Howard Hawks

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I like Hawks plenty but movies which others like (I Was a Male War Bride and Monkey Business) do very little for me.
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But you must admit, Mark, that the biography which I Was a Male War Bride was based on has a very catchy name, I Was an Alien Spouse of Female Military Personnel Enroute to the United States Under Public Law 271 of the Congress
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I like Hawks plenty but movies which others like (I Was a Male War Bride and Monkey Business) do very little for me.
i stopped watching halfway through monkey business.

and i used to work at a software company called business monkey



I need to watch WAY more Hawks films. The few films I've seen from him all are amazing. I might do a Hawks marathon this week, like Daniel did.

These are the only three Hawks pictures I've watched so far, I think (not in order of preference):

To Have and Have Not
The Big Sleep
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes


It's hard for me to compare them to eachother, so I'm not going to do that.

I do want to say that I absolutely LOVE Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It's like a deeply intelligent film about society's superficial materialism, masquerading as just a superficial materialistic film. It's a bit cynical, but I can handle that. It also looks so gorgeous... Such a clever and beautiful film!
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I'm disappointed that you bring up phony visual effects as a complaint for Only Angels Have Wings, Mark. I thought they were excellent, I really did. The same with Ceiling Zero too, fantastic, especially for their age.

And yeah, like Rio Bravo, I love Only Angels Have Wings' sense of community. I love how Hawks develops the setting perfectly through mise-en-scene and it really feels you are part of a group, I can see where Altman was inspired by him with this, and also his overlapping dialogue. It's the same with Hatari! too, it might be a little less serious, but it has all the fun Hawks ingredients, a built-up setting, great crowd of people, lots of comedy, awesome action sequences etc. and even little touches like speaking over the radio that I love.

The next two films I'll probably watch will be Monkey Business and To Have And Have Not, looking forward to both.

And yeah Only Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is visually stunning, the colours are so rich and great to look at. As I say, I think I underrate it on my list, but they're all too hard to divide. Also bluedeed I know what you are saying about The Thing, I've read lots of stuff about whether he did or did not direct it and both theories seem plausible, even if he didn't then Nyby definitely managed to capture his style well and create a Hawksian film
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RIP www.moviejustice.com 2002-2010


Man's Favorite Sport?(1964) is the funniest performance I've seen by Rock Hudson.
It's been years since I've watched that, but remember loving it
It was playing on AMC or TCM back in the day and I was watching it with my gpa, who did like to fish so got a kick out of it. Good stuff.

I've within this year have watched several Hawks films, as they can always be found - at least one or two, at any time on The Criterion Channel. So far this year, Bringing Up Baby, Twentieth Century, Air Force, Monkey Business, Gentleman Prefer Blondes, Sergeant York, Red River, and Hatari! I've made no secret about it; he's my favorite director of all time with his no nonsense "just tell the damn story" approach. I also recently watched the 20 minute Peter Bogdanovich interview featurette on The Red River Criterion disc talking a bit about Hawk's style and process and how unlike other authors he loved eye level camera shots and invisible edits and cuts.

Great filmmaker and to me, along with Ford and Wilder, Hawks encapsulated The Golden Age of Hollywood.
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And I wrote this several weeks ago on facebook:

"Stumbled across a wonderful film, Sergeant York (1941, Howard Hawks) on youtube channel Old Films Revival Project. Great, great movie. In fact, while I had watched countless old westerns on TV and Golden Age classics like Gone With the Wind (in bits and pieces) and The Wizard of Oz, I don't know how many times as a young child, it wasn't really until I was in eighth grade and watched Sergeant York on AMC or TCM (through Dish Network back then) that I really, REALLY paid close attention to the old style of filmmaking and storytelling in the classic studio system heyday of films. Really began to notice, to think about, and dissect in my mind how older films were very different from modern pictures in terms of storytelling, tone, and style.

Howard Hawks, the greatest filmmaker of all time, tells the real story of Alvin York - a World War I hero from the rural hills of Tennessee who infamously captured, near single-handedly with just a handful of men, over a hundred German soldiers and two dozen machine gun nests during the chaos and Hell of WWI trench warfare.

I'll post the link to the film here. It's a delightful film and released just on the eve of World War II, it's one of the "big three" American pro European intervention non-appeasement films that Hollywood released at the start of the 1940s acting as allegorical morality plays to rally up the nation to get behind the war efforts in Europe at a time where isolationism vs interventionalism was still (and really today the debate still goes on) a hot area of contention. The other two big ones being of course Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and Casablanca (1942) and each of the three films works perfectly as a form of pro-war, rah-rah America propaganda. That's not a bad thing. Propaganda is a word that while it certainly does have a negative connotation - well earned to a degree, in and of itself at face value is not an inherently malevolent thing - no more than say the Tooth Fairy is for getting young kids to brush their teeth or Santa Claus is to illicit good behavior... anyway... but that's a different discussion altogether.

The truth is Sergeant York is emblematic of the old style of filmmaking which is VERY dialogue heavy, VERY character heavy, and VERY allegorical and literary heavy in terms of storytelling. Sure the great visuals are there, including some great deep focus photography, but the visuals tend not to overwhelm the story... certainly they don't draw too much attention to themselves as is common in most Howard Hawks' films. Also a great score by Max Steiner (Now, Voyager, Gone With the Wind, The Searchers) with solid melodies and motifs. Moreover, while technically a "war film" the first half of the movie is anything but and like most great Hawks' pictures it really transcends genres. To me, it works first and foremost as a comedy with some truly absurdist and hilarious moments such as church sermon being interrupted by a raucous and rowdy bout of horseplay with gunfire, a bar divided by state lines in which one side alcohol is prohibited, where five steps over it's a free for all, a murder attempt thwarted by lightning, a bar fight being stopped by "mom's callin'" using turkey hunting as war strategy, and the idea of wanting to be crammed into a subway as reward for being a war hero.

While I've never been a fan of Gary Cooper and his dry, dull, and drool deadpan "aww chucks" low-energy demeanor and style of dialogue delivery, it absolutely works perfectly for the character and plays well off of the real star and glue of the film which is Walter Brennan as the preacher.

Great stuff and Sergeant York along with some of the other films I mentioned is a great entryway into older cinema of a by-gone era. Also as a side note, really - REALLY cool to see L'avventura by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni on the same youtube channel (Old Films Revival Project) too. As a complete opposite and different type of filmmaker than Howard Hawks, his (Antonioni) stuff is really equally as great and certainly is in my top 10 filmmakers of all time as well."

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PtuM7M...mmlYs0M9NJLnZo



It's been years since I've watched that, but remember loving it
It was playing on AMC or TCM back in the day and I was watching it with my gpa, who did like to fish so got a kick out of it. Good stuff.
Glad to here there's another fan of Man's Favorite Sport, it's been a long time since I seen that but I've never forgotten it. I really like Paula Prentiss in it and Rock Hudson was at his comic best too. One of these days I'll catch it again.

I've within this year have watched several Hawks films, as they can always be found - at least one or two, at any time on The Criterion Channel. So far this year, Bringing Up Baby, Twentieth Century, Air Force, Monkey Business, Gentleman Prefer Blondes, Sergeant York, Red River, and Hatari! I've made no secret about it; he's my favorite director of all time with his no nonsense "just tell the damn story" approach. I also recently watched the 20 minute Peter Bogdanovich interview featurette on The Red River Criterion disc talking a bit about Hawk's style and process and how unlike other authors he loved eye level camera shots and invisible edits and cuts.

Great filmmaker and to me, along with Ford and Wilder, Hawks encapsulated The Golden Age of Hollywood.
I so agree! Hawks is one of my favorite directors. I just looked at his filmography and he has so many great films that he directed. Ford and Wilder too are favorite directors of mine. You know I seen Bringing Up Baby three times before I really appreciated what Hawks did with it...but it was the 4th time when I watched it with Peter Bogdanovich's commentary that I realized that Hawks had made something very special with Bringing Up Baby.

" his no nonsense "just tell the damn story"...Absolutely, you described his directorial style to a tee and that's why I enjoy his films so much. Your post got me thinking that I want to watch or rewatch all of Howard Hawk's filmography, he also made a few silent films.



RIP www.moviejustice.com 2002-2010
My top 5 of his films:

The Big Sleep
To Have and Have Not
Bringing Up Baby
His Girl Friday
Sergeant York
Good list. If I were to do a top five Howard Hawks, just off the top of my head here:

1. Red River - A+
2. The Big Sleep - A+
3. Bringing Up Baby - A+
4. Rio Bravo - A+
5. Sergeant York - A+

But it's such a hard call, to be sure. Actually I just saw Twentieth Century for the first time earlier this year, as it was on The Criterion Channel, and I absolutely loved it. I still need to see Only Angels Have Wings and Barbary Coast and a handful of others. But to me, he's a director whose films are just joyful, fun, clever, well written, and paced and just pure cinematic storytelling with characters that you plain enjoy spending two hours with. Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges, and Ernst Lubitsch are the other big "writing" directors for me which also evoke similar thoughts of greatness in my mind. Just classy all around.



RIP www.moviejustice.com 2002-2010
You know I seen Bringing Up Baby three times before I really appreciated what Hawks did with it...but it was the 4th time when I watched it with Peter Bogdanovich's commentary that I realized that Hawks had made something very special with Bringing Up Baby.

" his no nonsense "just tell the damn story"...Absolutely, you described his directorial style to a tee and that's why I enjoy his films so much.
I would gladly spend time listening to an audio commentary on Bringing Up Baby with Bogdanovich who was of that generation of filmmakers that loved Hawks. Was that commentary Criterion?

Also, I can't remember who said it. I think Hawks himself said it or someone quoted him as saying "Just tell the damn story." I read a book about him about 20 years ago that I found in the college (UNI) library.



I would gladly spend time listening to an audio commentary on Bringing Up Baby with Bogdanovich who was of that generation of filmmakers that loved Hawks. Was that commentary Criterion?...
I don't remember if it was a Criterion DVD, it was at my library and I borrowed it but that was some years ago.



These are my top tier Howard Hawks film in chronological order...I still need to watch Twentieth Century and a few of his other lesser known films.

El Dorado (1966)
Man's Favorite Sport? (1964)
Hatari! (1962)
Rio Bravo (1959)
Land of the Pharaohs (1955)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
The Thing from Another World (1951)
Red River (1948)
The Big Sleep (1946)
To Have and Have Not (1944)
Ball of Fire (1941)
Sergeant York (1941)
His Girl Friday (1940)
Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Barbary Coast (1935)