Howard Hughes

  • The Outlaw (1943)

    The Outlaw (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) There’s plenty to be said about Howard Hughes’ various failings and eccentricities in all the facets of his personal history. Even as a film director-producer, his filmography is an amazing collection of disasters: decent movies that came out years after production because he wouldn’t stop tinkering with them (Jet Pilot); movies where he, as a producer, would rapidly clash with directors and go through several of them (also Jet Pilot, but others too); films in which he let his interest in specific actresses dictate aspects of the film (The French Line), and other wonderful stories in which he deliberately courted scandal. But he was primarily an entertainer, and films like The Outlaw (even if Howard Hawks secretly co-directed) show his first-rate instinct. As a story, The Outlaw is a hodgepodge of familiar western elements, centred around one of the most overused common grounds for American Westerns: Lincoln, New Mexico and the associated legacy of Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday. Little of the film is meant to be based on fact, and as it moves forward, it’s clearly written around popular entertainment rather than accuracy. Hughes was a billionaire, but he was also a first-class female form appreciator, and that’s how The Outlaw is often mentioned as a spectacular showcase for Jane Russell’s sex appeal. There’s no way to see the haystack scene and not be impressed — in fact, The Outlaw’s release was delayed for two years, as Hugues tried to deal with the censors throwing apoplectic fits over Russell’s presence in the film. That, as you can imagine, does provide a distinctive flavour to The Outlaw — in a genre often concerned with asexual machismo, it’s a bit of a surprise to see Russell being so blatantly presented as an object of desire. Coupled with the entertainer’s instincts of both Hughes and Hawks, the result is a bit more than yet another dreary rerun through the Billy the Kid mystique. As someone who keeps being fascinated by Howard Hughes and nearly everything surrounding him, I found The Outlaw more captivating than expected, especially for an early-1940s western.

  • Hell’s Angels (1930)

    Hell’s Angels (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) For movie buffs and viewers of Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, his 1930 war epic Hell’s Angels doesn’t need much introduction: It was Howard Hughes’ ambitious fusion of his interests in aviation and moviemaking and (perhaps apocryphally) the movie in which he realized the use of clouds in filming exciting aerial sequences. The film’s famously long production process straddled the silent and the sound era, meaning that the film aesthetically feels a bit weird, especially in its use of title cards for the German dialogue. It’s hard to avoid comparisons with that other WW1 aerial war film Wings — both in topic matter and in approach, although Wings is probably the best overall film. What Hell’s Angels does have going for it, though, is spectacle. Even for modern viewers, the film’s action sequences still pack a punch. Stuff blows up real good, to borrow a phrase (oh, that zeppelin sequence!) and the aviation footage does look exciting—considering that three people died filming it and Hughes himself got seriously injured flying one of the scenes, you have to appreciate the result. Jean Harlow shows up in her feature film debut, and she’s directed by the noteworthy James Whale, whose next films would be classic Universal Monster movies. The Pre-Code nature of the film (especially coming from Hughes, a known huckster) can be seen in unusually frank dialogue and sexual refences. All of this boils down to a film that still holds quite a bit of thrills and interest even today — it’s clearly an early sound film, but you can see (especially in the colour sequences!) how it was pushing the envelope of what was possible at the time and how it was meant to be a blockbuster from the get-go. Hell’s Angels, despite its significant narrative shortcomings, completely deserves its reputation as an essential film of its era.

  • The Hoax (2006)

    The Hoax (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, April 2020) Howard Hughes’ life is expansive and fascinating enough that several movies can be made about him without necessarily stepping on each other’s topics. The Hoax is Hughes-centric without even featuring Hughes himself, as it’s about the efforts of writer Clifford Irving to create a wholly fictional Hughes autobiography and being richly rewarded for it. Richard Gere comfortably stars as Wallace, a writer who turns conman when he thinks he can get away with it. It all goes swimmingly until Hughes himself emerges from his late-life silence to shut down all speculation that he wrote the book, kill the book’s publication along the way and send Irving to prison. (Amusingly enough, you can now purchase Clifford’s Hughes “autobiography” as an ebook.) Con stories are at their best with chutzpah and this one has a lot of it. Well-constructed and generally executed with style, The Hoax fills the gaps of its narrative with early-1970s pop music, snappy editing and a sustained rhythm. In an era where truth is devalued, I would normally have issues with making a hero out of a serial liar, except for one thing: The Hoax does not present the real story. It adds layers of conspiratorial and political intrigues that are far-fetched at best—so much so that Irving himself (who died in 2017) expressed his strong disapproval at this fictitious portrayal of his life, much like Hugues himself did to bring down the charade. The irony is so delicious that it must be savoured. What we’re left with is a film that, like Irving, doesn’t know when to quit—The Hoax could have been a perfectly charming comedy about a lie spinning out of control, but then it reaches for a darker third act filled with government conspiracies and evermore ludicrous speculations. Too bad—but it’s still generally worth a look, if only as an introduction to both Hughes and Irving.

  • F for Fake (1973)

    F for Fake (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) We could easily rename F for Fake to F for Fascinating and it wouldn’t change much. Abandon any preconception of a standard narrative or documentary film, because from the first few minutes (which feature a suspiciously specific disclaimer that “everything we will tell you in the next hour is factual”), Orson Welles is clearly having fun playing with cinematic grammar, placing himself front-and-centre and messing with expectations. The subject matter, as we gradually discover (Welles doesn’t make it easy) is to talk about four fascinating personalities: Elmyr de Hory (celebrated art faker), Clifford Irving (journalist and de Hory biographer, discovered during filming to have faked an autobiography of Howard Hughes), Howard Hughes (mogul turned mysterious hermit, then far more mysterious than now) and finally Orson Welles himself (no stranger to fakery as a filmmaker and radio broadcaster). F for Fake a feature-length series of impressionistic digressions on fakery leading to a final fifteen minutes that goes somewhere unexpected. This is a film best seen with Wikipedia on hand, though, as it assumes quite a bit about what an early 1970s viewer would know and find interesting. My favourite part of the film is easily Welles’s larger-than-life presence himself, as the film allows him to charm the viewer and even witness as he holds court in a restaurant—if anyone ever wondered how much fun it would be to hang out with later-day Welles at his storytelling best, then wonder no more. Otherwise, there’s quite a bit of fun to see Welles subvert expectation and mislead his audience (as he tells us he’s going to do in the first few minutes). Welles buffs will also come away from the film far better informed about Oja Kodar, something that’s probably essential to understand Welles’s last few years and the tortuous path that The Other Side of the Wind took to its final release. There’s an entire film’s worth of supplementary material to be read about F for Fake, so keep that Wikipedia link close by.

  • The Racket (1928)

    The Racket (1928)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2019) One of the things that has me most amazed as I explore movie history is the privileged position that we modern viewers enjoy over previous generations, even generations that were much closer to the older movies being watched. Often, some of the best-regarded films of previous decades were lost or went unseen for decades before being rediscovered much later. Sometimes, the continued existence of a film relies on a very thin thread. One of those rediscovered films is The Racket—not an insignificant title, considering that it was produced by mogul Howard Hughes and was nominated for the first-ever Academy Awards. And yet the film was lost for decades until a single copy was posthumously rediscovered in Hughes’s archives. So don’t complain when you see that the film as shown on TV and digital streaming has unsightly scratches—those are from the sole surviving copy of the film, the eye of the needle from which all digital copies have now been made. Those considerations aside, The Racket is quietly fascinating in its own way, given how it’s a gangster film from before the gangster film era—written and produced during prohibition, it predates many of the foundational gangster epics of the early 1930s, and yet tackles themes of police corruption as well as the complex interplay between criminals, policemen, media, and the politicians. There are a few directorial flourishes and special effects creating an effective sense of suspense—the camera moving (in a film otherwise made of static shots!) to reveal the geometry of a nightclub where everybody has weapons pointing at each other, or a dissolve shot to reveal the guns that everyone is holding underneath their hats. Those flashes of interest do help compensate for a story that qualifies as well-worn by today’s standards, although it ends on a bittersweet-enough note to make the film still feel relevant despite the period. It’s kind of amazing that The Racket has made it to us, but it’s an intriguing message from the past.

  • Scarface (1932)

    Scarface (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2019) The real star of Scarface may not be Paul Muni as a Capone-inspired gangster, nor superlative director Howard Hawks, nor legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht, but multi-talented producer Howard Hughes and his instinct for anticipating what the American public really wanted to see. By today’s standards, Scarface is promising but familiar fare—the last ninety years have led to a very large number of gangster pictures offering vicarious thrills by portraying (sometimes with a bit of moralistic tut-tutting) the life of gangsters. Martin Scorsese built a career on such movies, and they seem hardwired in Hollywood’s DNA. Examples reach into the silent era (notably Hughes’ The Racket), but Scarface, along with the slightly earlier Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, helped codify the genre even as real-life gangsters were laying waste to urban areas. It was tremendously successful, and just as influential—all the way to a much better-known 1983 remake penned by Oliver Stone and directed by Brian de Palma. This original is much rougher—hailing from the early days of sound cinema, it does have a wild energy to it, and a good turn from Muni. While modern viewers won’t appreciate the innovation of the film in staging complex action sequences (including some savvy special-effects work!), the result on-screen looks and feels a lot like more modern movies. Pre-Code audiences liked it (even Al Capone was reportedly a fan), but Scarface raised so much controversy that it was shelved by Hugues and effectively disappeared for decades before resurfacing in the post-Production Code 1970s. Now, contemporary audiences can see what had been unavailable to prior generations and appreciate the result for themselves, as a hard-hitting gangster film that pushed the envelope and remains absorbing in itself. I’m sure Hughes would approve.

  • The Aviator (2004)

    The Aviator (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2004) It’s always a pleasure to see Martin Scorsese at work again, and he does much to please both fans and general audiences with Howard Hughes biography The Aviator. Leonardo DiCaprio may not be such a good casting choice as Hughes (he look too frail and, later, far too young), but his performance is impressive. Mogul in most sense of the terms, the historical figure of Hughes is unequalled when it comes to the richness of available dramatic material: His love life was a parade of celebrities, his legal battles were legendary and his personal problems were, shall we say, gigantic. The Aviator is seldom as absorbing as when it races through Hugues’ good days as a fascination with Hollywood leads him to a life-long passion for airplanes and then on to the civil aviation business. The script has its weaknesses, but they’re often paved over by a Casino-strength Scorsese ably assisted by top-notch editing. The Aviator runs into repetitive sequences later on, as Hugues’ descent in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders gets the better of a grander-than-life character. Many sequences then run too long, and keep on making a point long after which it’s been understood. (Ironically, the film focuses too much on Hughes’ disorders to give a more complete picture of his personality as a businessman, a playboy and an inventor: I wonder if it hadn’t been better to stick to the accepted chronology of Hughes’ life, in which his worst OCD episodes developed much later in life) Still, The Aviator still leaves an impression of superior film-making. Blame Cate Blanchett, whose dynamite interpretation of Katharine Hepburn deserves both an Oscar and a separate biopic of its own. (Kate Beckinsale’s Ava Gardner is also quite good, but Gwen Stephani is over-hyped as Jean Harlow) Blame the seamless visual effects. Blame the Beverly Hills crash sequence, itself a spectacular action scene. Blame the lavish production. But perhaps best of all, blame a director who understands how to portray a character who finds deep joy while flying in a film titled, indeed, The Aviator.