Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (13 page)

It was a slight, clothesline of a premise
with very little story, very likely inspired in part by the successful sex comedies De Mille and Neilan had done, but with sufficient opportunity for amusing scenes, energetic spats, and visual distractions. Appeal to the female audience was considered particularly important by executives at the time, and
Fig Leaves
had that in abundance. Writers Hope Loring and Louis D. Lighton quickly elaborated
Hawks’s rough story into a full screenplay without changing any essential
elements; George O’Brien and Olive Borden, Western stalwarts who had just acted for John Ford in
Three Bad Men
, were cast as Adam and Eve; and Hawks was shooting his second picture by March.

The sexual sparring and light comedy was handled buoyantly enough, and while the film is a perfectly agreeable example of silent-era
romantic comedy, it is more interesting in the way it plants the seeds for various Hawks motifs that would flower in his sound comedies. There is the woman-animal connection that would reappear in
Bringing Up Baby
,
Monkey Business
, and
Hatari!;
the first of many instances of female impersonation in Hawks’s films; the introduction of the sort of “theatrical” behavior, in André’s extravagant gestures,
which would later be seen in John Barrymore’s Oscar Jaffe in
Twentieth Century
and often in the later comedies; and sexual role-playing and, by extension, playacting, which would become a principal way for men and women to define and redefine their relationships, perhaps nowhere so much as in
His Girl Friday
and
Monkey Business
but also in
Ball of Fire
,
I Was a Male War Bride
, and elsewhere. In
a broader sense,
Fig Leaves
gives the first taste of the sort of physical expressiveness Hawks liked in performances and of the lively, good-humored give-and-take between men and women that became a hallmark of his work.

At the time of its release, however, the picture was most noted for the splashily striking production values of the prehistoric and fashion show sequences. The Rube Goldberg
devices concocted to adorn the Garden of Eden are disarmingly clever, and the exaggerated animals—dinosaurs, the snake, and a giant ape—seem so homemade as to be endearing. Hawks said he and the cinematographer, Joseph August, had fun devising a way to dissolve between the story’s two time periods, at a time when lap dissolves hadn’t yet become commonplace: they took a beer bottle with a flaw in it,
began by shooting through the clear portion, then turned it so the flaw would blur the image.

But what most reviewers commented upon were the fashion sequences. With extravagant sets by William S. Darling and William Cameron Menzies and costume designs by Adrian, who would shortly become one of the most celebrated practitioners in his field, the fashion parades, which were shot in two-color Technicolor,
were spectacles without precedent in pictures, a cinematic equivalent to Ziegfeld’s stage revues. Fox publicity boasted that Borden’s costumes alone cost fifty thousand dollars, and
Variety
noted that the salon setting “gives opportunity for the display of a group of lingerie models which comes within an ace of having the sex kick of a nightclub show.”

It is impossible to ascertain precise
box-office figures for films released in the 1920s, but it is clear that
Fig Leaves
, which opened in July, was a hit—Hawks fantasized that “It got its cost back in one theater”—thereby assuring its director’s career in silent pictures. In his late-in-life interviews, Hawks had a tendency to downplay and even dismiss his silent work, but he did like
Fig Leaves
. When he saw it in France in the early
1970s, his first viewing since he’d made it, he found it “amazingly modern.”

In August 1926, another film opened that had Hawks’s name on it, but only as the author of the original story. In fact, the finished film
Honesty—the Best Policy
, directed by Chester Bennett from a scenario by L. G. Rigby, Hawks’s collaborator on
The Road to Glory
, seems to have borne only a partial resemblance to the
idea Hawks himself submitted, since it was considerably reworked in the interim. Since the picture apparently no longer exists, it is impossible to say for sure, but on the basis of the few contemporaneous assessments of it, it seems to have been something of a mishmash. Certainly, what Hawks and Rigby cooked up together is even more contrived than
The Road to Glory
, one of the least promising
pieces of material ever to have carried Hawks’s name.

Dangers of a Great City
, which the two men developed virtually simultaneously with
The Road to Glory
, between October and early December 1925, is a crime story about Bob Dare and Nancy Kay, a pair of robbers evading police captain Randall in San Francisco. Surprisingly, the two are not romantically involved, as, Nancy insists crime, for her,
is strictly business.

The police almost nab them at a glamorous masquerade ball, but the two manage to escape. Leaving Bob behind, Nancy makes a getaway and, after a long chase, Nancy and Randall both crack up their cars. A suddenly considerate Nancy then drags the badly injured cop out of danger, and incredibly, Randall now declares his love for Nancy. When Nancy tells him that he’s got to do
his duty and take her in, Randall weakens and says she can go free anyway.

Back in San Francisco some time later, Bob has managed to capture Randall and is about to shoot him when Nancy convinces him to spare the detective. Randall tells Bob that if he really loves Nancy, he’d better take her away and settle down.

The story becomes increasingly unbelievable as it unfolds, and there is the major
problem of which characters, if any, merit sympathy or interest. Fox wasn’t happy with the material, and Hawks dropped off the project after three drafts. The picture was shot in early spring 1926, with Rockliffe
Fellowes as Randall, Pauline Starke as Nancy, and Johnnie Walker as Bob, and was released that August with a framing story, directed by Albert Ray, about a young author who is trying
to win publication for his story from a publisher’s “jury” of office stenographers. The crime story is intercut with brief comedic scenes of the attractive listeners reacting to the suspense-filled tale.

The patch job, devised long after Hawks left the project, appears not to have been terribly successful. Describing it as “a picture of strangely mixed purpose,”
Variety
complained that just as
serious excitement was being built up by the central narrative, the film undercut itself by returning to the “short-skirted girls [tying] their legs around chairs.” The film was not one of Fox’s big attractions of the year.

Thus far, Hawks had only worked on pictures for which he himself wrote the stories. However, Fox’s commitment to its steady grind of productions meant it didn’t have time
to wait around for directors to come up with their own ideas, so Hawks was assigned to a script he always said he never would have chosen to do himself. In good measure because of Hawks’s own exaggerated descriptions of it,
Paid to Love
, which is little-seen even among Hawks aficionados, is one of the director’s most misrepresented works, in that it is thought of as the director’s one, failed
stab at an art film. Although beautifully crafted, it is nothing of the kind, resting instead firmly in the tradition of comic Ruritanian romances that stemmed from operettas and were so popular in Hollywood in the 1920s and early 1930s. It also introduced some major motifs that became hallmarks of Hawks’s work for the rest of his career.

Paid to Love
originated at Fox as a thirty-two-page treatment
written early in 1926 by Harry Carr, a longtime
Los Angeles Times
columnist. A second approach, by Benjamin Glazer, turned the French leading lady into an American. But the decisive treatment was developed by writer Seton I. Miller. A smart, well-read twenty-four-year-old from rural Washington State and fresh out of Yale, Miller had just arrived in Hollywood earlier in the year to work as a technical
adviser and actor on MGM’s feature
Brown of Harvard
, which incidentally dealt with rival Yale. He then joined the screen-writing staff at Fox, where
Paid to Love
was his first assignment. At least superficially, Miller and Hawks were a good match because of their mutual West Coast–Ivy League backgrounds, a similar literary bent, and a shared taste for racy, modern, hard-surfaced stories, and the
fledgling writer became the rising director’s most frequent early collaborator. Miller would work on eight of the next ten films Hawks made, through 1932.

On
Paid to Love
, Miller came up with the character of an American diplomat-financier who takes the king of a small nation to a bawdy Paris nightclub to find the introverted crown prince Michael “a real hotsy totsy wild woman.” Miller also
introduced another character, Prince Eric, Michael’s playboy cousin, whom the public prefers, and generally made the story far more mischievous, sophisticated, and fun. The young former newspaperman and titles writer William M. Conselman was brought in to add further polish and provide a less contrived ending, and a top cast was assembled that included George O’Brien as Crown Prince Michael, the
beautiful Virginia Valli as Dolores, and William Powell as Prince Eric.

Paid to Love
has always had a reputation as Hawks’s most stylistically atypical film, the one time he experimented with elaborate tracking shots, expressionistic lighting, and fancy cutting. This impression was particularly furthered by Hawks himself, who admitted allowing himself to be influenced by the German expressionist
master F. W. Murnau. “It isn’t my type of stuff,” Hawks said, adding that, as far as artsiness was concerned, “at least I got it over in a hurry. You know, the idea of wanting the camera to do those things. Now the camera’s somebody’s eyes.”

One of the most influential European films of the time for Hollywood filmmakers, including Hawks, E. A. Dupont’s
Variety
, opened in the United States in
late June; so impressed were the executives at Paramount, for example, that they not only bought the American rights to the picture but showed it to employees as an example of how movies should be made. Murnau, whose
The Last Laugh
had earlier impressed film professionals with its supple camerawork and seamless storytelling, arrived in Hollywood with great fanfare at the end of July to commence
his celebrated Fox contract with
Sunrise
. His presence on the lot was greatly felt, and his influence is difficult to overestimate. The awe in which the German directors were held was at its peak at the very moment Hawks started shooting
Paid to Love
at the beginning of August 1926, and it may be this atmosphere that Hawks was thinking of when he said that he tried to out-Murnau Murnau on the
picture.

The irony is that, while this may be Hawks’s most visually stylish picture, graced with lovely shots and very impressive production values, it is far from radical or even the least bit extreme in its technique; the camera-work of L. W. O’Connell, who, the following year, would shoot Murnau’s
Four Devils
, merely seems to have a bit more range and appear less locked down than in Hawks’s
subsequent work. Although not an important film,
Paid to Love
is amusingly suggestive romantic fluff, entertaining in precisely
the way it intends to be. The story is rife with role-playing—the entire plot, in fact, pivots on the idea that the two leads initially present identities other than their true selves. In terms of Hawks’s career, as the title itself would indicate, it is significant as
the vehicle that introduced a prototype of one category of the Hawksian woman, the vagabond showgirl–quasi-prostitute– kept woman who would appear in any number of pictures, from
Barbary Coast
,
Come and Get It
, and
Only Angels Have Wings
to
Ball of Fire
,
To Have and Have Not
, and
Rio Bravo
. In
Paid to Love
, this character, Dolores, is first seen performing at the exotic Café des Apaches in Paris,
where she is engaged to “make love” to Michael in order to “arouse his interest” in women, a development that will inspire the confidence of the American financier who will make no further loans to the small Mediterranean country of San Savona unless a line of succession is assured.

Hawks has fun portraying American discomfort with formal European traditions, and his purely visual presentation
of Prince Michael’s lack of interest in the opposite sex is as superbly simple as it is uncharacteristic: a floor-level tracking shot follows the shapely legs of a maid; the lecherous Prince Eric turns to appreciatively stare at them, but after the legs are shown again, an oblivious Michael doesn’t bother even to glance at them. This sort of male character, who ultimately succeeds with women despite
either apparent lack of interest or simple awkwardness, always amused Hawks, and it was a characteristic he pushed on occasion in his work with Cary Grant and particularly with John Wayne in his late films. The connection between the old king and Dolores is initiated by her taking a lit cigarette from him, apparently the first of countless such exchanges in Hawks’s films, and there is further
cigarette play later in the picture. Given the director’s keen interest in automobiles, the sight of Michael working on an engine block in the middle of his huge, elegant living room registers as a humorously personal touch. There is also a highly erotic close-up of Valli’s Dolores after she has kissed Michael, a shot more akin to the way William Daniels would shortly be shooting Garbo for Clarence
Brown or Sternberg would one day film Dietrich than to anything else in Hawks’s canon. With her hair cut short and combed wet and back, Valli looks rather like a boy with a woman’s body. The most outrageous moment of all comes when the leering Prince Eric slowly peels a banana while watching an oblivious Dolores getting undressed. Overall, there is a lovely pictorialism to the film that is impossible
not to enjoy, although its self-consciousness may be what felt alien to Hawks.