Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (109 page)

Hawks labored to make the story and the actors come alive. Because of his cast members’ limited experience, Hawks got much less creative input from them than he normally liked, and he had to deal with burgeoning
egos. Caan, who called Hawks “Coach,” was professional, although Norman Alden knew that “Jimmy always hated doing that picture”; in later years, Alden said, “he’d never want to hear about that.” Cissy Wellman, who choreographed the musical number in the bar and appeared as a waitress, said that as much as she loved her surrogate father, she was very disappointed when she worked with him on the film.
“He picked people who couldn’t act,” she said, “and some people needed direction. I think we all wanted it very much.” She realized that her father, who was exactly Hawks’s age but stopped making films in 1958, had gone through the same thing. “It’s a question of age, of timing. It’s called ‘adapting.’ … When he was directing, he would try to do Lauren Bacall all the time with every actress he
had.” James Caan felt the same way, allowing, “Hawks was a big believer in me. Unfortunately, I got Hawks when he was … well, not a little beyond his years … but a little behind the times, let’s say.” Intimidated by Hawks anyway, these young performers would tense up even more when they felt they were being molded to fit a preexisting image that the director had in mind, and it just didn’t work.
Hawks took to standing by and not saying anything at all. The reason there is an uncustomary amount of standard over-the-shoulder coverage in the picture is that instead of guiding and correcting his actors, Hawks would just cut when he didn’t like the lines or the delivery and decide he would use a reaction shot and lay different dialogue over later on. He didn’t know how to get what he wanted from
his cast, and he may have realized that there was nothing there to get anyway.

Hawks felt that the production “started off half-cocked” because he didn’t have the time to find a full cast of good actors, and things just got worse from there. Gail Hire did an excellent test, but once she had the part she changed from something of a headstrong rebel, which the director liked, to a star in her own
mind. Laura Devon didn’t pan out either, and the same went for John Robert Crawford and James Ward. Hawks liked the work of
Caan and Hill—“those two people could act and the others couldn’t,” he said flatly. There were many times Hawks’s patience reached its limit, and Kirgo often saw him become red with anger, but Hawks still never blew his top. Because of the limitations of most of the actors,
Hawks was also unable to steer his drama in a more comic direction, which had long been his natural instinct. Nor did he feel comfortable with the music, which consisted of corny “rock” versions of standards like “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” along with a silly Carol Connors—Buzz Cason number, “Wildcat Jones,” “talked” by Gail Hire, and other odds and ends contributed by Nelson Riddle,
whom Hawks probably engaged because of his celebrated theme for the
Route 66
TV show.

Hawks did have one bit of fun with an unexpected cameo performer. Jerry Lewis was the big man on the Paramount lot at the time, and one day, as Paul Helmick remembered, “Howard said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we had Jerry Lewis driving one of the cars?’ So I went to Jerry Lewis … and he said, ‘I’ll do it under
one condition, that Hawks will pay me scale for one day’s work.’ So Howard did it, signed the check himself, and Jerry said, ‘I’ll never cash this.’ So we put him in a black-and-white stock car, hunched over the wheel wearing a helmet. He mugged, of course, and it was kind of a mutual admiration society between him and Howard.” Helmick maintained that Lewis is visible in one insert shot of a driver,
but it is impossible to recognize him. Also in briefly are Terry (later Teri) Garr as a dancer and future Russ Meyer starlet Edy Williams.

Hawks prolonged the agony of the shoot, going about a month over schedule—he wrapped production on April 16—and in the process nearly doubled the budget, which soared to $2,425,176, effectively negating the reason he made the film in the first place. With
Paramount hoping to release the picture as its Thanksgiving attraction, Hawks pushed through postproduction and went, with some of his colleagues, to its first sneak preview, at the Alex Theater in Glendale on Friday, August 20.

It may have been the worst night of Hawks’s professional life. The showing was a nightmare, more catastrophic than anyone could have imagined. George Kirgo, who had left
the picture in March and was seeing it for the first time, said, “Beginning with Gail Hire’s soliloquy, the audience just started cracking up, laughing uncontrollably.” Robert Donner remembered, “There was this roped-off section for us all to be in and you just got lower and lower in your seat.” Norman Alden, who accompanied the director, recalled, “I didn’t really know what to say. I felt embarrassed.
No one was ever going to doubt him to say anything, and it wasn’t my place … it wasn’t anybody’s place, I guess.” George Kirgo, so mortified by the reaction
that he said, “I lost most of my hair that night,” left with the film’s young star and said, “James Caan was suicidal.” Paramount executives were so horrified that the studio discontinued all bidding by theaters for the picture. Hawks was
able to take it more in stride than a younger person might have done, but he did react at once, instantly cutting fifteen of the film’s 127 minutes and, on August 24, temporarily pulling Leigh Brackett off her Western script to prepare new dialogue for
Red Line 7000
which was dubbed in to try to improve things a bit. Kirgo was subsequently called back in to revise a few pages of Brackett’s material.

But Hawks knew that no matter what he did,
Red Line 7000
was essentially unsalvageable. His basic reaction to this fiasco was to plunge immediately and deeply into the Western
El Dorado
. Due to John Wayne’s busy schedule, filming would have to start on October 11, making this the fastest turnaround between pictures for Hawks in some twenty-five years. Therefore, Hawks was well and otherwise occupied
when
Red Line 7000
had its world premiere at the Plaza Theater in Charlotte on November 9, 1965. Marianna Hill, Norman Alden, Gail Hire, and James Ward flew in for the occasion, and the picture actually did reasonably good business on the expected circuits in the South.

It was a different story when the picture hit major urban markets. Noting that it opened in New York City on a double bill with
Beach Ball
, starring Edd Byrnes, the Supremes, and the Righteous Brothers, the
New York Times
’s critic Bosley Crowther struck a common chord when he lamented, “It is dumbfounding that a filmmaker as distinguished as he could make a film as vulgar, witless and outrageously ponderous as this.” Most aislesitters agreed wholeheartedly with Crowther, as did Hawks and his inner circle. Paul Helmick
bluntly said, “It’s a lousy picture.” Cissy Wellman admitted, “Jimmy Caan, all of us would like to burn it.” Aside from the obvious casting problems, Hawks blamed the failure on his jumping from one story to another, since “just as soon as you got interested in two people, you left them and got involved with someone else, and you couldn’t get the momentum back again.” To his credit, he assumed full
responsibility for the debacle: “I just messed it up. It’s as simple as that.”

Not quite everyone agreed. Over the years, some devoted Hawksians have done contortions trying to assert that the film is great simply because the film’s situations and motifs were so quintessentially Hawksian. In a long exegesis, Robin Wood went so far as to claim that
Red Line 7000
was possibly “the most underestimated
film of the sixties”; the way he continually refers to the film’s “intensity” and modernity and ignores the poor acting and artificial look, makes one wonder if he saw the same film as everyone
else. Rather more convincing was the critic Richard Thompson, who, writing in the highbrow journal
December
, dealt with Hawks’s own disillusionment with the film and paralleled the inexpertness of the cast
with the immaturity and unprofessionalism of most of the characters. Thompson’s persistent enthusiasm and decision to teach the film to students in Melbourne after moving there from the United States accounts for the rabid
Red Line 7000
cult that exists to this day in Australia.

Still, Peter Bogdanovich is closest to the mark in saying that “theoretically it’s a good movie,” as those who defend
it are forced to ignore too many glaring shortcomings, even beyond the acting: the technical quality is pathetically poor, with a truly unpalatable mix of raw documentary footage, awful process work, and phony “exteriors” shot in the studio, most notably the announcer’s tower and the spectators in the stands; the characters are largely uninteresting and shallow; and the movie is ostensibly more
rooted in the real world than most Hawks films, and yet weirdly detached from it. To paraphrase Jacques Rivette: You only have to watch
Red Line 7000
to know that it is not a good film.

For
El Dorado
, the title Hawks gave to the adaptation of
The Stars in Their Courses
, Leigh Brackett felt she had outdone herself. “I wrote the best script I have ever written,” she proudly said, “and Howard liked
it, the studio liked it, Wayne liked it, and I was delighted.” The story told of a Duke, “a meticulously dressed Englishman” (and
not
the John Wayne character) who is helped out of a jam by “rugged” Arch Eastmere, “one of the most dangerous hired guns on the range,” when he is attacked in a bordertown cantina by the gunslinger Nelse McLeod and his gang. To return the favor, the Duke accompanies
Arch to the town of Eldorado, where the powerful rancher Mark Lacy has hired Nelse McLeod to grab, by force, water rights controlled by the rancher Randal, whose son Hallock is the local sheriff.

Arch owes Hallock a favor. Acting as Hallock’s deputies, Arch and the Duke help fight off McLeod’s men and prevent them from blowing up a cliff on the riverbank. After becoming partially paralyzed from
an old bullet wound, Arch “sacrifices his life to see that justice is done. Arch doesn’t want to live the rest of his life as a helpless, paralyzed man. With Duke’s help, he attacks and kills McLeod before he is cut down by hired guns himself. Duke turns Lacy over to the sheriff and the townspeople learn of his guilt for the first time. In death, Arch turns out to be the hero of Eldorado after
all.”

What specifically motivated Hawks to reject Brackett’s initial script and force her into what she derisively called
The Son of Rio Bravo Rides
Again
is not entirely clear, but it was probably a combination of reasons. For starters, when he read Brackett’s script, Hawks was struck by how tragic it was. “I read it and said, ‘Hey, this is going to be one of the worst pictures I’ve ever made.
I’m no good at this downbeat stuff,’” he told his writer. It is easy, and perhaps accurate, to speculate that Hawks, whose position as a reliable box-office director was beginning to be questioned in Hollywood, was simply anxious to retreat to the safe ground of
Rio Bravo
, to fall back on what he knew would work. But Hawks may also have rejected Brackett’s script because after the 1930s, he had
generally avoided killing off his leading characters once he’d developed interest and sympathy in them. Or he may have realized that his tendency to make his material more comic when working with Wayne would run counter to the contours of the grim, deterministic novel.

Hawks was far from shy about recycling discarded ideas from
Rio Bravo
. Put on the defensive about stealing from himself, as he
phrased it, Hawks noted that Hemingway did it all the time (certainly not as blatantly as Hawks did) and argued that “if a director has a story that he likes and he tells it, very often he looks at the picture and says, ‘I could do that better if I did it again,’ so I’d do it again.… I’m not a damn bit interested in whether somebody thinks this is a copy of it, because the copy made more money than
the original, and I was very pleased with it.”

The first person he met resistance from was Brackett. “I have been at swords’ points with him many a time because I don’t like doing a thing over again, and he does. I remember one day he and John Wayne and I were sitting in the office, and he said we’ll do such and such a thing. I said, ‘But Howard, you did it in
Rio Bravo
. You don’t want to do
this over again.’ He said, ‘Why not?’ And John Wayne, all six feet four of him, looked down and said, ‘If it was good once it’ll be just as good again.’ I know when I’m outgunned, so I did it.” Brackett wasn’t happy about it and did her best to apply little zigzags to Hawks’s blueprint. “Amazingly enough,” Brackett noted, “very few people, except film buffs, caught the resemblance.”

Hawks’s way
of bending the material to his own ends is visible in the first few minutes of the film. Instead of beginning with a violent attack in a cantina, the picture gets under way by firmly establishing what is by far the most important element in the story to the director: the friendship between the gunslinger (Wayne’s Cole Thornton, formerly Arch Eastmere) and the sheriff (Robert Mitchum’s J. P. Harrah,
formerly Hallock). Their initial conversation is held while Harrah aims his rifle squarely at Thornton until he convinces his old friend not to go to work for the expansionist-minded
rancher (Ed Asner’s Bart Jason, formerly Mark Lacy). Within moments, the script has drawn upon several previous Hawks films: the pre–Civil War back story and postwar Texas setting call to mind
Red River
, Harrah’s
discovery that Thornton knew his girl Maudie (Charlene Holt) before he did is taken straight from
A Girl in Every Port
, and Maudie’s recapitulation of her past (she was a penniless gambler’s widow before Thornton took her under his wing) could pass for a biography of Feathers and John T. Chance in
Rio Bravo
.

The one significant scene retained from the novel and initial screenplay was Thornton’s
shooting of the rancher’s son, whom he took to be firing at him, and the wounded boy’s ensuing suicide. Thornton’s subsequent action of taking the boy’s body back to his father’s ranch and telling the man what happened is one of the most powerful expressions of a stoic’s handling of death in all of Hawks, and as Robin Wood observed, its spare, beautifully articulated gravity makes one long to see
the completely serious film Hawks chose not to make.