David Vining's Blog, page 155

Rio Bravo

#6 in my ranking of Howard Hawks’ filmography.

Howard Hawks, smarting from the failure of Land of the Pharaohs, left for Europe for a few years to lick his wounds and consider his next moves as a film director. While in Europe, he discovered that television westerns with emphasis on character rather than plot were fairly popular, so he returned home to America. There he found John Wayne ready and willing to work on a counterargument to Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, the story of Gary Coope...

Howard Hawks: The Definitive Ranking

A big thanks to Mark Andrew Edwards for recommending that I go through Howard Hawks’ filmography. This was a great ride.

Hawks was never a director I had given much thought to before. I owned a handful of his films already, but I’d never considered his body of work as whole or Hawks’ place in the larger world of cinema. What I found was a surprisingly subtle hand, never visually audacious but always confident, guiding a wide variety of stories. Many directors try their hands at differ...

Land of the Pharaohs

I would be very unsurprised if I discovered that the first workprint of Howard Hawks’ Land of the Pharaohs was well over three hours long. The way this film was marketed, it was held up as a huge historical epic with a trailer that boasted of the thousands of extras. It feels like it should be on par in terms of scale and scope as the later films Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments, but it’s a grand hour and forty-four minutes long. It’s short, is what I’m saying. It has all of the pieces you w...

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

An adaptation of a popular stage musical, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, is a delightful romp through a mixture of greed, consumerism, and true love that combines together to create a light and energetic entertainment full of fun songs, bright colors, and winning performances from everyone, in particular its two female leads.

It sounds like Marilyn Monroe was just an absolute pain to work with. She was talented, earnest, mistake ridden, and riddled with self-doubt that made her an infuriating ...

Monkey Business (1952)

Written by Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, and IAL Diamond, Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business feels like a combination of an Ealing Street Studios production like The Man in the White Suit with a Billy Wilder picture like One, Two, Three, run through the blender by Hawks himself. It’s a light, silly, and entertaining little comedy anchored by two wonderfully physical performances from Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant. Hawks apparently had no love for the film, finding its central premise too preposterou...

The Big Sky

This is the boys’ adventure novel version of Red River, the story of a dangerous trek on a mission into the wilds that no one has done before but lacking a lot of the drama and focus of the earlier film. It also seems to have one too many main characters, diverting attention in weird directions here and there when it shouldn’t have. It’s a fine little adventure, but it just doesn’t quite come together enough.

Kirk Douglas is Jim Deakins and Dewey Martin is Boone Caudill, two wanderers who...

The Thing From Another World

This is like a mashup of a Howard Hawks movie and a 50s scifi film. There are shots where one side of the screen feels like something out of Air Force and the other side of the screen looks like it comes from 20 Million Miles to Earth. It’s an interesting clash of styles that ends up combining together in a very good final act that sees the harder edged male-centric soldiers facing off against the science fiction monster. I don’t think it’s the masterpiece of 50s scifi that some people hold ...

I Was a Male War Bride

This feels unlike any comedy Howard Hawks had made up to this point. It feels, well, it feels typical. It’s definitely not bad, but the screwball antics of Bringing Up Baby and Ball of Fire are well gone. What we have instead is a slow-building post-war comedy starring Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan that looks like A Foreign Affair, relying on star power and charm to get the laughs. It works, especially on the back end, but I can’t help but feel a slight sense of letdown in the wake of the rauc...

A Song is Born

Howard Hawks repeated himself a lot, especially through the 30s, but this is his first outright remake of an earlier film he made. Based on the same Billy Wilder story that led to the script for Ball of Fire, A Song is Born recasts the literary main character played by Gary Cooper into a musical historian played by Danny Kaye. For a while, this remolding of the material from literary to musical feels like a strong step in the right direction with a livelier field of study to dramatize in cin...

Red River

There’s something about this film that feels like a step up. It’s weird because Hawks had been an assured directorial hand for almost two decades by the time he made this, with several great films to his name, but this production is so much bigger, complex, and intricate. Visually, it embraces the mythic feeling of a John Ford Western. This adaptation of Borden Chase’s serialized novel The Chisholm Trail feels like Howard Hawks really reaching to make something bigger and newer for himself, ...