Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (16 page)

Hawks provoked studio executives by going seriously over schedule and budget on
Fazil
,
shooting from June 5 through August 3, 1927, about double the time it usually took to film a normal silent picture, and spending
a great deal more than the allotted $125,000. Sol Wurtzel, who had already been irritated by what he saw as Hawks’s poky work habits, even considered shutting the production down at one point rather than squandering more money. Hawks’s extravagance on
Fazil
put a black
mark next to his name in Wurtzel’s book, which made the studio keep a close eye on him from then on and represented the beginning of the director’s lifelong adversarial relationship with his bosses.

Inexplicably,
Fazil
wasn’t released until June 4, 1928, long after the picture Hawks would make next. That film,
A Girl in Every Port
stands as the first defining work of Hawks’s career, the first
that announced a great deal of what its director was all about. It is not a great film, or even one of the most significant American pictures of the silent period, but it is the Hawks silent that connects in the most crucial ways to the work he would do later.

Hawks himself wrote the original story, in late summer or early fall of 1927. The immediate instigation was Fox’s desire for some sort
of follow-up to its smash hit
What Price Glory?
, Raoul Walsh’s adaptation of Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson’s World War I play about two soldiers who are great friends as well as romantic rivals. The film, which heavily played up the comedy, opened in December 1926 and made a star of Victor McLaglen, the brawny English former boxer and soldier. Hawks’s story simply made the characters
merchant seamen and dispensed with the war, allowing the characters to concentrate full-time on boozing, brawling, and womanizing.

Humorously emphasizing the phallic from the outset, Hawks named his characters Spike (McLaglen) and Salami (to be played by Robert Armstrong, a future screen tough guy who had appeared in only a couple of films previously). Hawks’s initial nine-page treatment has
the men putting into seven different ports of call—Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Panama, Fiji, Cavite, Bombay, and Hong Kong—and is based on the premise that everywhere Spike goes, the girls he encounters have all been tattooed with “The Mark,” a heart-and-anchor insignia that tells him that somebody is consistently beating him to the clinch. In Panama, the men finally meet and come to blows, but, faced
with a common foe in the police, join forces to fight the cops, which lands the duo in jail. Once released, they resume their battle, but when they fall into the sea and Salami realizes Spike can’t swim, he must rescue his rival, and the two become friends over a smoke.

In Hong Kong (or Singapore in an alternate version—it didn’t matter), Spike genuinely falls for a café entertainer. But when
he finds out that
she’s got Salami’s mark on her too, Spike takes pleasure in watching Salami get beaten to a pulp in a saloon brawl. He ultimately takes pity on him and mothers his pulverized pal, and when the cops arrive, they join forces again before fleeing. Hawks’s final scene has the buddies meeting two attractive girls; before they all go off together, Spike checks to make sure that his
choice doesn’t have Salami’s mark on her.

The first writer brought aboard was James Kevin McGuinness, who had just that year arrived in Hollywood as a Fox contract writer on the basis of his considerable reputation as a sportswriter for the
New York Telegram
, a columnist for the
New York Sun
, and a contributor to “Talk of the Town” in the
New Yorker;
much later, he became an MGM executive, a
writer for John Ford, and one of Hollywood’s most virulent anti-Communists. McGuinness, who was ultimately credited for the adaptation, added the plot business of treachery on the part of the girl Spike falls for, with her trying to set the two men against each other as she double-crosses Spike and robs Salami of his cash. He also wrote a credo for the two men that could stand as a definition of Hawks’s
ideal for a love story between two men throughout his career: “If they occasionally outwit each other to gain a private assignation with some particularly appealing girl, all that follows between them is the broad humor of triumph on one’s part, and the unconcealed chagrin of defeat on the other’s. No bitterness remains when the affair is over, never a smouldering resentment.”

McGuinness also
came up with a clever final scene in which the men, after escaping overwhelmingly poor odds in an enormous brawl, stumble into the street and find two girls, one very pretty and the other “terrible looking.” After each one offers the other the attractive one, they flip a coin. From this point on, we see the women only from the waist down: one male arm moves around the pretty girl’s waist, another
arm surrounds the ugly one; then the arm around the cute girl moves down a bit, while the arm around the unsightly one tries to move down but can’t go through with it. That’s the last we see of the sailors. “Who got the pretty girl and who the ugly one, we never know. But we do know that the two men went off together … friends.”

Several uncredited writers, including the well-known Mack Sennett
gag man Reginald Morris, Marion Orth, and Philip Klein, did further work on the story, but Hawks called upon Seton Miller to write the actual scenario. To streamline the action and meet Fox’s demands to cut down on sets, the number of ports was reduced to five and, perhaps in deference to the influence of Dupont’s
Variety
, the girl Spike falls for was transformed
into a circus high diver. When
Spike announces that he won’t be sailing any further because he’s in love, Salami replies, “You’re not in love—you’re just broke out all over with monkey bites,” a line ace title writer Malcolm Stuart Boylan came up with and which Hawks attributed to Ben Hecht on
Twentieth Century
.

The actress Hawks cast in the film’s largest female part had attracted attention for her beauty in the dozen or
so pictures she had made since changing professions from showgirl to actress two years before, but she was by no means considered a serious actress. Louise Brooks was married to Hawks’s friend Eddie Sutherland, and Hawks, liking her direct, irreverent manner as well as her striking looks, asked Fox to borrow her from Paramount to play the high-diving Marie. Brooks’s boyish figure is shown to maximum
advantage in her tight-fitting swimsuit, and Hawks resorted to a fancy shot from beneath to highlight her dramatic dive from a tower into a small tank. With her black hair worn in her distinctively sharp bob and her bangs trimmed just above her eyebrows, Brooks stood out in her brief appearance as the double-dealing conniver who tries to take Spike for his money and two-time him with her old beau
Salami.

Forty years later, Hawks told Kevin Brownlow why he chose Brooks: “I wanted a different type of girl.… I hired Louise Brooks because … she’s very sure of herself, she’s very analytical, she’s very feminine, but she’s damn good and sure she’s going to do what she wants to do. I could use her today. She was way ahead of her time, with that hairdress. And she’s a rebel. I like her, you know.
I like rebels.… What I don’t like are these little curled-up things that all look alike, who are trying to be pretty and are not interested in being chic and smart and different.” Looking with Brownlow at a photo of Brooks, the director said, “Just think of how modern she looks. Oh, God, she was a good-looking girl.”

Brooks was nothing if not brutally direct and honest in her assessments of her
friends and coworkers, and she returned the compliment. “Howard Hawks admired me,” she told John Kobal. “He was the perfect director. He didn’t do anything at all. He would sit, look very, very beautiful, tall and graceful, leaning against anything he could lean against, and watch the scene; and the person who did all the directing was that big ham Victor McLaglen. I mean, when we were shooting,
diving into the tank, it was a freezing cold night on the Fox lot, and Howard was walking around in a very smart tweed jacket, and I was shivering with the cold coming out of this damn greasy tank, and he smiled at me and he said, ‘Is it cold?’ He was just someone who had wandered on the set and was being sympathetic, but I liked him very much as a man and as a director.” On the basis of
her appearance
in
A Girl in Every Port
, Brooks was chosen by the German director G. W. Pabst to star as Lulu in
Pandora’s Box
, a role coveted by nearly every actress in Europe, including Marlene Dietrich. It was the film that would make Brooks a cult legend.

A Girl in Every Port
was shot entirely on the Fox lot from the end of October through December 21, 1927, with L. W. O’Connell, once again, and Rudolph
Berquist manning the cameras. The future star Myrna Loy and the fan dancer Sally Rand appeared briefly as two of the many girls, and even though Fox executives were nervous about Hawks’s tendency to take his time, and with it their money, they kept their distance because they smelled a winner, and the director appreciated it.

It was on this film, his sixth, that Hawks finally felt that he got
in the groove as a director and began to recognize what he could do and what he was good at. One of his talents was turning toward comedy with material that a routine director might just play straight or for melodrama. Given the importance of the female audience, many questioned the idea that a film would put male friendship above a traditional romantic attachment, but Hawks proved not only to others
but to himself that such a theme could carry a film, and he continued to use it throughout his career; his last serious project, in the 1970s, was ostensibly a remake of
A Girl in Every Port
. This film was also, Hawks told Peter Bogdanovich, “the first time I had a chance to use the kind of people I knew. Up till that time, I was working with characters who were figments of other people’s imaginations.
But on this film, the Westerns, the pictures with race drivers and things like that, I felt I was on familiar ground because I knew the people.” This doesn’t quite square with his having written the original stories to two of his previous films, but it is easy to see what Hawks meant, and easier still to observe how Spike and Salami link up with the competitive but friendly men in so many
of the director’s subsequent pictures.

The “love story between two men” motif appears in its crudest, most elemental form in
A Girl in Every Port
, and Hawks scholars have long argued over what one is to make of Hawks’s apparent approval of male camaraderie coming before heterosexual romance. A conventional reading finds Hawks’s insistence on positioning the women here as either disposable, interchangeable
prey or threats to the men’s convivial status quo to show simple misogyny. Those tracing the homosexual subtext in Hawks’s work need only begin here, with the outrageous running gag, introduced by Hawks himself in the original outline, of Salami’s repeatedly asking Spike to pull his middle finger when it gets out of joint during a brawl. Robin Wood, a leading champion of Hawks, finds
this picture hopelessly adolescent
and unsatisfying because the resolution, “in which the characters remain arrested at an immature stage of development,” is offered up as a “happy ending.” Leland A. Poague, in his book on the director, sees it very differently, as a sort of ironic tragedy in which the men “are trapped, quite literally, in and by their own plans and values.” It is entirely likely
that Hawks might have agreed with Wood’s conclusion about the characters’ arrested development, since, as he grew older, he gravitated toward more varied and complex resolutions of the tensions implicit between male friendships and heterosexual couplings, most maturely in
The Big Sky
.

A psychobiographical analysis of
A Girl in Every Port
would point out that along with
Fazil
, it displays a paralyzing
fear of commitment and marriage. The choice for men in both films is explicitly seen to be a wife, on the one hand, and literally a harem, or endless string of available women, on the other. The first scene of Spike going ashore in Amsterdam to look up an old flame shows him fleeing when he discovers that she now has a husband and three kids. The other family unit, of a widow and her son
(possibly by Spike) in San Pedro, is depressingly down-and-out, and as soon as Marie inspires thoughts of domesticity in Spike, they are rubbed out by her calculating behavior. Whether or not Hawks was inwardly agonizing over giving up his bachelor ways for marriage cannot be known, but the two films he made in the year before his wedding certainly lend artistic evidence to such a possibility.

Hawks finished shooting
A Girl in Every Port
just before Christmas 1927, but, despite the good commercial showings of
Fig Leaves
and
The Cradle Snatchers
and the evident promise of the new picture, Hawks was in hot water with his bosses. Costs were cut on the latest production by eliminating some of the ports of call (the picture runs only sixty-four minutes) and by dressing existing sets in the
most minimal ways to give them their requisite foreignness. But Hawks had already established a reputation as an overspender and as a director prone to “dilly dallying around,” in Sol Wurtzel’s opinion. Even more crucially, Hawks kept turning down stories the studio wanted him to do, with the result that by January, seven weeks from the conclusion of his year’s contract that started in March 1927,
he had made only two of the three films he was obliged to deliver. As of that moment, Hawks had drawn more than ten thousand dollars on his third picture, even though he hadn’t decided on a script, and Wurtzel was not only in a mood to stop any further payments to Hawks until he got cracking on another film but was seriously considering not exercising the studio’s option on Hawks’s services when
the current contract expired in March.

Fed up with what he considered Hawks’s “procrastinating methods” and his “slowness and dilatory method of working,” Wurtzel gave Hawks an ultimatum: he must choose at once from between two stories, “The Richest Man in the World” and “Part Time Marriage,” and then make the film for $125,000 and not a penny more. Two days later, Hawks replied flatly that
any delays or overages on his picture were “not due to any fault of mine.” He insisted, “If your budget has been exceeded, it has only been because of my earnest desire to complete a satisfactory production, and one of which you might be proud.” Claiming that he was “more than anxious to cooperate with you in any way,” Hawks said that while he didn’t like either of the scripts Wurtzel was proposing,
he would choose “Part Time Marriage.” Ironically, the property Hawks turned down, “The Richest Man in the World,” a contrived reworking of the story of the late European tycoon Alfred Loewenstein, was fatefully taken on the following year by his brother Kenneth.