its actors look straight at the audience, was Kühle Wampe/Whither Germany? (Germany, 1932) written by playwright Bertolt Brecht. After a character’s death an actress turns to the camera and says “One fewer unemployed”. Later, director Jonathan Demme would use the same technique in The Silence of the Lambs (USA, 1991), Jodie Foster (105) and Anthony Hopkins looking straight at the camera, Scorsese would reprise Porter’s gunshot in GoodFellas (USA, 1990).
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Actors did not look at the camera in conventional cinema because it was believed that to do so broke the dramatic spell for the audience. In certain modes of comedy, however, such looks became the norm. Few performers looked down the lens more regularly than Oliver Hardy.
Comedy was not the only genre that broke the rules of closed romantic realism. The innate artifice of the musical genre gave it leeway in the area of audience address and, indeed, at the end of a dance routine, the performers would sometimes look straight at the lens, as if the audience was directly watching them put on a show. The film’s grammar would then segue into traditional closure and they would continue to act as if no-one was watching. However, some musicals did something even more surprising, borrowing from Richter’s abstract films or Clair’s surreal Entr’acte (France, 1927). The ones in question are 42nd Street (USA, 1933) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (USA, 1933) both choreographed by Busby Berkeley. The illustration of the Shadow Waltz musical number from the latter (81, see page 116) looks like a flower or an artichoke. In fact, it is a group of violin players photographed from a sound stage’s roof, looking directly downward. Although E. A. Dupont had swung the camera from a trapeze in Variety (Germany, 1925) and Gance had moved and thrust it ubiquitously in Napoleon (France, 1927), it had rarely been placed directly overhead the action and never to such abstract effect. The innovator here was Berkeley, a successful Los Angeles-born choreographer. Like Mamoulian he had worked in the New York theatre and, again like his predecessor, seemed liberated by the infinite number of angles from which a camera could photograph. Berkeley was inspired by two different sources. Firstly, as a US soldier he was stationed in France during the First World War and was struck by the drama, discipline and theatricality of the military drills and marching patterns. Many of his later sequences were simple military routines, eroticized, abstracted, utopianized in the manner to which Dyer refers at the beginning of this chapter. Secondly, he took a thirty-minute hot bath every morning in which he dreamt. So distinctive were the results of the military memories, together with bath-time doodlings, that the industry started calling the results “Berkeley top shots”. Gold Diggers of 1933 was Hollywood’s greatest Depression musical and one of the strangest works of art of the first half of the twentieth century. Its marriage of social concern and abstract pattern making with human bodies is captured in Berkeley’s military, geometric, erotic and horticultural images.
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In later years, filmmaker Jonathan Demme regularly had his cinematographer place the camera square on the actors’ faces. In this moment from The Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster looks directly towards the audience, but the effect is far from comic. USA, 1990.
Joseph Von Sternberg’s films reflected another type of visual excess in Hollywood. Born in 1894 into a poor, Viennese Jewish family, he became famous for devising the sultry, veiled eroticism of German star Marlene Dietrich. Director and star collaborated on such films as The Blue Angel (Germany, 1930), The Scarlet Empress (USA, 1933) and The Devil is a Woman (USA, 1935) together with filters, furs, veils, props, wigs, outfits and visually extravagant lighting, as shown in the image overleaf (106) from The Scarlet Empress. Hollywood’s lighting and design departments had a tendency to decorate films beyond credibility and to seduce the audience through design, but in The Scarlet Empress the instinct shades into lunacy. The whole of the middle-ground is laid out in a frieze of actors and sculptures. There is almost no perspective in the image; people are stacked as in a mediaeval painting. Larger-than-life candleholders look like gargoyles on the façade of Notre Dame. Marlene Dietrich (centre) is haloed in feathers whose textural softness is doubled by the misty effect of lens gauzes. Surrealists would say that the confusing space in such a scene, its seductive lighting and over-emphasis on texture and display, indicate the erotic and unstable impulses behind certain aspects of Hollywood cinema.
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The Scarlet Empress. The imagery of the film was so stylized that it bordered on surrealism. Director: Joseph von Sternberg. USA, 1933.
Oliver Hardy staring at the audience, the abstractions of Berkeley and the excesses of Von Sternberg were cracks in the gleaming, sealed orb of Hollywood, whose system of genres was mastered by Hawks.
EUROPEAN AVANT-GARDE
While Hollywood was flirting with abstract and experimental cinema, the real avant-garde was emerging elsewhere. Although this was not as experimental a period as the 1920s, key films were produced. Buñuel had followed up Un Chien Andalou (France, 1928) with the equally subversive L’Age d’Or/The Golden Age (France, 1930) and two years later, as the Spanish Civil War drew closer, Buñuel would make Las Hurdes/Land Without Bread (Spain, 1932), an intense documentary about the crippling poverty of those living on the Spanish–Portuguese border. Returning to France in 1930, the Comte de Noailles, Buñuel’s benefactor on L’Age d’Or also funded the poet and artist Jean Cocteau to make Le sang d’un poète/The Blood of a Poet (1930) as he would his later films, La Belle et la bête/Beauty and the Beast (France, 1945) and Orphée/Orpheus (France, 1950). Le sang d’un poète treated film as if it was a bunch of magic tricks, in the spirit of Méliès. Using reversed motion, upended sets, overlays of imagery and mythological references, it told its story of a poet who is inspired by a personified statue to go through a mirror into the underworld. The scene in which this happens is particularly effective. The shirtless poet stands over the mirror which, in a single cut, turns into a rectangular pool of water into which he splashes as a chorus of men roar (195).
Still in France, we find creative energy as brilliant as Cocteau’s in the films of Parisian Jean Vigo. The son of a anarchist, Vigo made his first experimental film, A Propos de Nice/About Nice (France, 1930) in the south of France, where the weather benefited his tuberculosis. His third film, Zéro de Conduite/Zero for Conduct (France, 1933) was a forty-five minute work about a revolt in a boys’ boarding school. It starts with a schoolboy prank about hiding marbles and develops into a riot in the spirit
of the Surrealists, but with more clear-ly political intent. Shot by the brother of the Soviet director Dziga Vertov, Boris Kaufman, its most striking sequences are a dormitory pillow fight and the slow-motion procession of the boys (107). The mystical and physical qualities of the former scene – it looks as if it is snowing inside – are enhanced by the musical accompaniment which was composed and transcribed backward by Maurice Jaubert and then performed. The film was interpreted as a political attack on French schools and – for this reason as well as its general spirit of rebellion – banned in France until the mid-1940s; it inspired the British film If… (Lindsay Anderson, 1968). Vigo was to make the poetic romance L’Atalante (France) in 1934, before dying of leukaemia in the same year, aged twenty-nine. He was the most talented figure in French cinema during this period.