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TC is also curiously completely absent from Robin Wood's book. That also might have something to do with it, or be a reflection of it.

Bogdanovich’s rep house screenings of Hawks in the sixties are widely regarded as jump-starting American auteurists into “re”discovering Hawks, but I’m not sure if Twentieth Century played. I do know Bogdanovich was a fan, as Cybill Shepherd talks about how he made her watch it when they first started dating (which is of course almost gleefully apt) and they’d go on to use the iron door exchange to each other in actual arguments— but that wouldn’t be til the early 70s

Oh why not, here's my list, sure to inspire and confound in equal measure:

01 Bringing Up Baby
02 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
03 His Girl Friday
04 Twentieth Century
05 Sergeant York
06 The Big Sleep
07 A Song Is Born
08 Red River
09 Viva Villa
10 Monkey Business

I'm thinking you have a thing for comedies.

He's funny that way.

My main surprises this round were rewatching Only Angels and finding it just okay, and then rewatching His Girl Friday, which I had decided at some point was overrated, and coming on board with it again

For comparing purposes the Hawks films which are in They Shoot Pictures Don't They list amongst the first 2000:

Rio Bravo * 57
Bringing Up Baby * 125
His Girl Friday * 142
Red River * 200
Only Angels Have Wings * 233
Big Sleep, The * 290
To Have and Have Not * 488
Scarface * 568
Hatari! * 586
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes * 922
Thing from Another World, The * 962
El Dorado * 983
Big Sky, The * 1813

http://theyshootpictures.com/hawkshoward.php

Had I gotten to revisit A Song is Born for the list it’d definitely would have effected my list. It’s so easy to forget the film’s effortless seeming charms. Also crazy to think this was Hawks’ first effort in color.

Despite sometimes earning its reputation as the film where Hawks lost it I basically like Red Line 7000 as this cute , little outing and think it provides a lot to love against the well vocalized flaws. The acting and plotting starts out rough and I was certainly worried when even the great James Caan came off as a lost amateur. His storyline remains a boring mess throughout, but a lot of the other stories have a charm and naturalism that runs counter to the beach movie trappings. It’s no wonder QT says it’s one of his favorite. Scenes like the Wild Cat sing along have been basically stolen wholesale.

In a lot of ways it seems like the film would have been better had Hawks been honest about his intentions and made this a film of women without men focusing on these beautiful young ladies who stand on the sidelines as the cars race. The women are the most engaging and successful parts of the movie with their stories being far more compelling then the interchangeable men. Even the camera, not just the actors, comes alive when the women are in focus bringing new kinds of lighting and angles that make the drama work. Without the women the film often plays more like a comedy sans jokes and a square one at that.

The race scenes as well are engaging things of beauty showing a lively sense of action where anything is possible and whole sorts of danger happens. I can’t imagine anyone being distracted or bored at least during these scenes. So, in the end while this isn’t some impeachable masterpiece wrongly slung at with arrows it also isn’t some horror show brought forth to embarrass auteurism, as if there weren’t enough legitimate examples for that!

Doing some Hawks revisits, and I actually kinda like Hatari! now for many of the reasons others have stated. It's breezily enjoyable during certain episodes, though other 'hangout' moments fall completely flat for me (this is a film whose back half is far superior, due to acclimation to its vibe and characters). The one aspect that I found superior to Rio Bravo (another film that grew in my esteem this time around) is Wayne's relationship with his object of affection. The goofiness just works better here, most of all because it's a deliberately goofy movie, baldly earning its awkwardness. The whole elephant argument would be tiring in another film, but thankfully they don't spend too much time on the ethics and Hawks gives due attention to Wayne failing to get his way time and time again as the stakes necessary to fulfill Dallas' idealized plan become even more ridiculous. I still wish there were more fun episodes like the rocket subplot during the stretches of leisure time, but the animal hunting scenes can be pretty riveting and I expect this will be a welcome upgrade when KL gets to their 4K edition.

I've been doing a bunch of Hawks revisits and find myself coming around on a few previously-considered duds. The KL 4K of Hatari is remarkable, and I now adore the film, for many reasons stated above - it's the ultimate 'feel-good' hangout movie. I'd like to spend another three hours with those characters. Likewise, To Have and Have Not and The Thing From Another World played far better this time around, as I pitched my focus on acclimating to their breezy wavelengths and stopped expecting 'more' from them (e.g. acceptance that To Have and Have Not is a completely different type of movie than The Big Sleep). The dialogue and intermixing social dynamics are interesting and special in each, and they are essentially 'hang-out' movies of their own, moreso than other Hawksian camaraderie flicks like Air Force or Only Angels Have Wings (just as The Big Sky functions as Red River remade as a heavily slacked hangout movie). When viewing some of these films as little more than leisurely attempts to spend time with characters, foremost, as they react to some unformidable conflict, they work. Ball of Fire continues to fall short of its immense potential while still being good, and A Song is Born is still clearly the better adaptation. Like Ball of Fire, I Was a Male War Bride overstays its welcome a bit and shifts around anxiously in a few acts to try to sell some jokes already made, especially in its back half, but it's still fun. It's becoming clearer that Hawks has made very few bad films. Now let's see if I can come around on Monkey Business after so many failed attempts to comprehend its appeal..

therewillbeblus wrote:Now let's see if I can come around on Monkey Business after so many failed attempts to comprehend its appeal.

Good luck! Given the talent both in front of and behind the camera, this should be one of Hawks’ best, but it’s got to be one of the least funny “comedies” I’ve ever seen, right up there with It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

I’ll damn it completely by comparing it to ‘60s Wilder. It has to be in the running for the worst film by an otherwise consistently excellent director.

Isn’t 60s Wilder considered to still be pretty good Wilder, especially in a decade that brought us The Apartment, 70s Wilder would probably be a better comparison.

My bad. I always think of that as a ‘50s film. I was thinking of the other films from the decade (minus Irma out of respect for the board which loves it).

It has some real duds but The Apartment, Irma la Douce, and Kiss Me, Stupid are at the top of my own Wilder list, so yeah, I don't think it's any less consistent than other Wilder decades

I am eager to revisit Hatari. I did not like it at all when I saw it in theaters, and I may partially chalk that up to the fact that it was advertised as an IB Tech Print and very clearly was not! I also remember some casual colonial-like allusions that didn't sit well with me, though I can't recall exactly what they are. That last moment of To Have And Have Not with Bacall's shoulder shake still plays in my head routinely, though I only watched the film once probably a decade ago at this point.

Monkey Business played better for me using Rivette and Bogdanovich's readings of a more disturbing picture as a jumping off point; employing comedy to model an uncomfortable commentary on a preoccupation with youth and the myopia of intelligentsia. Personally it's more interesting to view it a bit differently, towards an inverted-'Hawksian' vision of how that inherent narcissistic quality in man affects relationship dynamics, to the point of possibly making them doomed organically, taking effort and artifice via ideology to make them function effectively. After reading McCarthy's biography, one could even view it as Hawks' self-reflexive admission of his own failure to make his romantic relationships work due to a preference for self-driven 'boyish' hobbies.

Yet at the same time, Hawks clearly shames the juvenile nature of youthful behavior through a brief Grant monologue two-thirds of the way through the film that comes off as genuine, and the film can be seen as a celebration of maturity as well. Hawks' biography also indicates a man who was always aloofly 'mature' and this could be taken conversely as proof that relationships can be lasting and meaningful if we just stay 'grown up' and don't ever reduce ourselves to these pathetic pubescent aspects of our 'selves' that Hawks sees in other people, muses on, but just can't relate to (well I think he can in slight ways, like when Rogers tells a white lie to Grant -that he said the percentage number that will make him feel less embarrassed- but the grey area of where this is acceptable and when it's appalling is suddenly an ocean in this one). There's an ambiguity regarding intent here that's fascinating because it seems directly related to Hawks' own concerns, in a much rawer and persistently sober fashion compared to his other pictures.

Is that why it's an inaccessible failure for so many? Because it's too broad, ambiguous, and ambivalent? Or because Hawks gets too intimately attached to concerns that are very intentional, and this contrarily blurs whatever his intention is out of focus? Is Hawks acknowledging that an existential meditation on mortality evokes an individualistic pull to put the self first above the group, and does he validate and detest this from different parts of his psyche? Is that why we get these two wildly opposing tones to work with, woven throughout his body of work and often entangled within individual films? Or did Hawks just want to give Cary Grant an opportunity to demean his persona even further, play around with some monkeys, and aggressively devolve the screwball comedy down to its most inane content left bare, a meta-statement reflected in the plot's regressive material itself? Did Hawks want to kill the screwball once and for all, or was it an accident exacerbated by its superfluous substance? If we're at the point where characters can believe a magic serum can transform a man into a baby, maybe we're there at the very edge of the cliff with the possibilities of milking idiocy for humor.

So, it only took maybe a handful of watches across a few decades for this to move from comedy jail to 'interesting failure' territory - I even laughed a few times! I guess this means I need to give Red Line 7000 another go too.. oh boy

I didn't hate Red Line 7000 either this go-around. It's not good, especially the male "characters," which are interchangeably bland - but the women are interesting and have interesting things to say. Marianna Hill's car ride of heartbreak is particularly striking for how she articulates her piece. It's a strange mesh of this depth of feeling alongside stupid boys and stupid car races. The latter fittingly always wind up with a crash as the focus, rather than some unearned victory, and I wonder if that's the point - the final frame being a kind of joke about the picture as a whole, for anyone who wanted to see this for its the advertised Hawksian pizzazz, and not as a woman's picture (which of course is everyone and no one, respectively - this would've been a nice fat F cinemascore)

I can’t imagine anyone who participated in this thread not enjoying the Kino 4K release of Hatari!

It’s no longer a film I tolerate, and seeing it in 4K is particularly rewarding. So many times I gave up on my DVD, with my only real memory of the film being the Henry Mancini score, which I adored as a kid. I still have my family’s album soundtrack.

The commentary is where this release really goes to an another level. Julie Kirgo and Peter Hankoff cover so much, with great knowledge of Hawks and film history that I consider this disc essential in any Hawks collection.