Howard Hawks
Howard Hawks was born May 30, 1896 in Goshen, Indiana. He moved to Southern California when Hollywood was still young and studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University. He also served in the Army Air Corps. Hawks ended up starting his own independent productions and by 1924 was the head of the story department at Paramount and directing silent films for Fox. (LeVasseur)
Hawks didn’t have a particular genre as a director and his filmography contains almost every genre out there. His films were known to be no-nonsense, have influential images such as narratively significant cigarette lighting, and have rapid-fire dialogue. The lines in his films tend to overlap sometimes, giving the sense of urgency and tension that Hawks was trying to portray in his films. Even with his more serious films there tend to be comedic undertones. (LeVasseur)
His films also tend to value the group over the individual. Often, he will show this through giving characters nicknames and show how those groups bond through competition and rites of passage. David Boxwell, a professor of film and literature at the U.S. Air Force Academy and commentator for Bright Lights Film Journal, quotes Robin Wood on the ‘Hawksian’ use of nicknames in Hawks’ films stating, “In effect, the renaming serves as a kind of baptism into a masculinist world which would otherwise denigrate his real name, and hence identity, as ‘effeminate’ (Boxwell).
Though he started out making silent films, it was his first films with sound that began to give him a presence in Hollywood. His first sound films were The Dawn Patrol, The Criminal Code, and Tiger Shark. (LeVasseur)
One of his most influential films, made in 1932, is Scarface which went on to define a standard in the gangster film genre. (LeVasseur)
Hawks was known to help jump-start careers for major Hollywood stars. He gave Rita Hayworth a supporting role in his film Only Angels Have Wings and helped Lauren Bacall get her start in Hollywood by pairing her up with Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not, before they went on to play opposite each other in The Big Sleep. He helped to launch Marilyn Monroe’s acting career in the ‘50s with the comedy Monkey Business and the musical Gentleman Prefer Blondes. (LeVasseur)
Hawks also made some well-known westerns. He directed John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River and later again included Wayne in the well-known Rio Bravo. He began to slow his filmmaking in the ‘60s, and it wasn’t until 1974 when he received his first Oscar, honorary, before he died in Palm Springs, CA, in 1977. (LeVasseur)
Works Cited
Boxwell, David. “Howard Hawks.” Senses of Cinema. Issue 58. 21 May, 2002.
LeVasseur, Andrea. “Howard Hawks.” The New York Times. Movies & TV.
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