Search results
Oct 28, 2011 · A brief, early biographical sketch that emphasizes Hawks’s outdoor life, his engineering acumen, and his failure to earn even a single Oscar during his lengthy career in the film industry. back to top.
For his next film, Hawks wanted to make a film about his childhood passion: car racing. Hawks developed the script for The Crowd Roars with Seton Miller for their eighth and final collaboration. Hawks used real race car drivers in the film, including the 1930 Indianapolis 500 winner Billy Arnold. [47] The film was released in March and became a ...
- Overview
- Early life and work
Howard Hawks (born May 30, 1896, Goshen, Indiana, U.S.—died December 26, 1977, Palm Springs, California) American motion-picture director who maintained a consistent personal style within the framework of traditional film genres in work that ranged from the 1920s to the ’70s. Although his films starred some of the American film industry’s most notable actors and were almost unremittingly popular, Hawks was long considered little more than a very competent journeyman before the critics-turned-filmmakers of the French New Wave began celebrating him as one of the quintessential Hollywood auteurs in the 1960s and ’70s.
Hawks made all of his 33 sound pictures without ever being under contract to a studio, although he relied almost entirely on cannily chosen studio talent. His signature was so distinctive that almost all his movies can be identified within moments as a Hawks film. Hawks was able to impose his style on nearly every viable genre that was in vogue during his long career—westerns, musicals, screwball comedies, war pictures, historical epics, romantic adventures, films noir, gangster sagas, and even science fiction. Many other directors were asked to do the same, but none enjoyed Hawks’s rate of success. He did not always manage to turn out a classic, but, arguably, he came close more often than any other American director, and his range significantly exceeded that of rival John Ford.
Hawks was born in a family whose considerable wealth was derived largely from the paper industry and who moved from northern Indiana to Wisconsin before finally settling in Pasadena, California. Hawks attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and graduated from Cornell University in 1917 with a degree in mechanical engineering. During summer vacations from college he worked for the property department of Famous Players–Lasky (which later became Paramount Pictures). Hawks also had become a barnstorming pilot at age 16 and served during World War I in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Following the war he designed and raced automobiles professionally. Hawks then worked as a production assistant and independent producer for directors such as Allan Dwan, before beginning a two-year stint as the head of the story department at Paramount Pictures.
Having signed with Fox Film Corporation, Hawks directed his first film, The Road to Glory, in 1926. Even in some of his first silent films he began to put into place themes that would recur throughout his career: A Girl in Every Port (1928) examined the special bond between two men that supersedes their rivalry for the love of a woman. The Air Circus (1928) explored the romance of flight. The Dawn Patrol (1930), another film about flying, was Hawks’s first true sound film. It was based on a story by John Monk Saunders, whose work had also formed the basis for William Wellman’s Wings (1927), and starred Richard Barthelmess and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., as pilots stationed in France during World War I. The aerial footage (much of it shot from a plane piloted by Hawks) was outstanding and would be recycled in several films, including Edmund Goulding’s 1938 remake of The Dawn Patrol. Hawks’s next effort was The Criminal Code (1931), starring Walter Huston as a prison warden whose daughter falls in love with one of his prisoners. In a much-heralded interview in 1962, Hawks told future director Peter Bogdanovich that in pursuit of authenticity he had hired 10 convicts to critique the story.
Britannica Quiz
Hollywood Films in the 1930s Quiz
With The Crowd Roars (1932) Hawks melded two of his obsessions, filmmaking and auto racing. James Cagney played a driver who tries to keep his younger brother away from the sport, with tragic results. Tiger Shark (1932) starred Edward G. Robinson as a good-hearted Portuguese fisherman who helplessly watches his young bride fall in love with another man. Although The Crowd Roars was viewed by most critics as the first landmark film of Hawks’s career, Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932) had actually been completed before it but was held up for several months while Hawks and coproducer Howard Hughes struggled with the censors, who argued that the film glorified its central character, a gangster. Arguably the best of the “big three” early gangster epics (Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar [1931] and Wellman’s The Public Enemy [1931] were the others), Scarface was, as Hawks conceived it, “the Borgias set down in Chicago,” with Paul Muni as a thinly disguised Al Capone. The principal contributor to the screenplay was one-time Chicago journalist Ben Hecht, who would work often with Hawks. The extra scenes shot for the film to satisfy the censors were exquisitely lit by cinematographer Lee Garmes and as such were uncharacteristic of the unadorned visual style employed by Hawks throughout his career. He almost always used eye-level camera placement and was extremely judicious in his use of close-ups. (The story was “updated” in 1983 by Brian De Palma, with Al Pacino in the Muni role and cocaine, rather than Prohibition-era alcohol, as the criminal commodity.)
Hawks took an active role in the writing of the screenplays for his films but seldom asked for a screenwriting credit: the Screenwriters Guild required a director to contribute at least half of the writing to receive credit, but Hawks had no interest in tracking attribution during the screenwriting process. He had great respect for writers, and he worked with a number of well-known dramatists and novelists on his screenplays, including William Faulkner, whom Hawks introduced to the motion-picture industry so that Faulkner could adapt one of his own short stories for Hawks’s Today We Live (1933). Among the soon-to-be notable actors who appeared in this World War I drama were Gary Cooper, Robert Young, and Franchot Tone.
- Michael Barson
- Scarface (1932) Within only a couple of years since the technology took over the film industry, Hawks had already made his fourth sound film. So early in his career, Scarface would already become one of Hawks’s masterworks, and it would serve to establish the director’s proclivity for examining power-relationships, hierarchies, and male-dominated social structures.
- Bringing Up Baby (1938) Widely considered as Hawks’s definitive masterpiece, Bringing Up Baby is an essential screwball comedy. The film stars Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn as a temperate paleontologist and a whimsical, disaster-prone woman, respectively.
- Only Angels Have Wings (1939) As one of Hawks’s more straightforward works, Only Angels Have Wings establishes the director’s ability to present a narrative without undercutting it for any subversive commentary.
- His Girl Friday (1940) Hawks’s third film in a row starring Cary Grant sees the director returning to the screwball comedy of Bringing Up Baby. Only this time, Grant plays a comedic role altogether different from his anxious David Huxley; the conniving, exploitative newspaper editor Walter Burns is the epitome of self-assurance, and his cunning is rivaled by none other than his ex-wife Hildy Johnson, played by Rosalind Russell.
- Director. The director is the creative visionary behind a film and plays a key role in bringing the story to life. They work closely with the cast and crew to ensure that the film aligns with their artistic vision, making crucial decisions throughout the production process.
- Producer. While the director focuses on the creative aspects of a film, the producer is responsible for managing the business side of things. They oversee the entire production process, ensuring that the film is completed on time and within budget.
- Cinematographer. When it comes to capturing the visual essence of a film, the cinematographer is the go-to person. Also known as the director of photography (DP), the cinematographer works closely with the director to translate their creative vision into stunning visuals on screen.
- Production Designer. Imagine watching a film set in a futuristic city or a medieval castle without the right sets, props, or visual elements. It just wouldn't feel authentic, would it?
Nov 16, 2018 · Film Industry Jobs: 40 Essential Roles in Film Production. Written by MasterClass. Last updated: Nov 16, 2021 • 7 min read. From Los Angeles to New York to locations around the world, the film industry relies on film crews with a wide array of skills in the field of film and video production.
People also ask
What movies did Howard Hawks make?
Did Howard Hawks produce before directing?
What makes Hawks a good movie?
Is Howard Hawks a good film director?
All this zaniness—or so it seems in the women Hawks chooses—is something of a defense mechanism, a cover for an underlying vulnerability. Bringing Up Baby ’s Susan and The Twentieth Century ’s Lily Garland, so headstrong and self-reliant, are socially and sexually insecure.
