Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (114 page)

Hawks completed his final motion picture the second week of June, and “the minute he finished he headed for Palm Springs,” John Woodcock recalled. “He gave me carte blanche in the cutting,” trusting his editor to do his best and eliminate anything embarrassing. Hawks liked a few scenes, particularly the train robbery and its aftermath, but he felt that
“with the main girl such a dud, scene after scene just backfired.… If you got
passable
scenes, you were awfully glad.” On another occasion, he expressed his opinion of
Rio Lobo
more succinctly: “I didn’t think it was any good.”

When it was released at the very end of 1970, the film was generally recognized as a flat, below-par effort by both Hawks and Wayne. Given the built-in audience for
virtually any John Wayne picture, it did reasonable business, but less than Cinema Center had hoped for and less than any of the three previous collaborations between the director and star.
Rio Lobo
generated $4.25 million in rentals, which earned it twentieth place among pictures for the year. By way of comparison, Wayne’s next vehicle, a thoroughly average Western called
Big Jake
, earned rentals
of $7.5 million, while the hip revisionist Western
Little Big Man
, released at exactly the same time as
Rio Lobo
, pulled in $15 million.

A few hardy souls spoke out for Hawks’s last film. Most prominent among them was Roger Greenspun, the second-string critic for the
New York Times
and an arch-auteurist, who wrote that
Rio Lobo
was “close enough to greatness to stand above everything else so
far in the current season.” The review raised eyebrows in many quarters and provoked angry letters to the paper; in retrospect, with Hawks’s critical reputation scarcely riding on the verdict, it is easy to see why. While not oblivious to the film’s shortcomings, Greg Ford, in a scholarly
Film Heritage
essay, plausibly argued that if such artists as Matisse, Faulkner, and Wallace Stevens could
be allowed many recapitulations of the same subjects, why not Hawks?

Still, however charitable one might care to be, the evidence of decline is too obvious to ignore. The film’s lack of creative spark, of inspiration, of energy, of any driving force is palpable in every scene save for the train prologue. As shoddy as the visuals is the blandly utilitarian dialogue, much of which sounds dubbed
in. If one were to compare the talk here with that in virtually any picture Hawks made before the 1950s, the staggering difference, in both words and pacing, would be instantly apparent. In fact, the dialogue is so functional, and the dramatic developments so basic, that one is put in mind of a silent film, albeit with little of the visual or storytelling economy. Wayne’s preference for relaxation
over action shows in his exceedingly “comfortable” performance, which may possess the authority but has little of the toughness of his work in
Rio Bravo
. Some detractors have gone so far as to call
Rio Lobo
a Hawksian self-parody, but it’s not quite sharp enough for that. The film truly does feel tired and unengaged, with the repetition of previous situations and conceits this time played out
to diminishing returns. Few great directors ever went out with a bang; like most of them, Hawks, at the estimable age of seventy-four, sort of faded away.

The transformation of Howard Hawks from working director into living legend had its seeds planted in France in the 1950s, began taking noticeable shape in the 1960s, and assumed a life of its own in the 1970s. The first full-length critical study,
Howard Hawks
by Jean-Claude Missiaen, appeared in 1966, and the following year, for a BBC-TV series called
The Movies
, Peter
Bogdanovich and Nicholas Garnham made a pioneering, hourlong documentary,
Howard Hawks: The Great Professional
, in which Hawks tells a number of his most familiar stories. While shooting the interview in Palm Springs, Bogdanovich had what was, for him, the harrowing experience of riding in a dune buggy with twelve-year-old Gregg at the wheel and getting stuck in the desert on a blistering day.
“I started walking back for help,” Bogdanovich recalled, “and I realized I didn’t know where I was. Eventually I’m not feeling very well. There’s a tiny bush. I’m going to get sunstroke, and I’m trying to figure out how to put my head under this bush. Then I hear a motorcycle and up rides Howard. When I got within hailing distance, I could see he looked terribly worried. Howard was riding through
the sand and he looked very grim, like a man who knew tragedy. It was the most serious moment I ever saw him in.”

In 1968, Robin Wood, the author of a previous volume on Hitchcock and one of the few brilliant critics ever to devote his career to film analysis, published a book on Hawks’s films that still stands as the best critical investigation of the director’s work and one of the most persuasive
studies of any filmmaker. Succinct but fully argued, passionate but steeled by a rigorous critical method, Wood’s intellectual, highly influential book did more to legitimatize high regard for Hawks than anything other than Andrew Sarris’s installation of Hawks in the pantheon of great Hollywood directors in his landmark book
The American Cinema
that same year. Even then, Sarris felt compelled
to point out that “Howard Hawks was until recently the least known and least appreciated Hollywood director of any stature,” citing
Hawks’s conspicuous neglect in the standard film histories published up to that time. Perceptively noting that “Hawks has lived a tightrope existence, keeping his footing in a treacherous industry for more than forty years without surrendering his personal identity,”
Sarris remarked on Hawks’s concern for professionalism, his functional, eye-level visual style, and his ability to stamp “his distinctively bitter view of life on adventure, gangster and private-eye melodramas, Westerns, musicals, and screwball comedies, the kind of thing Americans do best and appreciate least.” His conclusion: “That one can discern the same directorial signature over a wide variety
of genres is proof of artistry.” From a critical point of view, Wood and Sarris decisively confirmed Hawks’s new standing, not just as an accomplished popular entertainer but as an American artist of the first rank. Hawks remained a major focal point of critical debate in Peter Wollen’s enormously influential 1969 volume,
Signs and Meaning in the Cinema
, and 1971 saw the publication of another
full-length study, by Jean Gili.

If Hawks ever read much of this adulatory analysis is unclear, but he willingly fostered the worship of critics by sitting for countless interviews about his career. His number was listed in the phone book, and he would tell anyone who called just to come on over. On the subject of himself, Hawks was inexhaustible, recounting the same colorful stories as if for
the first time and outlasting interlocutors perhaps a third his own age; Joseph McBride remembered, “When I left Hawks’s home after one of our visits, which seldom lasted less than five hours, I always felt exhausted, and
he
always looked great.”

Hawks also played host to young directors who idolized him, unhesitatingly dispensing opinions and advice. The first of these was Bogdanovich, whose
fealty to the master was such that he included excerpts from Hawks films in his first two features—
The Criminal Code
in
Targets, Red River
in
The Last Picture Show
—and blatantly, but unofficially, used a Hawks classic,
Bringing Up Baby
, as the basis for his third, and most successful, film,
What’s Up, Doc?

Bogdanovich remembered screening
Targets
for two director friends, Jean Renoir and Hawks,
and felt that their reactions “shows the difference between the two men.… Renoir said, ‘It is as good as the best Hitchcock,’ and that’s all. I showed the picture to Howard one night, just to him. He sat there. I sat there. Finally, he said, ‘Well, the acting’s not too good.’ ‘I know. Some of it.’ ‘Some of those scenes go on a little too long.’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘But the action’s good, and that stuff’s
hard to do.’ I lived on that for years. When we show the clip from
The Criminal Code
, there’s a line, ‘Howard Hawks directed
that,’ and he snorted when that came on. He liked and appreciated the
Red River
clip in
The Last Picture Show
. When I sent him the
What’s Up, Doc?
script, I didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks. I was in the first day of rehearsal and the a.d. came up and said, ‘It’s
Howard Hawks.’ I got on the phone and he said, ‘I read your script. You didn’t steal the leopard, and you didn’t steal the dinosaur. But it’s pretty good. Who’s in it?’ I said, ‘Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. I know they’re not Hepburn and Grant.…’ He said, ‘That’s for sure. But don’t let ’em be cute, and you’ll be fine.’ That was it. He got a kick out of its having been stolen from
Bringing
Up Baby
. Then he went down to South America and came back and said, ‘I’ve got some pictures for you,’ and he’d taken pictures of the theater marquees where
What’s Up, Doc?
was playing. He loved that it was a hit.”

When the up-and-coming director William Friedkin was living with Kitty Hawks in New York for a couple of years in the early 1970s, the three spent some time together, which represented
the possible beginnings of a rapprochement between a father and daughter who had scarcely ever seen each other. Friedkin naturally asked the old man what he thought of his films. Bluntly, Hawks said that he thought both
The Night They Raided Minsky’s
and
The Boys in the Band
were “lousy” and warned Friedkin that he’d better make something entertaining if he wanted to keep getting work. Hawks said
that he recommended that Friedkin “make a good chase. Make one better than anyone’s done,” and Friedkin confirmed that this piece of advice led directly to his decision to make
The French Connection
, for which he won an Oscar.

On a more personal and distressing level, when Kitty Hawks and Friedkin were in Los Angeles one February, Hawks invited them to dinner for her birthday. Friedkin recounted,
“We met him at one of his favorite restaurants, Chianti, on Melrose. Kitty gave him a big hug and we noticed that he had a brown paper bag with him, like a grocery bag. We sat down and he said, ‘Kitty, I’ve got something for you,’ and she got very excited, not imagining what it could be. And he gave her the bag and she reached in and pulled out two men’s shirts, and she just burst into tears.”
Kitty’s lingering resentment of her absent father flooded to the surface once again, and while they saw each other sporadically, especially once Kitty moved to Los Angeles and became an agent, the two never reached any kind of accord.

One rather less illustrious filmmaker with whom Hawks became involved was Max Baer Jr. Best known for having played Jethro on
The Beverly Hillbillies
and as the
son of the heavyweight boxer whom Hawks had briefly directed before being replaced on
The Prizefighter and the Lady
in 1932,
Baer sought and received Hawks’s help in writing, producing and even editing his first production,
Macon County Line
, a cheap period melodrama. Hawks didn’t think much of it but was genuinely impressed by how much money it made.

Hawks admitted that he didn’t see much he
liked. He hated Sam Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch
, dismissing it with the often-quoted line, “I can kill four men, take ‘em to the morgue, and bury ’em before he gets one down to the ground in slow motion.” Nor was he thrilled with
The Godfather
, suggesting that he had long since done it all, and better, in
Scarface. Easy Rider
he found interesting because “it was kind of a new style and it was well
done.” At the same time, he rightly predicted, “I don’t think the picture is going to live as an outstanding picture.” Pierre Rissient took him to see Abraham Polonsky’s
Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here
, which he liked, as he did
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. By inference, one can conclude that Hawks was both a Robert Redford and a George Roy Hill fan, since the picture during this period that
he seemed to like most was Hill’s
The Sting
. It is easy to see why, since it recapitulated the best of Old Hollywood and represented the sorts of things Hawks himself did well: it was centered on a strong buddy-buddy relationship, traded heavily upon star personalities, injected considerable humor into a dramatic story, and didn’t pretend to be anything more than it was.

Hawks considered some
of his early film festival visits to be promotional stops, since he very much regarded himself an active filmmaker who intended to make more pictures. In November 1970, a month before
Rio Lobo
was released, he participated in a tribute at the Chicago Film Festival. He also made time to visit the Hawks-fanatical Doc Films group at the University of Chicago, which possessed one of the few prints
of
Scarface
then available in the country and published the magazine
Focus
, which ran the legendary cover article “Who the Hell Is Howard Hawks?” Charles Flynn, who picked Hawks up at the airport on behalf of the group, recalled that the director asked to be taken directly downtown to Abercrombie & Fitch, where he spent a long time inspecting the store’s stock of guns.

In July 1972, Hawks did
what nearly every major director of his generation did when they were perceived as being put out to pasture: he served as the president of a film festival jury. Hawks did the honors at the San Sebastian Film Festival, where he was forced to sit through quite a few European art films of the type he generally abhorred and avoided. But in the company of a few admirers, he made a pilgrimage to Pamplona
for the running of the bulls, something he had considered filming twenty years
before for his unrealized adaptation of
The Sun Also Rises
. While in Spain, he was approached by the Russian delegation about directing what would have been the first U.S.–Soviet co-production, a dubious distinction that was subsequently claimed by George Cukor’s
The Bluebird
. Hawks had been responsible for giving the
Russian entry at San Sebastian a special prize and, apparently in return, he was told that he could have carte blanche to make whatever he wanted. Provocatively, he proposed “a story that you might call pretty political,” but one that might also be called a direct steal from
Some Like It Hot
, about a pair of Americans who “are trying to get away from the Russian police, and they go in the back
door of the Ballets Russes. And when the cops come in, they’re dancing in the chorus.” Discussions never went very far, but Hawks’s idea was no doubt not quite what the authorities had in mind from the director of
Red River
and
Rio Bravo
.