Auteur List: Howard Hawks - Discussion and Defenses

[Rayon Vert]

Yeah I won't defend that one! (I do like Land of the Pharaohs too though, and it's on my small list of revisits for this project.)

[knives]

That's why I'm terrified to plop down money on it despite it being the biggest obstacle to finishing off his sound films. Then again I'll be placing Land of the Pharaohs as my number two and probably voting for Man's Favorite Sport so maybe I'll like this one as well.

[Never Cursed]

Ball of Fire and Sgt York (just added) are the only Hawks films streaming on Criterion Channel. I've never seen The Big Sleep before, so to those who have, which version should I seek out?

[domino harvey]

That's why I'm terrified to plop down money on it despite it being the biggest obstacle to finishing off his sound films. Then again I'll be placing Land of the Pharaohs as my number two and probably voting for Man's Favorite Sport so maybe I'll like this one as well.

Don't spend money on it. I'm prob voting for Man's Favorite Sport? too, by the way

[domino harvey]

Ball of Fire and Sgt York (just added) are the only Hawks films streaming on Criterion Channel. I've never seen The Big Sleep before, so to those who have, which version should I seek out?

I've only ever seen the longer pre-release version. Neither will make sense, so that shouldn't be a deciding factor haha

[therewillbeblus]

Agreed on Red Line 7000 as awful (though I don't like his other racing film either). I remember enjoying Hatari! but the one I'm really looking forward to revisiting is El Dorado, which I remember liking a lot more than Rio Bravo! Time will tell if this was a fluke low-expectations viewing, or an actual opinion, as it's been a while. I also love Man's Favorite Sport? go figure

[domino harvey]

Agreed on Red Line 7000 as awful (though I don't like his other racing film either).

The forgettable programmer remake, Indianapolis Speedway, is even better than the original Crowd Roars, if you can believe it

[dustybooks]

I too recommend The Dawn Patrol, which is a wonderful companion to All Quiet on the Western Front and adds an interesting wrinkle to the attitude toward war exhibited in, for instance, Sergeant York.

I love Hawks but (and I don't know how popular or unpopular an opinion this is here and now) for me Bringing Up Baby is still far and away my favorite of his films. I had a few experiences very early in my film-watching life (Citizen Kane was another) in which certain films from the classic Hollywood system that truly exploited the possibilities of the medium and tested its limits absolutely made my eyes bug out. Even though I haven't laughed as hard at subsequent viewings of Baby (though I've appreciated how its more ribald innuendos have become clearer as time passes) and I had at least one disastrous experience trying to convince an ex-girlfriend to enjoy it, its genuinely off-the-rails, almost Tex Avery-like sensibility continues to set it apart to the point that it seems almost otherworldly to me. Cukor's Holiday is such a wonderful film with the same two leads made in the same year, and yet how can it have even come from the same galaxy as this one?

Some other comments: Twentieth Century, which I disliked at first, and The Big Sleep have grown in my estimation each time I've revisited them. Scarface is probably my favorite gangster film of any era, the only real competition for me coming from the silent era. The only Hawks titles that have outright disappointed me so far have been I Was a Male War Bride -- I found the two halves to come off as rather mismatched -- and A Girl in Every Port, which is good but relies on a kind of frattish humor I just find a little tiresome. And I've only seen either once, so who knows if these opinions will stand.

[therewillbeblus]

I've never seen The Big Sleep before

What I wouldn't give to see it again for the first time! I grew up watching it as a kid (still doesn't make a whole lot of sense) so there's some nostalgia there, but for me it ranks along with North By Northwest as the most narratively engaging, pure fun cinema can offer, and is likely a lock for my second spot. But yeah, don't waste your time trying to make sense of it- just relax and enjoy the ride.

[domino harvey]

I also love Man's Favorite Sport? go figure

The Paula Prentiss Principle applies

[Never Cursed]

Ball of Fire and Sgt York (just added) are the only Hawks films streaming on Criterion Channel. I've never seen The Big Sleep before, so to those who have, which version should I seek out?

I've only ever seen the longer pre-release version. Neither will make sense, so that shouldn't be a deciding factor haha

Won't make sense in, like, a good Breathless sort of way, or in the more common use of the phrase?

[domino harvey]

I posted this in the Hawks thread a while back. Don't click it til you see it, but the answer is, if you try following the plot, you'll discover that it is so confusing that it literally doesn't make sense. So just sit back and then afterwards enjoy this ridiculous flow chart someone made to explain things

From Twitter (spoilers for the Big Sleep)

Spoiler

[Never Cursed]

Gotcha. Guess I know what I'm watching tonight!

[knives]

Agreed on Red Line 7000 as awful (though I don't like his other racing film either). I remember enjoying Hatari! but the one I'm really looking forward to revisiting is El Dorado, which I remember liking a lot more than Rio Bravo! Time will tell if this was a fluke low-expectations viewing, or an actual opinion, as it's been a while. I also love Man's Favorite Sport? go figure

El Dorado is great (drunk Mitchum >> drunk Martin) though if I'm remembering correctly which is which Rio Lobo is even better with an absurd train sequence at the end that seems there just for the sake of fun.

Also didn't know there was more then one The Big Sleep. I adore the book, but I find the movie a bore. To answer Never Cursed in a 'Who's Line is it' way. Hawks literally had to write in a bunch of scenes just to explain plot points that Chandler forgot about in the book.

[DarkImbecile]

Neither will make sense, so that shouldn't be a deciding factor haha

To illustrate this exact point, my Film Noir professor showed The Big Sleep the first week of the course and offered an automatic "A+" to anyone who could definitively identify who killed a particular character (I want to say it was the

Spoiler

butler

, but not 100% sure — I haven't seen it since!). Of course no one was able to offer even a halfway serious attempt.

[domino harvey]

DarkImbecile: see the red question mark in the flowchart quoted above!

[DarkImbecile]

Huh, I didn't get the usual notification that a raft of posts had been made while I was drafting that one before I submitted... thanks for flagging or I would have skipped over it!

[domino harvey]

Also, this may go without saying, but Todd McCarthy's biography of Hawks is essential. It goes movie by movie and if you really love Slim Keith after reading about her there, there's a whole other biography on her (forget the author) that's been sitting on my shelf unread for some time. That's how famous and influential Hawks was-- even his lover gets a full bio!

[Rayon Vert]

I read the McCarthy bio 4-5 years ago and I'll second that as being terrific.

[knives]

Uggh, you guys are making me spend too much money getting pumped for this list.

[Altair]

Thanks for the list Rayon Vert, this means I'll be able to watch a few of his earlier films that I hadn't seen before.

[therewillbeblus]

It's worth mentioning that The Big Sleep feels like one of the largest outliers in Hawks' oeuvre, as it really doesn't reflect his brand of ideology or meditations on fellowship. I would make a case that his flair for capturing dynamic dialogue and bouts of extraordinarily rough actions are present, but otherwise it just cements that he's one of the best at engaging in relentless forward momentum in a manner that feels more breezily entertaining than acutely aggressive.

[therewillbeblus]

Neither will make sense, so that shouldn't be a deciding factor haha

To illustrate this exact point, my Film Noir professor showed The Big Sleep the first week of the course and offered an automatic "A+" to anyone who could definitively identify who killed a particular character (I want to say it was the

Spoiler

butler

, but not 100% sure — I haven't seen it since!). Of course no one was able to offer even a halfway serious attempt.

While it's never cleared up, my favorite theory is

Spoiler

nobody murdered the chauffeur- he committed committed suicide after 'failing' by losing the photos and having murdered Geiger for nothing, which just makes the entire plot to figure it out even more pointlessly absurd!

[Red Screamer]

I've never seen The Big Sleep before, so to those who have, which version should I seek out?

You can probably find a precise list of differences between the versions somewhere, but comparing their conceptual differences is helpful too:

The first cut represents the culmination of Hawks’s dedication to narrative, to classical storytelling principles, to the kind of logic that depends upon the intricate interweaving of dramatic threads. The revised, less linear cut sees him abandoning these long-held virtues for the sake of ‘scenes,’ scenes of often electrifying individual effect, but scenes that were weighted heavily in favor of character over plot and dramatic complexity.

The recently restored first version...reveals not how a terrific movie got better or worse but how, for commercial reasons, it got transformed into another kind of terrific movie.

Long after the other three writers had left the project, Jack Warner hired Epstein to beef up the interplay between Bogart and Bacall and thereby improve Bacall’s image, which had been tarnished by her miscast appearance in the poorly received Confidential Agent, which appeared before The Big Sleep and after To Have and Have Not. Her highly influential agent, Charles Feldman, urged Warner to revise The Big Sleep in order to repair the damage, and most of the reshooting and reediting — and, in at least one instance, redubbing — was carried out in strict accordance with his suggestions.

Complicating and occasionally enhancing these revisions was the fluctuating relationship between Bacall and Bogart, who’d fallen in love while shooting To Have and Have Not. During the initial shoot on The Big Sleep, Bogart was still married to someone else and fitfully trying to make that marriage work, and Hawks, who may have had designs of his own on Bacall, was mainly interested in keeping his two stars apart when they weren’t working together. By the time the three of them regrouped to shoot the new scenes for the second version, Bogart and Bacall had become inseparable, and as a consequence Hawks’s relationship with both had cooled.

I've only seen The Big Sleep theatrically and both times the theaters opted for (or only had access to) the second version. But I can't complain about seeing more of Bacall!

[mizo]

Re: the loose end murder in The Big Sleep

This post was originally going to begin "I haven't seen it lately, so I may be misremembering, and this might just be my interpretation..." but in the process of writing I ended up rewatching part of the movie and, man, it is obvious that

Spoiler

Joe Brody killed Taylor (the chauffeur). It's only Brody's sudden death that stops Marlowe from pressuring him further on it. I get that the movie is tough to follow, I had to pause and rewind a couple times while watching to make sure I was getting everything. But it's completely silly that the iconic example of the movie's incoherence is something that it just doesn't quite say explicitly. I mean, Hawks could hardly do more to underline the fact that Brody has something to hide. He builds an entire (lovely) comedic bit around Brody being too cagey and worried to look Marlowe in the eye!

I wonder if the key to the difficulty of the plot is not in its intricacy or eventfulness. Rather, the fact that it's mostly pieced together in retrospect, through dialogue, and that that expository dialogue is fractured and interspersed with layers upon layers of quips and deflections and non sequiturs, just means that the audience exclusively receives most of this information verbally. In the end, the film just puts too much strain on our auditory attention spans and we inevitably get lost, or miss some detail. Anybody who's tried to learn a second language by listening to audio recordings of native speakers knows how easy it is to stumble and how one missed word can instantly turn into three missed sentences. A+, I guess, to Hawks & co. for replicating this always-frustrating feeling!

Nevertheless, it's indisputable that the changes made to the release cut obscured things further. For one, it cuts out a brief sequence showing Marlowe finding the key to Geiger's place. Without that scene, his ability to get in whenever he wants doesn't make much sense. Also, I believe the release cut also has a major error where one of the new Bogart and Bacall scenes references events that haven't happened yet, or something like that, as if it's been slotted into the film in the wrong place.