F I L M S T U D I E S / F I L M M A K E R S W o Prolific director Howard Hawks made films in nearly every genre, from gangster movies o like Scarface to comedies like Bringing Up Baby and Monkey Business and westerns d like Rio Bravo. In this new edition of a classic text, author Robin Wood explores the ways in which Hawks pushed the boundaries of each genre and transformed the traditional forms in new, interesting, and creative ways. This edition also contains an exciting new introduction by Wood, which shows how his thinking about Hawks has deepened over time without fundamentally changing. Since its original publication in 1972, Wood’s Howard Hawks has set the terms for virtually all subsequent discussions about the director. The provocative chapters demonstrate the ways in which Hawks’s films were affected by the director’s H personality and way of looking at and feeling things and by his celebration of instinct, Robin Wood self-respect, group responsibility, and male camaraderie. Wood’s connections be- oH o w a r d tween the professionalism of Hawks’s action films and comedies, with their “lure of w irresponsibility,” have become a standard way of conceptualizing Hawks’s films and the model to which all later critical work has had to respond. This book remains as a contemporary as when it was first released, although it is grounded in the auteur period of its publication. r d H A W K S Wood has stubbornly resisted the trends of academic film studies and in so doing has remained one of its most influential voices. Certain to be of interest to film scholars and students, this book will also be particularly useful as a text for university courses H on Hawks, popular cinema, and authorship in film. A ROBIN WOOD is a founding editor of CineAction and the author of numerous works, W New Edition including Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (Columbia, 1985) and Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (Columbia, 1998). He is professor emeritus K at York University, Toronto, and the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema Studies. S Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series Cover design by Maya Rhodes Wayne State University Press Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 WoodReplacementwithBcode.indd 1 3/3/10 10:00:16 AM Howard HAWKS Howard HAWKS Robin Wood Wayne State Univeraty ness Dttioit CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION SERIES A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at http://wsupress.wayne.edu General Editor Barry Keith Grant Brock University Advisory Editors Patricia B. Erens Robert J. Burgoyne School of the Art Wayne State University Institute of Chicago Tom Gunning Lucy Fischer University of Chicago University of Pittsburgh Anna McCarthy Peter Lehman New York University Arizona State University Peter X. Feng Caren J. Deming University of Delaware University of Arizona New edition published 2006 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. Foreword and Introduction to 2006 edition © 2006 by Wayne State University Press. Originally published 1968 by Martin Seeker & Warburg in association with the British Film Institute. © 1968 by Robin Wood. Revised edition published 1981 by the British Film Institute. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. 1413 121110 65432 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wood, Robin, 1931- Howard Hawks / Robin Wood.— New ed. p. cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and television series) ISBN 0-8143-3276-5 EISBN 978-O-8I43-3837-7 1. Hawks, Howard, 1896 Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series. PN1998.3.H38W66 2005 79i-43O2'8o92—dC22 2005027801 Contents Foreword vn Introduction to 2006 Edition xi 1. Introduction to 1981 Edition 1 2. Self-Respect and Responsibility 11 Only Angels Have Wings (1939)3 To Have and Have Not (1944)3 Rio Bravo (1959) 3. The Lure of Irresponsibility 52 Scarface (1932), Bringing up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940)3 Monkey Business (1952)3 I Was a Male War Bride (1949) 4. The Group 83 Hawks and Ford, Air Force (1943)3 Ball of Fire (1941)3 The Thing from AnotherWorld (1951) 5. Male Relationships 107 A Girl in Every Port (1928), The Big Sky (1952)3 Come and Get It (1936)3 Red River (1948) 6. The Instinctive Consciousness 124 Hatari! (1962)3 Manys Favourite Sport? (1964)3 Red Line 7000 (1965) 7. Down the Valley of the Shadow 146 El Dorado (1966) Appendix: Failures and Marginal Works 157 Land of the Pharaohs (1955)> SergeantYork (1941), The Big Sleep (1946)3 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) Retrospect 167 Filmography 182 Acknowledgements 210 VI Foreword When the British film journal Movie published its first is- sue in 1962, it featured a chart that ranked directors accord- ing to their auteurist status, like Andrew Sarris's infamous "pantheon." Only two directors were included in "Brilliant," the highest category: Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. Robin Wood has written major works on both of these film- makers, and both books, like the directors who inspired them, can also be described as brilliant. The two books set the standard for auteur criticism and have yet to be surpassed for their combination of critical rigor and insightful originality. Since its original publication in 1972, the Hawks book has set the terms for virtually all subsequent discussions of director Howard Hawks. Wood's provocative connection between the professionalism of Hawks's action film and their inverse in the comedies, with their "lure of ir- responsibility," has become one of the ways everyone thinks about Hawks's films and the model to which all subsequent critical work on the director has had to respond in some fash- ion. Wood boasts that he is not a theorist, but this is true only insofar as he does not limit himself to a particular model or perspective. Although he was later attacked as an "unrecon- structed auteurist" for books such as this one, the truth is that Wood was tackling questions of gender and ideology before the theoretical mantras of feminist and semiotic film stud- VII ies even existed. When no one, including Wood, knew how to frame questions of the construction of masculinity and the relation of this masculinity to women, he was thinking about them but with a different critical vocabulary. Wood's new introduction for this reprint, like his recent monograph on Hawks's Rio Bravo for the British Film Insti- tute's Film Classics series (2003), shows how his thinking about Hawks has deepened over time without fundamentally chang- ing. This, of course, is not the same thing as saying that the author has thought nothing new on the subject. Living, as he says, with his favorite directors for decades, Wood has revised considerably his critical opinion of Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman; but as he notes in his new introduction, while he no longer sees Hitchcock and Bergman in the same way he did forty years ago, for him "Hawks remains Hawks." Thus Wood considers his book on Hawks to be, as he says in his preface to the revised edition of Hitchcock's Films Revisited (2002), the best of his early auteurist books and the one least in need of "revisionist thinking." True, Wood admits that if he were writing the book today, he would revise his opinion of the relative value of a few specific films—although on the achieve- ment of Red Line 7000 he remains firmly "unrepentent." But now, as then, Hawks represents for Wood the greatest com- munal director Hollywood has produced, and one who was concerned with fundamental issues of self-respect, emotional maturity, and personal relationships. If Wood thinks this book requires no significant revision, it is a testament to how deeply he understood Hawks's films in the first place. Also in that Hitchcock preface, Wood tells us that while at- tending Cambridge in the early 1950s he would sneak away after attending F. R. Leavis's lectures to see Red River, The Thing from Another World, Monkey Business, and Gentlemen Pre- fer Blondes in the afternoon, and that while he didn't realize these films were all made by the same director until ten years later, "I already loved them." His introduction to this new edi- tion of Howard Hawks, like the Rio Bravo monograph, shows VIII that he still does. The book reveals a brimming joy for Hawks's pragmatic style, and even though Wood is now a different kind of critic, his more overtly political assessment of Hawks never dampens the exhilaration. The new introduction, with its po- lemical tone and sense of urgency, is characteristic of Wood's more recent writing. Yet if it seems an intriguing counter- balance to what he describes as the apolitical analysis of the book, clearly he admires Hawks no less than before. One can- not doubt Wood's confession in the Hitchcock preface that Hawks's movies are "the films to which I most often return." I am very pleased that several of Robin Wood's early books will be published in Wayne State University Press's Contem- porary Approaches to Film and Television series, beginning with this volume on Howard Hawks. Although the book was written several decades ago, and is on one level a product of what Wood himself calls "'primitive' auteurism," it neverthe- less remains as contemporary as when it was first published. Robin Wood has stubbornly resisted the trends of academic film studies, and in so doing has remained one of its most in- fluential voices. Barry Keith Grant 2005 IX