The movie Howard Hawks always regretted making: “I thought it was lousy”
There was a very select group of directors working in the Golden Age of Hollywood, which put out consistently incredible films with the biggest names in the business, and it consisted of the likes of John Ford, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks; the last of whom it could be argued was the most expansive of them all.
That’s because Hawks made legendary movies in several different genres; while the likes of Ford made historic westerns, and the occasional comedy, Hawks helmed amazing films in all manner of brackets, from gangster movies to westerns to screwball comedies to sci-fi. Yet somehow, he still isn’t what those outside of films would regard as a household name.
Without doubt, some of what Hawks created during the 1930s and ‘40s rank up there with anything anyone has done. The original Scarface, for example, made as early as 1932 and based on the real-life crimes of Chicago gangster Al Capone, was hugely controversial, banned in many parts of America, yet massively influential.
Contrast that with the Katharine Hepburn comedy Bringing up Baby, a genuinely laugh out loud movie that is still as funny almost 90 years later. And then there’s The Big Sleep, Bogart and Bacall in a classic Raymond Chandler adaptation that defined noir at the end of the ‘40s. Plus even at the end of the next decade you’ll find Rio Bravo; John Wayne and Dean Martin as good as they ever were in the tale of a few ragtag men trying to keep a prisoner safe against a bloodthirsty gang. Hit after hit, genre after genre.
That’s not to say it was all smooth sailing for Hawks, however, especially not in the early stages of his career. He did have a privileged background and only got into films by chance after meeting a cinematographer while racing a car gifted to him by his grandfather and working his way up from prop boy to set builder to producer, a title he earned by virtue of loaning family money to a studio head.
But he made the most of those advantages, directing a series of silent films in the early 1920s before he was handed the chance to write and direct his own; A Road to Glory, which was a 1926 drama that critics enjoyed but didn’t really resonate with audiences. In conversation with fellow director Peter Bogdanovich, Hawks said: “At the time I thought the thing to do was to be dramatic.”
Adding, “The critics thought it was great; I thought it was lousy. And then this man Sol Wurtzel, who had a great influence on me, said, ‘Well, you’ve shown that you know how to make a picture that all the critics like, but nobody else is going to like it, so for God’s sake, go out and make some entertainment.’ So I wrote a story called Fig Leaves and it got its cost back in one theatre.”
Fig Leaves proved to be Hawks’ only comedy for the next ten years or so, and was so popular it allowed Hawks to rise quickly to prominence over the next few years, directing his first ‘all-sound’ film in 1930 with the World War I aviation drama The Dawn Patrol.
That film won an Academy Award for ‘Best Story’ at the following year’s Oscar ceremony and was one of the biggest hits of the early 1930s. Its success meant Hawks was able to operate as a name director, without needing to sign restrictive studio contracts.
