Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (105 page)

Feldman also apprised Hawks of the progress on negotiations on the Columbia contract. Columbia was still
very interested in the deal, but Hawks was beginning to make impossible demands, such as final say in the event of any dispute with the studio over casting and cutting, from which Feldman had to dissuade him. Hawks told his friend that, for personal and financial reasons, he was leaning toward making his upcoming pictures in Europe. They also discussed John Wayne. Members of the inner circle
knew there were concerns about his health, but more pressing was Wayne’s insistence upon being paid tens of thousands of dollars for six weeks of overages on
Hatari!
It was a situation painfully reminiscent of what had happened on
Red River
, where the star felt he was getting shortchanged by his friend and boss. Hawks told Feldman he could take care of things man-to-man with Duke and get him to
compromise, but Wayne wanted every penny owed him and had to threaten another lawsuit to get it.

In late June, after completing
Hatari!
to his satisfaction, Hawks de-camped for Palm Springs to bake in the heat and unwind after the unceasing yearlong effort of making such an ambitious film. He was reasonably pleased, he said, that “the picture turned out to be pretty good, but I think we
could
have had a
hell
of a picture. You have to put Wayne with somebody who’s good. Every time I put him with somebody who’s good I end up with a good picture.” For him, Gerard Blain and Hardy Kruger, while perfectly decent actors, simply didn’t combine to equal one Montgomery Clift, Dean Martin, or, specifically, Clark Gable in screen weight or star power.

In late July, Hawks received a surprising
offer. Darryl Zanuck was just then preparing his most ambitious personal project, an adaptation of Cornelius Ryan’s best-selling book about the D-day invasion,
The Longest Day
. Part of the producer’s plan to maintain absolute control over every aspect of the massive production was to hire three different directors, one to handle the French aspect of the story, another for the German angle, and
a third for the Allied side. The last would be the most important, and Zanuck provisionally offered the job to Hawks, but when Hawks’s agent Jack Gordean informed Zanuck that his client would require “a lot of money” and would need to see a script before discussing it, it was enough of a red flag for Zanuck. Another submission Hawks received during this time was
The Rounders
, a Max Evans novel
about two contemporary cowpokes that Burt Kennedy brought to the screen in 1965. Hawks felt the material was initially very funny but ultimately a one-joke affair.

The first sneak preview of
Hatari!
, at the United Artists Theater in Long Beach on August 3, was a great success, as was a subsequent one at Stamford Theater in Connecticut. But Paramount, whose other year-end releases were scheduled
to be
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Blue Hawaii
with Elvis Presley, and
The Errand Boy
with Jerry Lewis, decided that it wouldn’t be able to book
Hatari!
into enough top theaters in December to maximize its potential, so the distributor put off its opening until the following summer. This was a disappointment to Hawks and, for this reason, the picture Wayne made at Paramount subsequent to
Hatari!
, John
Ford’s
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
, was released first. Wayne’s next film,
Circus World
, was postponed, and Paramount and Hawks discussed a possible quick project with the actor. Jack Gordean then told Paramount executives that, “Howard has always liked
The Maltese Falcon
, and he feels he can make this a very exciting film with Wayne doing the Bogart role.”

When the issue of script credit
on
Hatari!
came up, Hawks strongly felt that credit should read, “Screenplay by Leigh Brackett, original story by Harry Kurnitz.” Given that what Frank and Tom Waldman wrote bore only occasional resemblance to the finished film and that Brackett had been on the set to write virtually all the dialogue, Hawks said, “I do not think that the contribution the Waldman brothers made to the script warrants
giving them credit on the screen.” The brothers filed a protest with the Writers Guild but did not prevail.

Despite all the extra time Paramount had to generate publicity and its boast that it would back
Hatari!
with “the biggest all-media showman-ship campaign in history,” Hawks began to feel that the studio was blowing it and went to New York “to raise hell,” as Paul Helmick put it, with marketing
executives. There was another side to the publicity, however, that pleased Hawks enormously. Beginning on May 21, 1962, the highbrow Museum of Modern Art in New York launched a three-month retrospective of Hawks’s career, the first of its kind in the United States. Today, such an event would seem richly deserved and nothing out of the ordinary. But just then the passion for, and achievement of,
European art cinema was at its zenith, with gods such as Bergman, Antonioni, Fellini, Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, and Buñuel at the peak of their powers and reputation. In this climate, an extended tribute to a Hollywood entertainer whose last four films had been a comedy about a youth potion, a gaudy musical, a lackluster Egyptian epic, and a Western featuring John Wayne and a couple of pop singers,
and whose new picture was being promoted with coloring books and baby-elephant music, was greeted at best with some skepticism, at worst with outright derision.

The series was the brainchild of Peter Bogdanovich, then an intense twenty-two-year-old film buff, occasional theater director, and aspiring critic, Hollywood chronicler, and film director. A couple of years earlier, his critic friends
Andrew Sarris and Eugene Archer had been raving about Howard Hawks, and Bogdanovich had admitted that he hadn’t seen much by him. “
Bringing Up Baby
hadn’t been seen in New York in years,” Bogdanovich recalled, “and Gene, Andy, and I made a list of all the Howard Hawks films we wanted to see.” The young men then persuaded the New Yorker Theater’s Dan Talbot to stage a two-week series called “The
Forgotten Film” in January 1961. Of the twenty-eight films on the program, eleven were by Hawks. “I saw all the Hawks films and was blown away,” Bogdanovich said. “On one Saturday we showed
The Big Sleep
and
To Have and Have Not
, and we had lines around the block. This was our first hint that this whole Bogart thing was happening. At
Bringing Up Baby
, people were screaming with laughter. I had
to see it three times.”

This, then, was the beginning of the Howard Hawks cult in America. When the
Hatari!
release date was firmed up, Richard Griffith, the curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art, agreed to stage the series if Bogdanovich could convince Paramount to pay for it. This done, Bogdanovich and his then wife, Polly Platt, traveled to Hollywood to meet the great man and interview
him in his Paramount office. “He was very cool, very straight,” Bogdanovich remembered. “He sat there smoking Kents. He didn’t laugh much, but when Polly made a mistake with the tape recorder and taped over a half hour, it didn’t faze him at all; he said we could just do it again.” The couple spent two or three days talking to Hawks.

When he was in New York for the
Hatari!
opening, Hawks appeared
at the museum, where Bogdanovich saw him again briefly. The series “was very successful, very popular,” Bogdanovich said. “It was unusual for its time. People were just getting hip to the idea that Howard Hawks was good.” Bogdanovich’s pioneering monograph,
The Cinema of Howard Hawks
, emphasized the irony of Hawks’s relative neglect in his native land, given that “he is probably the most typical
American director of all,” and stressed the fact that domestic recognition was coming only in the wake of his discovery by the French. Also published in the wake of the series was Andrew Sarris’s penetrating two-part article in
Films and Filming
, “The World of Howard Hawks,” the first in-depth auteurist consideration of Hawks’s career written in English. In December 1962, the young cutting-edge
British critics added their voices in support of Hawks, as the bold
Movie
magazine put
Hatari!
on its cover and devoted most of the issue to the director, with articles by V. F. Perkins, Robin Wood, and Mark Shivas, among others.

Hatari!
had its world premiere on June 19, 1962, at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood as a black-tie benefit for Hollywood Friends of Africa. The next morning, Hawks
flew to New York, where a marquee several stories tall on the De Mille Theater advertised “Howard Hawks’
Hatari!
” and the East Coast premiere took place that night. The reviews were decidedly mixed, with everyone agreeing on the merits of the animal footage but most critics deriding the egregious 159-minute running time and pointing out the lack of dramatic urgency in the story. Business started
out strongly, the film bringing in just slightly less than Hitchcock’s Paramount smash
Psycho
had at the same theater, but didn’t hold at that high level. The film was very popular with kids that summer but was basically perceived as a pleasant and exotic diversion though not essential viewing for adults. A fine performer in the Midwest and Southwest, it did less well in bigger, more sophisticated
markets. Hawks continued to feel that Paramount didn’t make the most out of it and, after all the work and high hopes, was a bit disappointed with the commercial results.

By the time
Hatari!
was completely played out and removed from release at the end of 1964, Paramount had collected $4,755,913 in domestic film rentals on a box-office gross of $10,015,179. Overseas, it did well, particularly
in Japan, where it had a huge opening at the Hibiya Theater in Tokyo and went on to earn more than $1 million. Still, as Paramount sank nearly $10 million into production, prints, advertising, and marketing, the film remained officially in the red until the 1970s, when television sales started generating residuals.

Even though Hawks had virtually unlimited control and power in the making of
Hatari!
, his particular way—both loose and strong—of creating films, the specific mix of personalities involved, and his willingness, even eagerness, to discover his film in the process of making it, meant that it turned out quite differently than the motion picture he’d had in his mind at the outset. Today, making a film in this manner at a Hollywood studio would be impossible, intolerable. And
yet, despite the strain and discord among the troops,
Hatari!
is the most genial film in the world. As the critic Joseph McBride and other devoted fans of the picture have noted, there are few, if any, films that offer such enjoyable company, where one would like to just step into the screen and join in the action. If you don’t like the film, it is legitimately open to criticism as being too long,
juvenile, silly, undramatic, and inconsequential. If you do like it, none of this matters, and the more than two-and-a-half hours spent with the characters may not be nearly long enough.

Among the numerous individuals who “discovered” Hawks at the Museum of Modern Art during the summer of 1962 was the future film critic Stuart Byron. Years later, when he was asked to contribute to an anthology
about favorite movies of all time, Byron chose to write about
Hatari!
Although he rivaled Jacques Rivette in critical extremism when he presumed that “even John Simon, forced to see
Hatari!
ten times, would understand its greatness,” Byron astutely positioned Hawks at the center of the whole auteurist critical debate of the period, pointing out that “it is through Hawks that most people ‘come
to’ auteurism,” or “see the light.” He then described
Hatari!
as the most perfect expression of everything Hawks believed in and represented; Hawks was, the critic maintained, “a Darwinian without regrets,” a proponent of “a kind of atheistic humanism” who posited the value of personality and human beings against the “spiritual void” depicted in all of his films. Byron argued, “Inasmuch as he
has no nostalgia for religion, Hawks is more starkly modern than Bergman (or for that matter, Wallace Stevens)—and … he can only be compared thematically, among the major modern figures, with Samuel Beckett.”

Thus were drawn the battle lines—and such they were—in the dramatic debate over whether or not Howard Hawks was an “artist.” As Hawks made his final films over the next few years, the argument
would heat up to feverish, sometimes insanely passionate levels.

By February 1962, Charles Feldman and Jack Gordean had already spent sixteen months trying to hammer out Hawks’s rich deal with Columbia. In the usual Hollywood manner, it kept getting stalled and delayed, and after making his agents worry when he kept adding provisions that no studio would ever grant, Hawks decided he didn’t want to go through with the
deal after all. The reason he gave involved changes in the tax law that looked to pass shortly in Congress, laws that would put a financial damper on his plans to base his activities in Europe. After talking it over on the phone, Hawks and Columbia chairman Leo Jaffe mutually decided to call the whole thing off, but it was still embarrassing to Feldman, who had just produced
Walk on the Wild Side
for the studio and was also preparing Ian Fleming’s
Casino Royale
, the one James Bond novel not owned by Hawks’s old friend Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. Feldman and Hawks brought Leigh Brackett out to Los Angeles to discuss an approach to the script, and Hawks fancied the idea of Cary Grant in the role of the dapper 007. Later in the year, Feldman and Hawks got an advance print of
Dr. No
from England and thus were among the first Americans to see the initial Sean Connery Bond film. Hawks promptly lost interest in pursuing
Casino Royale
, but Feldman persisted.

For his part, Hawks quickly entered into a deal to stay at Paramount that was virtually identical to the one he had nearly consummated with Columbia: three pictures to be made by his Laurel Productions over five years, with
Hawks receiving $200,000 a picture and 50 percent of the profits. There was briefly talk of the director reuniting with John Wayne and Dean Martin on a CinemaScope epic, tentatively entitled “The Yukon Trial,” about a cattle drive to Alaska during the Gold Rush days. But Hawks, who had not made anything fully in the romantic-comedy vein in more than a decade, was more interested in a story by
Pat Frank that had recently appeared in
Cosmopolitan
magazine, “The Girl Who Almost Got Away.”
The modest tale centered on Roger Willoughby, a light-tackle specialist who, as the most successful salesman of the year, receives a bonus and a trip to the famous Wakapoochee Bass Tournament. This is a considerable challenge since, despite his profession, he has never fished in his life.