Hawks accepted this new found attention graciously, but like most of his contemporaries, he disliked navel gazing. As he once said, "I don't want to analyse it too much, because I've seen too many people that are ruined... It's very dangerous to stop and think of so many things. Just one question: Do you like it or don't you?"

Hawks & Hollywood

Hawks was born on the 30th of May 1896, in Goshen, Indiana but his family moved to California when he was ten. Thus, the young Hawks found himself near what was quickly becoming the centre of the film industry in America. His first experience of film-making came when he worked as a props man for Famous Players-Lasky, on Summer vacations from Cornell University (where he studied engineering). On a Mary Pickford film, entitled The Little Princess (1917), Hawks even volunteered himself to direct a few scenes when the original director became too drunk to carry on.

After a short spell with the army at a flying school in Texas, Hawks made a living, variously, as an aviator, a professional racing car driver and designer (on one occasion, designing a car which won the Indianapolis race). These experiences would prove invaluable to Hawks, forming a background to such early films as The Crowd Roars (1932), Ceiling Zero (1935), and Only Angels have Wings(1939).

Hawks eventually returned to Hollywood, and worked in a whole range of jobs: assistant director, casting director, script supervisor, editor and producer. In 1922, Paramount hired him to work in their story department. Given just two months to come up with 40 storylines for new films, Hawks bought the rights for works by authors like Jack London and Joseph Conrad. He also worked, mostly unaccredited, on scripts for about sixty films. However, Hawks' ambitions to direct were thwarted at Paramount. When he mentioned this off-handedly to an executive at the Fox studio, Hawks was offered a job there as director immediately. His directorial debut was The Road to Glory (1926), a melodrama, of which no print has survived. With the arrival of sound in the movies, Hawks came into his own as a director. The Dawn Patrol (1930), a WW I flying movie and Hawks' first talkie, set standards for the way sound was used in films.

But it was with Scarface (1932) that Hawks made his first great movie. Along with screenwriter Ben Hecht he cooked up the idea of updating the story of the Borgias, transposing it to Prohibition era Chicago. Hawks regarded Scarface as his favourite work, the only film he ever made away from interference by the studios. Shot in 1930, the films release was delayed because of Hawks' and producer Howard Hughes' battle with the censor over the violence in the movie. The film's heady combination of violence and comedy, often imitated, still makes Scarface an intense cinematic experience. When finally released, it was with the added subtitle The Shame of a Nation and an unsubtle extra scene (not directed by Hawks) to hammer home the anti-social behaviour of Tony Camonte and his gang.

Hawks' talent continued to blossom in the 1930s. The apparent ease with which he worked in the studio system was largely due to his growing reputation in the industry as a professional. He became, in effect, an independent film-maker, selling his ideas to the eight major studios (all of which Hawks worked for during his career).

The Hawks Method

When it came to scripting a film, Hawks made no bones about recycling storylines he had previously used. His success was partly due to working with some of the best writers in the business. As well as Ben Hecht, other collaborators included Billy Wilder, John Huston, William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett. Hawks explained "I'm such a coward that unless I get a good writer, I don't want to make a picture." Yet Hawks worked unaccredited on all the scripts for his films. It was the direction, and the actor's delivery of the dialogue which gave Hawks' films their edge. Often overlapping and delivered at machine gun pace, Dillys Powel neatly summed it up in her review of His Girl Friday (1940), describing the film as possessing "the speed and accuracy of a spitfire."

Hawks stortelling skills were second to none. His art was in effectively masking any preconceived design to a script. At their best, his films cruise along like finely-tuned, precisely engineered machines. Or as Jacques Rivette put it more poetically, "The smooth orderly succession of shots has the rhythm like the pulling of blood, and the films are like a beautiful body kept alive by deep, resilient breathing."

In The Big Sleep (1946), Hawks for once abandoned his clearly delineated plot lines. Adapted by Faulkner, Brackett and Jules Furthman from Raymond Chandler's novel, the plot was so dense that none of the writers involved could work out who committed one of the murders.

Another important aspect of Hawks' approach to film-making was his collaboration with actors. Unlike Hitchcock who infamously remarked that actors should be treated like cattle, Hawks defined a good director as "someone who doesn't annoy you". Hawks often encouraged improvisation among his actors, which added to the spontaneity in his films. His unerring instinct for talent led to him giving an impressive list of actors their first big break. Paul Muni in Scarface, Carol Lombarde in Twentieth Century (1934), Montgomery Clift in Red River (1948) and Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944). He also played an important part in Marilyn Monroe's early career, casting her in Monkey Business (1952) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).

Hawks helped shape some of the most recognisable screen personas in the cinema. Humphrey Bogart's incarnation as Philip Marlowe remains one of his most iconic roles. Hawks also provided Cary Grant with some of his best comedy parts, enjoying undercutting Grant's reputation as a ladies man in Bringing Up Baby, I was a Male War Bride (1949) and Monkey Business. Not to forget John Wayne, who gave one of his best performances as Tom Dunson, the tyrannical cattleboss in Red River. After seeing this film John Ford commented, "I never knew the big son of a bitch could act," and promptly cast Wayne in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949).

Genre Bending

Hawks' position as America's greatest genre director is incontestable. Hawks virtually invented the screwball comedy with Twentieth Century. His comedies centred on strong, smart women, wreaking havoc on men's lives. The sheer speed of what Hawks called his three-cushion dialogue influenced Frank Capra when he came to direct Mr Deeds Goes to Washington (1939). What Hawks did for Cary Grant in his comedies he also did for Gary Cooper in Ball of Fire (1941), casting him as a bookish professor. In the same year Sergeant York was released which also starred Cooper (it won him his first Oscar). It turned out to be Hawks' biggest hit and he was nominated for best director, (incredibly it was the only time he was nominated). Sergeant York belongs to Hawks' roster of action films. Many critics have noted that the director's films have often focus on a tightly-knit group of professionals, often isolated from society, who must learn to work as a team if they are to survive. Qualities like loyalty and self-respect are held in high esteem. These scenarios have often been interpreted as intriguing parallels to the process of film-making.

Air Force (1943), a film about the conflict and camaraderie aboard a B-17 bomber, is as exciting a piece of American WW II propaganda there is. Even better is Only Angels have Wings, focusing on a team of devil-may-care mail pilots in the Andes, battling with hazardous weather conditions and the entrance of a woman (Jean Arthur) into their exclusively male group. Hatari! (1962) transplanted these classic Hawksian situations to Africa, and a group of wildlife hunters on a game reserve.

Other miscellaneous delights in Hawks' filmography include Come and Get It (1936). Sam Goldwyn sacked Hawks from the film, hiring William Wyler to direct the last ten minutes. Nevertheless it is still a recognisably a Hawks film, featuring one of the director's favourite plot devices, the love triangle. To Have and Have Not was made when he wagered with Ernest Hemingway he could make a film out of the author's "worst book". The satirical musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes offered a sly view of the sex war, and the memorable sight of Monroe singing 'Diamonds are a Girls best Friend'.

Land of the Pharaohs (1955) was Hawks' most ambitious film to date, and was his contribution to Hollywood's cycle of ancient epics. It was a production fraught with difficulties. Hawks disliked working with the cinemascope camera, and he admitted problems with creating convincing dialogue. The result may have been uneven, but Land of the Pharohs has one admirer in the shape of Martin Scorsese who has praised Hawks masterful widescreen compositions, singling out the scenes detailing the construction of the pyramid for their sheer scale and realism.

This massive project apparently took its toll on Hawks. After its completion he took a four year break, spending some of the time in Europe. The film he eventually made turned out to be one of his best and most influential, Rio Bravo (1959). Partly a droll response to High Noon (1952), partly a variation on Hawks' recurring themes, he later reworked the plot in El Dorado (1967) and Rio Lobo (1970), the director's last film. In the midst of the upheaval in the American film industry in the 1960s, Hawks called up John Wayne and said "You want to make a couple of westerns 'till I can make up my mind what to do? Because westerns aren't going to change." The films in this loose western trilogy, made in the twilight of Hawks' career, steadily became more laconic, more pessimistic. The director's no-nonsense style, the camera at eye-level, was as assured as ever. His determinably old-fashioned approach was in opposition to new voices in the genre, and Hawks didn't have much time for the demythologising of Penn or Peckinpah. He denigrated Peckinpah's use of slow-motion by saying "I can kill four men, take 'em to the morgue and bury 'em before he gets one down to the ground in slow-motion."

After Hawks

Hawks' influence on cinema is hard to calculate. A volume could be written alone on films which have been adapted from storylines, or straightforward remakes of Hawks' films. If John Ford was the great poet of American film, then Hawks was its premier stylist of cinematic prose. The Searchers (1956) may have cast a mythical spell over the next generation of American film-makers, but Hawks' legacy is just as great.

Robert Altman borrowed and refined upon Hawks' innovation of overlapping dialogue in M.A.S.H. (1970) and Nashville (1975). Peter Bogdanovich largely remade Bringing Up Baby as What's Up Doc? (1972). Brian De Palma's grandiose remake of Scarface (1983) brought Hawks' gangster saga bloodily up to date. John Carpenter proved himself the director most indebted to Hawks, relocating the action of Rio Bravo to the urban jungle of L.A. in Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). His terrifying film The Thing (1982) offers a pessimistic reworking of Hawks' 1951 production (which by all accounts Hawks had a hand in directing). Hawks' influence is also present in the films of Walter Hill, who is probably one of the few genre directors in modern American cinema .

Hawks remained active in his later years, continuing to work on various unrealised projects. Finally, his lack of Oscar recognition was rectified in 1975 when he was the recipient of the Lifetime's Achievement Award. It is as fitting a tribute to Howard Hawks' great talent to end by quoting from that ceremony, which referred to the director as "a giant of the American cinema whose pictures, taken as a whole, represent one of the most consistent, vivid, and varied bodies of work in world cinema."

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