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BAM Screens Howard Hawks
From screwball comedy to musical, sci-fi to western, film noir to gangster flick, this American auteur defined or added to virtually every cinematic genre
His Girl Friday (Photo: Warner Bros.)
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Director Howard Hawks hunted with Ernest Hemingway, never filmed a flashback and used the best screenwriters in the industry. He came from a wealthy Midwest family to Hollywood when the movie business was burgeoning. Hawks worked his way up through the studio system and then out of it, eventually becoming an independent producer and director. He was also a race car driver, aviator and a designer in an aircraft factory. With a similar zest for variety, Hawks defined or added to virtually every cinematic genre, from screwball comedy to musical, sci-fi to western, film noir to gangster flick.
This September 15 to 30, BAM will show 15 of Hawks’s classic films, movies that were heavily borrowed from and that created standards still utilized today. Go see Scarface, the model for the well-known Pacino blockbuster, to marvel at Hawks’s use of gesture in creating characterization. Hawks was an early proponent of ad-libbing, and in Bringing Up Baby Cary Grant ad-libbed the first-ever cinematic use of the term “gay” in reference to sexual orientation. His Girl Friday and particularly Ball of Fire typify Hawks’s talent for entertaining banter (the slang of Barbara Stanwyck’s burlesque dancer juxtaposed against Gary Cooper’s perfect professorial diction).
Hawks’s movies put characters in new environments where they famously play with identity, particularly gender identity, most notably in I Was a Male War Bride. The Hawksian woman became a typecast, and she is evidenced in Hawks’s leading ladies, from Hayworth to Hepburn. These gals keep up with the boys in the arenas of wit, wisecracks, toughness and beauty. Lauren Bacall made her onscreen debut playing the most striking Hawksian woman, Slim, in the stunning To Have and Have Not. (Slim was the nickname for Hawks’s then-wife, and the smoldering panther of a leading lady is said to have been modeled after the real thing.)
If you must see only one film in the series, The Big Sleep is the most enticing of BAM’s line-up. Of the denouement, Hawks said, “Neither the author (Raymond Chandler), the writer (William Faulkner) nor myself knew who had killed whom." And then there are the actors, Bogey and Bacall, together onscreen for the second time just after their wedding, a marriage that lasted until Bogey’s death in 1957. The Big Sleep is Hawks’s only foray into noir, and considering the film’s literary and cinematic star power, there is no excuse for missing it on the big screen.
The full schedule can be found on BAM’s website: BAM.org