Howard Winchester Hawks (May 30, 1896 – December 26, 1977) was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era. Critic Leonard Maltin called him "the greatest American director who is not a household name."[2] Roger Ebert called Hawks "one of the greatest American directors of pure movies, and a hero of auteur critics because he found his own laconic values in so many different kinds of genre material."[3] He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Sergeant York (1941) and earned the Honorary Academy Award in 1974.
A versatile film director, Hawks explored many genres such as comedies, dramas, gangster films, science fiction, film noir, war films, and westerns. His most popular films include Scarface (1932), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948), The Thing from Another World (1951), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and Rio Bravo (1959). His frequent portrayals of strong, tough-talking female characters came to define the "Hawksian woman".
Howard Winchester Hawks was born in Goshen, Indiana. He was the first-born child of Frank Winchester Hawks (1865–1950), a wealthy paper manufacturer, and his wife, Helen Brown (née Howard; 1872–1952), the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Hawks's family on his father's side were American pioneers, and his ancestor John Hawks had emigrated from England to Massachusetts in 1630. The family eventually settled in Goshen and by the 1890s was one of the wealthiest families in the Midwest, due mostly to the highly profitable Goshen Milling Company.[4]
Hawks's maternal grandfather, C. W. Howard (1845–1916), had homesteaded in Neenah, Wisconsin, in 1862 at age 17. Within 15 years he had made his fortune in the town's paper mill and other industrial endeavors.[5] Frank Hawks and Helen Howard met in the early 1890s and married in 1895. Howard Hawks was the eldest of five children, and his birth was followed by Kenneth Neil Hawks (August 12, 1898 – January 2, 1930), William Bellinger Hawks (January 29, 1901 – January 10, 1969), Grace Louise Hawks (October 17, 1903 – December 23, 1927), and Helen Bernice Hawks (1906 – May 4, 1911). In 1898, the family moved back to Neenah where Frank Hawks began working for his father-in-law's Howard Paper Company.[6]
Between 1906 and 1909, the Hawks family began to spend more time in Pasadena, California, during the cold Wisconsin winters in order to improve Helen Hawks's ill health. Gradually, they began to spend only their summers in Wisconsin before permanently moving to Pasadena in 1910.[7] The family settled in a house down the street from Throop Polytechnic Institute, and the Hawks children began attending the school's Polytechnic Elementary School in 1907.[8] Hawks was an average student and did not excel in sports, but by 1910 had discovered coaster racing, an early form of soapbox racing. In 1911, Hawks's youngest sibling, Helen, died suddenly of food poisoning.[9] From 1910 to 1912, Hawks attended Pasadena High School. In 1912, the Hawks family moved to nearby Glendora, California, where Frank Hawks owned orange groves. Hawks finished his junior year of high school at Citrus Union High School in Glendora.[10] During this time he worked as a barnstorming pilot.[11]
He was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire from 1913 to 1914; his family's wealth may have influenced his acceptance to the elite private school. Even though he was 17, he was admitted as a lower middleclassman, the equivalent of a sophomore. While in New England, Hawks often attended the theaters in nearby Boston. In 1914, Hawks returned to Glendora and graduated from Pasadena High School that year.[10] Skilled in tennis, at 18 Hawks won the United States Junior Tennis Championship.[12] That same year, Hawks was accepted to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he majored in mechanical engineering and was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon. His college friend Ray S. Ashbury remembered Hawks spending more of his time playing craps and drinking alcohol than studying, although Hawks was also known to be a voracious reader of popular American and English novels in college.[13]
While working in the film industry during his 1916 summer vacation, Hawks made an unsuccessful attempt to transfer to Stanford University. He returned to Cornell that September, leaving in April 1917 to join the Army when the United States entered World War I. He served as a lieutenant in the Aviation Section, U.S. Signal Corps.[14] During World War I, he taught aviators to fly, and these experiences influenced future aviation films like The Dawn Patrol (1930).[15] Like many college students who joined the armed services during the war, he received a degree in absentia in 1918. Before Hawks was called for active duty, he returned to Hollywood and, by the end of April 1917, was working on a Cecil B. DeMille film.
Howard Hawks's interest and passion for aviation led him to many important experiences and acquaintances.[15] In 1916, Hawks met Victor Fleming, a Hollywood cinematographer who had been an auto mechanic and early aviator. Hawks had begun racing and working on a Mercer race car—bought for him by his grandfather C.W. Howard—during his 1916 summer vacation in California. He allegedly met Fleming when the two men raced on a dirt track and caused an accident.[16] This meeting led to Hawks's first job in the film industry, as a prop boy on the Douglas Fairbanks film In Again, Out Again (on which Fleming was employed as the cinematographer) for Famous Players–Lasky.[17] According to Hawks, a new set needed to be built quickly when the studio's set designer was unavailable, so Hawks volunteered to do the job himself, much to Fairbanks's satisfaction. He was next employed as a prop boy and general assistant on an unspecified film directed by Cecil B. DeMille. (Hawks never named the film in later interviews, and DeMille made roughly five films in that time period). By the end of April 1917, Hawks was working on Cecil B. DeMille's The Little American.[17] Hawks worked on Marshall Neilan's The Little Princess, starring Mary Pickford. According to Hawks, Neilan did not show up to work one day, so the resourceful Hawks offered to direct a scene himself, to which Pickford consented.[18] Hawks began directing at age 21 after he and cinematographer Charles Rosher filmed a double exposure dream sequence Pickford.
Hawks worked with Pickford and Neilan again on Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley before joining the United States Army Air Service. Hawks's military records were destroyed in the 1973 Military Archive Fire, so the only account of his military service is his own. According to Hawks, he spent 15 weeks in basic training at the University of California in Berkeley where he was trained to be a squadron commander in the Air Service. When Pickford visited Hawks at basic training, his superior officers were so impressed by the appearance of the celebrity that they promoted him to flight instructor and sent him to Texas to teach new recruits. Bored by this work, Hawks attempted to secure a transfer during the first half of 1918 and was eventually sent to Fort Monroe, Virginia. The Armistice was signed in November of that year, and Hawks was discharged as a Second Lieutenant without having seen active duty.[19]
After the war, Hawks was eager to return to Hollywood. His brother Kenneth Hawks, who had also served in the Air Service, graduated from Yale in 1919, and the two of them moved to Hollywood together to pursue their careers. They quickly made friends with Hollywood insider Allan Dwan. Hawks landed his first important job when he used his family's wealth to loan money to studio head Jack L. Warner. Warner quickly paid back the loan and hired Hawks as a producer to "oversee" the making of a new series of one-reel comedies starring the Italian comedian Monty Banks. Hawks later stated that he personally directed "three or four" of the shorts, though no documentation exists to confirm the claim. The films were profitable, but Hawks soon left to form his own production company using his family's wealth and connections to secure financing. The production company, Associated Producers, was a joint venture between Hawks, Allan Dwan, Marshall Neilan and director Allen Holubar, with a distribution deal with First National. The company made 14 films between 1920 and 1923, with eight directed by Neilan, three by Dwan and three by Holubar.[20] More of a "boy's club" than a production company, the four men gradually drifted apart and went their separate ways in 1923, by which time Hawks had decided that he wanted to direct rather than produce.[21]
Beginning in early 1920, Hawks lived in rented houses in Hollywood with the group of friends he was accumulating. This rowdy group of mostly macho, risk-taking men included his brother Kenneth Hawks, Victor Fleming, Jack Conway, Harold Rosson, Richard Rosson, Arthur Rosson, and Eddie Sutherland. During this time, Hawks first met Irving Thalberg, the vice-President in charge of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Hawks admired his intelligence and sense of story.[22] Hawks also became friends with barn stormers and pioneer aviators at Rogers Airport in Los Angeles, getting to know men like Moye Stephens.
In 1923, Famous Players–Lasky president Jesse Lasky was looking for a new Production Editor in the story department of his studio, and Thalberg suggested Hawks.[23] Hawks accepted and was immediately put in charge of over 40 productions, including several literary acquisitions of stories by Joseph Conrad, Jack London and Zane Grey. Hawks worked on the scripts for all of the films produced, but he had his first official screenplay credit in 1924 on Tiger Love.[24] Hawks was the Story Editor at Famous Players (later Paramount Pictures) for almost two years, occasionally editing such films as Heritage of the Desert. Hawks signed a new one-year contract with Famous-Players in the fall of 1924. He broke his contract to become a story editor for Thalberg at MGM, having secured a promise from Thalberg to make him a director within a year. In 1925, when Thalberg hesitated to keep his promise, Hawks broke his contract at MGM and left.[25]
In October 1925, Sol Wurtzel, William Fox's studio superintendent at the Fox Film Corporation, invited Hawks to join his company with the promise of letting him direct. Over the next three years, Hawks directed his first eight films (six silent, two "talkies").[23] Hawks reworked the scripts of most of the films he directed without always taking official credit for his work. He also worked on the scripts for Honesty – The Best Policy in 1926[26] and Joseph von Sternberg's Underworld in 1927, famous for being one of the first gangster films.[27] Hawks's first film was The Road to Glory, which premiered in April 1926. The screenplay was based on a 35-page composition written by Hawks, making it one of the only films on which Hawks had extensive writing credit. Today, it is one of Hawks's two lost films.[28]
Immediately after completing The Road to Glory, Hawks began writing his next film, Fig Leaves, his first (and, until 1935, only) comedy. It received positive reviews, particularly for the art direction and costume designs. It was released in July 1926 and was Hawks's first hit as a director. Although he mainly dismissed his early work, Hawks praised this film in later interviews.[29]
Paid to Love is notable in Hawks's filmography, because it was a highly stylized, experimental film, à la German director F. W. Murnau. Hawks's film includes atypical tracking shots, expressionistic lighting and stylistic film editing that was inspired by German expressionist cinema. In a later interview, Hawks commented, "It isn't my type of stuff, at least I got it over in a hurry. You know the idea of wanting the camera to do those things: Now the camera's somebody's eyes." Hawks worked on the script with Seton I. Miller, with whom he would go on to collaborate on seven more films. The film stars George O'Brien as the introverted Crown Prince Michael, William Powell as his happy-go-lucky brother and Virginia Valli as Michael's flapper love interest, Dolores. The characters played by Valli and O'Brien anticipate those found in later films by Hawks: a sexually aggressive showgirl, who is an early prototype of the "Hawksian woman", and a shy man disinterested in sex, found in later roles played by Cary Grant and Gary Cooper. Paid to Love was completed by September 1926, but remained unreleased until July 1927. It was financially unsuccessful.[30] Cradle Snatchers was based on a 1925 hit stage play by Russell G. Medcraft and Norma Mitchell. The film was shot in early 1927. The film was released in May 1927 and was a minor hit. It was believed to be lost until Peter Bogdanovich discovered a print in 20th Century Fox's film vaults, although it was missing part of reel three and all of reel four.[31] In March 1927, Hawks signed a new one-year, three-picture contract with Fox and was assigned to direct Fazil, based on the play L'Insoumise by Pierre Frondaie. Hawks again worked with Seton Miller on the script. Hawks was over schedule and over budget on the film, which began a rift between him and Sol Wurtzel that would eventually lead to Hawks leaving Fox. The film was finished in August 1927, though it was not released until June 1928.[32]
A Girl in Every Port is considered by scholars to be the most important of Hawks's silent films. It is the first to feature many of the themes and archetypes that would define much of his subsequent work. It was his first "love story between two men", with two men bonding over their duty, skills and careers, who consider their friendship to be more important than their relationships with women.[33] In France, Henri Langlois called Hawks "the Gropius of the cinema" and Swiss novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars said that the film "definitely marked the first appearance of contemporary cinema."[34] Hawks went over budget once again with this film, and his relationship with Sol Wurtzel deteriorated. After an advance screening that received positive reviews, Wurtzel told Hawks, "This is the worst picture Fox has made in years."[35] The Air Circus was Hawks's first film centered around aviation, one of his early passions. In 1928, Charles Lindbergh was the world's most famous person and Wings was one of the most popular films of the year. Wanting to capitalize on the country's aviation craze, Fox immediately bought Hawks's original story for The Air Circus, a variation of the theme of male friendship about two young pilots. The film was shot from April to June 1928, but Fox ordered an additional 15 minutes of dialogue footage so that the film could compete with the new talkies being released. Hawks hated the new dialogue written by Hugh Herbert, and he refused to participate in the re-shoots. It was released in September 1928 and was a moderate hit and is one of two Hawks films that are lost.[36] After seeing Louise Brooks in A Girl in Every Port, G. W. Pabst cast her in Pandora's Box (1929).[37]
Trent's Last Case is an adaptation of E. C. Bentley's 1913 novel of the same name. Hawks considered the novel to be "one of the greatest detective stories of all time" and was eager to make it his first sound film. He cast Raymond Griffith in the lead role of Phillip Trent. Griffith's throat had been damaged by poison gas during World War I, and his voice was a hoarse whisper, prompting Hawks to later state, "I thought he ought to be great in talking pictures because of that voice." However, after shooting only a few scenes, Fox shut Hawks down and ordered him to make a silent film, both because of Griffith's voice and because they only owned the legal rights to make a silent film. The film did have a musical score and synchronized sound effects but no dialogue. Due to the failing business of silent films, it was never released in the US and only briefly screened in England where critics hated it. The film was believed lost until the mid-1970s and was screened for the first time in the US at a Hawks retrospective in 1974. Hawks was in attendance of the screening and attempted to have the only