Howard Hawks

His Girl Friday (1940)

His Girl Friday (1940)

(On Cable TV, June 2018) There are many reasons why His Girl Friday shouldn’t work. The characters aren’t particularly nice people. A man about to be executed is at the centre of the film’s premise, which is odd for something often billed as a romantic comedy. A woman in a tragic situation becomes a comic device, and then the film makes it even worse by playing her quasi-suicide for laughs. The ending shows no real character growth. And yet His Girl Friday is fantastic. It’s a riot of laughs, a whirlwind of lightning-fast dialogue, a strong show of characters and it still has, more than seventy years later, both crackling energy and some thematic depth. Cary Grant is wonderful as a tough newspaper editor who browbeats both employees and lovers into doing what he wants—an utterly repellent character transformed into a striking comic figure through sheer acting talent. The first fifteen minutes, in particular, have Grant at his best. Rosalind Russell is equally good as a reporter who can’t quite quit either the business or her ex-husband. A sparkling battle-of-the-sexes comedy of remarriage, doubling as a highly cynical (yet uplifting) look at the news business, His Girl Friday still has plenty to wow audiences even today—the speed of the dialogue alone feels very contemporary and so does the biting cynicism about the news business. The film is optimized for speed, not detail—then-veteran director Howard Hawks (in almost exact mid-career) knew that he didn’t have to do anything to get in the way of his two lead actors, and the results speak for themselves. His Girl Friday is well-known today partly because it accidentally ended up in the public domain and has since then been a staple of late-night cable TV broadcasts, but it’s actually really good on its own. It’s got enough laughs to please modern audiences, especially now that the bad behaviour of its characters doesn’t seem so awful.

Monkey Business (1952)

Monkey Business (1952)

(In French, On Cable TV, May 2018) It’s easy to see why Monkey Business is often considered to be a loose follow-up to Bringing up Baby—Howard Hawks is back with a fast-paced comedy, Cary Grant reprises his silly intellectual mode, Ginger Rogers steps in as the wilder female partner and the film is at its best when it’s just goofing around. Thanks to a high-concept premise (what if a serum gave you back your youth … or at least made you regress back in age mentally?), there are plenty of opportunities for random silliness. The film never gets better than seeing Day play at being a bratty schoolgirl, although seeing Marilyn Monroe vamp it up as a voluptuous secretary is also fun. While it’s technically a science-fiction film, Monkey Business is best seen as a farce reteaming Hawks and Grant together and just having fun along the way. (This being said, the film’s best laugh comes early on in the opening credits sequence, as the director tells Grant “not yet” and to go back behind the door before making an entrance. Alas, the film doesn’t go back to metatextual comedy.)  It’s really not quite up to Bringing up Baby’s standards—the film is occasionally annoying (the monkey), occasionally dull (anything with the scientists), occasionally offensive to modern sensibilities (never mind “the secretary”; I have in mind the “Indian scalping” schoolyard playing.)  It’s still not a bad time thanks to the aforementioned goofing off, but it could have been better.

Red River (1948)

Red River (1948)

(On Cable TV, April 2018) Yee-haw, little doggies! No, wait, what’s the appropriate expression for a cattle drive? Get it ready because Red River is a western focusing on a very long trip from Texas to Kansas, driving cattle to the market. Beyond the various obstacles along the way, we have a rivalry between an older man (John Wayne) and a younger man. The dramatic tension is obvious and developed in a straightforward fashion, but Red River remains a memorable western largely due to its scope and clean directorial style from Howard Hawks. Wayne is better than usual as an unsympathetic lead confronting his adopted son throughout the picture. As a western, it doesn’t try to reinvent the form, although the focus on a cattle drive is a bit unusual. (Sadly, the usual Native American prejudices are along for the ride).  Those who don’t like westerns won’t necessarily be convinced by Red River, but the film does have its share of thrills for genre fans.

Bringing up Baby (1938)

Bringing up Baby (1938)

(On Cable TV, January 2018) All right. This is it. I am a contended cinephile. When I embarked on a conscious program to watch older movies, I did so supposing that sooner or later, I’d watch a movie that I’d fall in love with. While I’ve been really happy to revisit some old favourites and see them hold up (2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance), or to confirm that some beloved classics are beloved for a reason (Singin’ in the Rain, anyone?), I started watching Bringing up Baby without any expectations other than crossing off a popular title from 1938. Within minutes (specifically the torn dress sequence), however, I was squarely identifying with Cary Grant’s proto-nerd protagonist, falling in love with Katharine Hepburn’s drop-dead gorgeous romantic interest and gasping at the speed and precision of director Howard Hawks’ movie. To put it simply: Bringing Up Baby is as funny, witty and fast as any contemporary romantic comedy, and the 1938 year of release is irrelevant. The plot is a big ball of nonsense that has something to do with a paleontologist, an heiress and a tame leopard. But never mind the plot, as the real strength of the film is in its witty fast-paced dialogue. Hepburn is an instant favourite as a character too crazy to be true … but the entire film is like that, and it plays beautifully even eighty years (!) later. Those who complain that “old” movies are dull and slow clearly haven’t seen Bringing up Baby. It’s raucously funny even today—while contemporary comedic theory holds that chicken and monkeys are the funniest animals, the film makes a strong case that leopards may be a comic engine of their own, as several of the film’s funniest sequences hinge on the eponymous “Baby.”  (To be fair, one scene also involves chicken. Being eaten by the leopard.)  Considering that the film is often upheld as a representative example of screwball comedies, I have a feeling that I’ve just discovered an untapped vein of pure cinematic bliss. At the pace at which I see movies, I often see them and move on, never to re-watch again. In Bringing up Baby’s case, however, I ended up ordering it on DVD (along with three other similar Hepburn comedies) within days of seeing it. I have a feeling I’ll be extolling its virtues and often lending the DVD in the next few years.