Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (80 page)

In fact, from the coming of sound onward, the director whose career Hawks’s arguably most resembled was that of King Vidor. Vidor made twenty-eight sound films while Hawks made thirty-two, and Vidor’s long affiliation with MGM is roughly comparable to Hawks’s tenure at Warner
Bros.; each functioned well and with considerable latitude at his respective home studio, doing much of his best work there, but each maintained a sufficient arm’s length so as never to become swallowed up by the studio’s style and mentality. Hawks and Vidor each pushed for independence whenever they could, although the impulses behind Vidor’s
Hallelujah!
or
Our Daily Bread
were strictly ideological
and intellectual in nature, contrasted to Hawks’s more mercantile motives. Both made epic Westerns as their first films after World War II, moved at will from genre to genre and studio to studio, strayed at their peril into 1950s historical epics, and never quite got their due from the industry.

Although several of Hawks’s post-1948 films were very successful with the public, they are, with but
one exception (
Rio Bravo
), much less popular now, decades later, than any number of his earlier pictures. The reasons why are complex and should emerge in time. On the one hand, the later films remain as adventurous in spirit and modern in temperament as the earlier ones; a couple of them are also markedly better than their reputations would indicate. At the same time, however, Hawks’s almost
infallible judgment, his uncanny knack of being right in the long run even when he looked wrong in the short term, and his virtually unerring talent for casting began to cough and then sputter; in the nearly twenty-five years after casting Montgomery Clift in
Red River
, Hawks launched just one actor or actress of significance—James Caan—after having discovered or introduced so many in the prior
fifteen years. His slow decline was also marked by a couple of uncharacteristic lapses in judgment, as well as by an aesthetic retrenchment that resulted in one of the great conservative works of art, two
or three others that come awfully close, and one spectacular and fascinating folly. The paradox of Hawks’s postwar career, and the challenge of grasping it fully, lies in the pull between the
unceasing modernity and unsentimentality of his point of view, his accelerating withdrawal from the prevailing currents of contemporary taste and thought, and his relaxed and generous, rather than inward and contemplative, brand of serenity.

Through the spring and early summer of 1948, Howard Hawks was the subject of much jockeying for favor among studio executives, including Jack Warner, Dore
Schary, the new vice president in charge of production at MGM, and Harry Cohn. Despite the ongoing problems with Monterey, however, Hawks was undeterred about working independently if someone would put up the money. If he or she were successful enough, any artist in Hollywood in the late 1940s had the motivation to form a corporation, since the federal income tax on people making more than $100,000
per year now stood at a staggering 68 percent; those few earning $500,000 or more were taxed at a rate of 88.6 percent. More irritated than ever that he had failed to sign Monty Clift to a personal contract, Hawks now talked to the hot young actor about forming a corporation together. But Clift was in the catbird seat at Paramount, with his pick of scripts and directors, and the combination of
his painful indecisiveness and his unwillingness to place himself at anyone else’s command would have mitigated against the success of the venture. Hawks also revived the idea of an ongoing partnership with Cary Grant, allied with independent producer Eddie Small.

However, in recent years, Hawks had socially and personally drawn closest among all the moguls to his croquet partner, Darryl F. Zanuck,
so it was not surprising that, given roughly equal terms and opportunities at several studios, he would choose to work for 20th Century–Fox. Hawks felt more at home temperamentally with Zanuck, a fellow Midwesterner and the only non-Jew among the studio chiefs, than he did with the other big bosses. But probably more important was that Hawks believed that Zanuck wouldn’t hover over him and
interfere in silly ways, and that Zanuck understood story better than any executive since Thalberg. Although he put business first and was incredibly tough-minded, Zanuck was also the most politically rational of the studio heads at that time; although he made the obligatory public statements against communist influence in the industry, Zanuck, believing that his colleagues were overreacting, was
the only industry leader who refused to sign the famous Waldorf agreement in November 1947, in which executives effectively initiated the blacklist by stating that they would not hire the Hollywood Ten or any Communist.

Hawks’s Fox deal evolved over several months through the first half of 1948, as Zanuck talked over ideas with the director while Feldman and studio lawyers haggled over terms.
Zanuck most wanted Hawks to take on
Twelve O’Clock High
, a major production about American fliers based in Britain, but Hawks was dead set against doing another film about the war. In May, Zanuck brought him another idea. For several months, the studio had been struggling with what seemed like a funny idea based on an autobiographical account by one Henri Rochard, a Belgian officer accidently
hit by a car and tended to by an American nurse named Catherine, to whom he later became engaged. When he and Catherine planned their trip to the United States upon his discharge, Rochard was informed that he could likely only “be admitted into the United States under the provision of Public Law 271, which regulates the entry of War Brides.”

When Zanuck first showed him the material, Hawks was
far from overwhelmed but felt there might be some potential in the
Bringing Up Baby
element of a smart woman almost completely dominating a man who becomes progressively more humiliated by circumstances. To try to reproduce the formula, he again recruited
Baby
creator Hagar Wilde to work, as she had before, with a more experienced writer, in this case perennial wise guy and
His Girl Friday
scenarist
Charles Lederer. Working from the screen-writer Leonard Spigelgass’s first draft, the pair took two months to hammer out a revision under Hawks’s watchful eye while the complicated details of the production were worked out.

After considering all his other options, Hawks signed a Fox contract in June that, most important to him, gave him adequate leeway to leave to make a film elsewhere. The deal
called for him to direct four pictures during a six-year period at $8,250 per week, but periods between pictures could be extended if he were making an outside picture and certain conditions were met. As it panned out, Hawks made $165,000 on his first Fox film in thirteen years, more than he did on
Red River
but a far cry from his haul on
A Song Is Born
. There was never a question of anyone other
than Cary Grant playing Rochard, but the first notion for his bride was to cast Ava Gardner, who had just broken through as a star. However, Hawks wasn’t sure Gardner had what it took to play opposite Grant and shortly decided to use someone he had wanted to work with since testing her for
The Road to Glory
a dozen years before. In the interim, Ann Sheridan, with her winning personality and comic
flair, had become a star in spite of the fact that she was seen in very few first-rate films. Always a good sport and a quick reactor in the
manner of Rosalind Russell, Sheridan seemed like just the ticket opposite a Cary Grant unleashed by Hawks.

For the second female part, that of Sheridan’s pert, efficient roommate, Hawks could cast whomever he wanted, so he cast his current girlfriend. Just
eighteen when Hawks met her, Marion Marshall had started modeling three years before, to make money after her father died. Before long, she was noticed by a 20th Century–Fox casting director, who signed her for the studio. She debuted in a small role in Anatole Litvak’s
The Snake Pit
and quickly made a strong impression on men around Hollywood. The producer A. C. Lyles, for one, remembered her
as “one of the funniest women in town, with a wonderful laugh,” and her fresh beauty attracted attention everywhere. She went out with Hawks for the first time on February 26 and continued to play bits in other Fox pictures while Hawks plotted a bigger future for her.

I Was a Male War Bride
was just part of a major trend toward overseas filming that snowballed in the late 1940s. There were many
reasons for it. To some extent, it was because the wealthy elite who produced, directed, and starred in movies had essentially been stuck in Hollywood for many years because of the war and relished the chance to work and play in the rebounding glamour capitals of Europe. After hitting an all-time peak in attendance in 1946, the industry was perceived to be in a crisis, hit by shrinking audiences,
political problems, and the Supreme Court decision forcing the studios to relinquish their theaters. Industry leaders were suffering a crisis of confidence, with the careers of such titans as Louis B. Mayer, David O. Selznick, and Sam Goldwyn drifting or in flux, and foreign films were enjoying unprecedented success with American audiences: in 1948, for the first time, a foreign-made film, Laurence
Olivier’s
Hamlet
, won the Oscar for best picture;
The Red Shoes
was an unexpected sensation; and Roberto Rossellini snatched Ingrid Bergman away from Hollywood and began starring her in his minimally scripted, commercially marginal Italian productions.

There was also a compelling financial reason to shoot films on foreign locations. After the war, many countries, in order to keep much-needed
cash inside their borders, imposed laws that forbade American companies from removing monies from those nations. It was estimated that by 1949 American film companies had approximately $40 million impounded in Great Britain alone. These frozen assets could be spent only internally, meaning that the only way film companies could use the money their films
made in certain countries was to produce
films there, which poured further funds into the local economies. Spurred by this, as well as by his own taste for the European high life, Darryl Zanuck announced in the summer of 1948 that 20th Century–Fox would spend $24 million, half of it frozen funds, on twelve European-produced motion pictures during the coming year. Not surprisingly, quite a few of these, including two of the first,
Princes
of Foxes
and
War Bride
, importantly involved clients and associates of Charles Feldman, who would also spend much of the next two decades in Europe.

Germany, however, was not on the usual list of glamour European locations at the time. Pockmarked by widespread destruction and with foreign troops still stationed everywhere, it was hardly conducive to serving as a backdrop for anything other than
what it was, a devastated nation not yet back on its feet, though a couple of films had already used it as such. It seemed inconceivable that anyone could make a film in Germany at that time and not take into account the repercussions of the war, but leave it to Howard Hawks to figure out a way to tell a story almost completely set in postwar Germany that was utterly devoid of politics, any mention
of the war, or, for that matter, many Germans.

The schedule called for the company to spend several weeks in Germany, beginning in late September, then move to London to complete filming in studios there before Christmas. Even before anyone left the States, however, there were ominous signals concerning the British phase of the shoot. With the unions suddenly in the ascendant under Prime Minister
Atlee’s leftist Labor government, the film industry in the U.K. was becoming much more prickly about foreigners barging in and allegedly taking jobs from qualified English workers. The Brits immediately ruled out the possibility of Hawks importing the cinematographer he wanted, Russell Harlan, for the English portion of the shoot. Then, in mid-August, the powerful Association of Cine-Technicians,
representing film crew members, decided to harden its stance against all outsiders. Since there were competent English directors currently without work, Howard Hawks should not be allowed into the country to direct the film, the association contended. Fox, of course, found the union’s position absurd; fortunately, so did most of the rest of the British film industry, and the ACT reversed its
decision a week later.

Leaving Los Angeles with both his status in Britain and the final cutting of
Red River
still unresolved, Hawks alit briefly in New York before sailing on the
Queen Elizabeth
on Saturday, August 21. At fifty-two, he was
traveling to Europe for the first time; prior to this, his only trips out of the country had been to Hawaii, Mexico, and Cuba. His traveling companion was
the effervescent, worldly Charles Lederer, and the two would spend the voyage working on the script and hanging out at the first-class bar. Following on the next sailing would be Cary Grant, who would stop in England to introduce his girlfriend, Betsy Drake, to his mother, and Ann Sheridan and Marion Marshall.

The German shoot was based in Heidelberg, and despite the status of the picture, as
well as Hawks’s and Zanuck’s military connections, conditions were far inferior to what Hollywood artists were accustomed to on foreign locations. The hotel was mediocre and the food so poor and unvarying that Grant and Drake would fly to Strasbourg or Switzerland whenever possible for gastronomic relief. The players were paid in U.S. Army script, which they could then convert into marks. But the
cast and crew were initially startled by the flourishing black market and the chaotic political conditions, from which they were only partially protected by their prestigious status. Although one of Zanuck’s staff producers, Sol Siegel, had been on the picture longer than the director and received producer credit, Hawks still ran his own show. Lederer kept hammering away at the screenplay, and shooting
began on September 28, as the bite of fall was first being felt. Virtually every scene scheduled for Germany was an exterior, and many of the locations were rural, which placed the filmmakers very much at the mercy of the elements. Unfortunately, while the weather in the film looks uniformly splendid, clear, and bright, this was hardly representative of what the company faced most of the time.
Many days were spent sitting around waiting, and Hawks remembered one occasion when they were in a valley and the sides of it became entirely black with clouds.