Howard Hawks fans like myself expect motif repetitions: if something works in one Hawks film, you can be damn sure he's going to use it again, and why not? His riffs and motifs strike deep archetypal tones that generate invigorating mythic resonance, especially when they concern men facing death in the service of some grand quest. Whether flying mail over the Andes, blazing the Chisholm Trail, helping save a bunch of ranches from a slimy war profiteer, or just defending the North Pole against some kind of super-carrot, Hawks' men in a group are the men you want to be running around with; their charisma and overlapping witty banter is intoxicating. But there can't always be wars, or endangered ladies, or murderers in jail with rich brothers trying to bust them out, or pilots trying to land in ceiling zero fog, or mighty herds to be driven through a Civil war-torn wilderness rife with border gangs, or a dame whose nympho kid sister is ensnared in the disappearance of her elderly father's IRA-expat drinking buddy. What do these brave death defiers do then? Do we still cheer their risk-taking even if it's just for kicks and/or cash?
That's what it boils down to: underlying motive. The stuff that makes a hero in one situation is just a death-wish-ridden adrenalin junkie in another. Without a worthy cause, Hawks' men-in-a-group are far less mythic. There's no nobility in driving super fast around a track, or capturing and caging wild, noble animals for lifetime confinement in zoos. The risk is purely for the risk, purely for the rubes entertainment, which might hit the viewer--slack-jawed in his recliner at two in the morning-- a little too close to home.
So it is thaat Hawks' later non-western films reveal the less-heroic side of heroism, the urge to find danger somewhere, anywhere. The resulting 'adventures' reveal the sociopathic side of Hawks' masculine camaraderie. We Hawks fans realize his protagonists may be less honorable, far less 'cool' than we thought once they have to adjust to civilian life.
Hawks, as we know, flew biplanes with Faulkner in WWI. He hunted and fished with Hemingway and NASCAR raced with Gary Cooper. He's clearly a 'rugged' outdoors thrill seeker. Maybe due to some repetition compulsion disorder, some existential PTSD lingering forever after adopting the "hurrah for the next who dies" approach to impending mortality while in the Signal Corps. (WWI being, let us not forget, before the full development of parachutes). For all his bravado, the Hawks male is still stuck at the Russian roulette table in Hanoi. He's still signing up for another tour in Iraq's detonation squad like in THE HURT LOCKER.
Hawks made very few bad films in his long career (far fewer than John Ford) and yet he receives far less lionization. The press tend to think of his best work more in terms of the stars that were in it (there's no 'Hawks box' DVD set), thus BIG SLEEP and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT are in the Bogie-Bacall box; ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS and HIS GIRL FRIDAY are in the Cart Grant box, etc. Part of this might be that Hawks' personal stamp is harder to discern, so comfortable is he across a spectrum of genres, sometimes mixing genres within a single film; another part, that his iconoclasm kept him independent, signing with studios for three picture deals or getting financing from this or that outfit; no studio is able to claim him, the way Columbia claims Capra, Paramount claims Lubitsch, MGM Minelli, or Fox Ford. Still, when many of us list our top all-time favorite films, Hawks takes up at least half the top twenty. My list does at any rate.
But, by the mid-1960s we had come a long long way from Hawks' prime. He was old --perhaps less clear-eyed about what true courage was. Nonetheless, even the last last few films in his oeuvre reward study, if only to further discern the pros and cons of his recalcitrance. I've already analyzed one of his very last comedies, MAN'S FAVORITE SPORT? (see: Fear of Fishing), and now....
Hawks, as we know, flew biplanes with Faulkner in WWI. He hunted and fished with Hemingway and NASCAR raced with Gary Cooper. He's clearly a 'rugged' outdoors thrill seeker. Maybe due to some repetition compulsion disorder, some existential PTSD lingering forever after adopting the "hurrah for the next who dies" approach to impending mortality while in the Signal Corps. (WWI being, let us not forget, before the full development of parachutes). For all his bravado, the Hawks male is still stuck at the Russian roulette table in Hanoi. He's still signing up for another tour in Iraq's detonation squad like in THE HURT LOCKER.
Hawks made very few bad films in his long career (far fewer than John Ford) and yet he receives far less lionization. The press tend to think of his best work more in terms of the stars that were in it (there's no 'Hawks box' DVD set), thus BIG SLEEP and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT are in the Bogie-Bacall box; ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS and HIS GIRL FRIDAY are in the Cart Grant box, etc. Part of this might be that Hawks' personal stamp is harder to discern, so comfortable is he across a spectrum of genres, sometimes mixing genres within a single film; another part, that his iconoclasm kept him independent, signing with studios for three picture deals or getting financing from this or that outfit; no studio is able to claim him, the way Columbia claims Capra, Paramount claims Lubitsch, MGM Minelli, or Fox Ford. Still, when many of us list our top all-time favorite films, Hawks takes up at least half the top twenty. My list does at any rate.
But, by the mid-1960s we had come a long long way from Hawks' prime. He was old --perhaps less clear-eyed about what true courage was. Nonetheless, even the last last few films in his oeuvre reward study, if only to further discern the pros and cons of his recalcitrance. I've already analyzed one of his very last comedies, MAN'S FAVORITE SPORT? (see: Fear of Fishing), and now....
HATARI!
1962 - **1/2
This the one with John Wayne lassoing --and having his jeep butted by--charging rhinos, fleeing giraffes and snorting wildebeests. Africa + Wayne = how can it fail? Wayne and Hawks, these old dudes, were really out there doing this crazy shit! But it can fail nonetheless, at least for some of us. Why? Blame it on the Buttons. And other things. The problems start with the supporting cast, continue with subject matter and end with the subtext. As with Hawks' very last film, Rio Lobo, he saddles the Duke up with a bunch of young unknowns, some from other countries, or sons of friends, and these youngsters can't always capture the finer points of group camaraderie or erudite cocktail hour wit the way, say, Wayne could with Dean (Martin), or Mitchum (Sr)., or Montgomery Clift (honey). And there are very slim pickings in the way of cool Hawksian women. In fact, there aren't any. Was Hawks too old to pick 'em and build 'em from the ground up, training their voices to go deeper, light cigarettes cooler, and not refuse drinks like little bitches?
That's what hurts the most.
Of the two women in Hatari, French actress Michèle Girardon is a bit too mother-earthy as ranch owner Brandy, and Italian model Elsa Martinelli (as a visiting photographer who hooks up with Wayne) shows all the emaciated signs of either fever or an eating disorder, making her regular refusal of cocktails all the more painful and buzzkilling (as Don Birnim says "in the morning it's medicine! Haven't you learned that yet?"). Nothing kills the mood like a person who is so miserable and you know one drink and they'd be the life of the party, but they just say no, and sulk, and wonder when you're coming up to bed. Then come downstairs every hour or so to glare at you as you slowly kill all available bottles.
The ration girls to men is absurd and all the men are either too old or too short, or both. Brandy is shared by diminutive German actor Hardy Krüger (who wears a little pair of khaki shorts shorts so we can see his bandy little legs) and lil' froggy Gérard Blain. Valentin de Vargas (he played the leather jacket-wearing ball-having "Pancho" Grande in Touch of Evil) is OK though, and--in the type of cigar-chewing role usually reserved for Ward Bond or George Kennedy--Bruce "Kong-block'" Cabot is "the Indian." So there's them, but they don't scintillate.
Now, I have nothing against international casts, but if English is not your first language it can be hard to sound breezy and conversational while delivering a mouthful of brilliant Leigh Brackett dialogue. I mean this as no reflection on the actors themselves, only that the international vibe might be what Hawks or the distributors wanted but--we who love Hawks' unique ability to bring witty overlapping dialogue to a group brave and skilled men and witty deep-voiced, cigarette and scotch and soda women--don't like to see what we like to see taken away by bad casting decisions. These actors just can't deliver the overlapping lines fast enough, or with enough zip, nor do they know what words to emphasize so the dirty jokes come across. It's like asking Paul Henreid play Oscar Jaffe or Walter Burns. Sure, Henreid is great but he simply can't talk fast enough and with enough tail-flap flair to get lift-off.
There are perks to be found in the margins: the memorable Henry Mancini score ("Baby Elephant Walk" comes true) and the lack of stunt doubles being the top two. We can assuage our guilt over the animal abuse by the knowledge Wayne and company had the guts to do all their own animal-wrangling; there's no rear screen projection and no stock footage of any kind ("of any kind, David") and it makes a huge difference. Compare it something like MGM's Tarzan series (which relied on all three) and the many scenes of the groups' complex hunting strategy as their vehicles roar across the plains, driving vast herds before them, really sparkle in the African dust, revealing the film's clear influence on, amongst other things, Spielberg's Jurassic Park: The Lost World.
I like some other things at play here too: the leisurely cycle of the film follows, say, Hemingway's first person accounts of safaris, like Green Hills of Africa, where the book is divided into hunting on the plains by day and drinking/conversing at night; the cycle of animals and drinks, hunts and conversations, as natural and easy as the progression of drinking life itself.
But this time--rare for Hawks--it's the night part, the drinking, that fails. Breeziness and camaraderie are a hard thing to force.
I could forgive that forced feeling, maybe, but it's harder to forgive after trying all day to shake the bad vibes of watching these wild and free animals terrorized and forced into a lifetime of captivity. Surely, such behavior is the anathema of heroism.
I could forgive that forced feeling, maybe, but it's harder to forgive after trying all day to shake the bad vibes of watching these wild and free animals terrorized and forced into a lifetime of captivity. Surely, such behavior is the anathema of heroism.
But I can even forgive that.
But what I cannot forgive is the presence of something far worse than bad vibes or forced joviality. It's something so odious, so vile and unspeakable, no forgiveness is possible.
And that thing is a hirsute little ham named Red Buttons.
Red Buttons, the original red-headed stepchild... I love his convulsive dance marathon heart attack in They Shoot Horses Don't They? But in Hatari! there's no need to ask which animal I'd like to shoot first.
Sure he's got a kind of Rooney-like Arthur Murray tenement hoofer grace to his burly hobbit movements, but his hammy cowardice and passive aggressive cockblocking drag the joie de vivre down over the film's wings like a steel mesh net. Endlessly showboating, whining, blowing up one of the blazing hot Serengeti's last acacia trees, solely in order to abduct a whole tribe of monkeys who live in its branches, and then getting drunk that night and refusing to let anyone else talk about anything but how he was too scared to watch his big moment of triumph... oh my God! He's as un-Hawksian as it's possible to get.
And that thing is a hirsute little ham named Red Buttons.
Sure he's got a kind of Rooney-like Arthur Murray tenement hoofer grace to his burly hobbit movements, but his hammy cowardice and passive aggressive cockblocking drag the joie de vivre down over the film's wings like a steel mesh net. Endlessly showboating, whining, blowing up one of the blazing hot Serengeti's last acacia trees, solely in order to abduct a whole tribe of monkeys who live in its branches, and then getting drunk that night and refusing to let anyone else talk about anything but how he was too scared to watch his big moment of triumph... oh my God! He's as un-Hawksian as it's possible to get.
Imagine if you parachuted Jerry Lewis down into Casablanca, cast him as a waiter at Rick's, and told him to do everything he can, up to abd including jumping up and pissing on their table, to prevent Ilsa and Rick from hooking up. Remember that sketch in SNL with Fred Armisen as the weathervane character removed from Wizard of Oz? Surely it was based on Hatari's Buttons. Was that sketch written after seeing this movie. Abbot and Costello are the souls of wingman discretion by comparison.
Hawks has made dozens of films over his long career but Buttons represents a 'new' kind of character for Hawks, one so foreign to his 'isolated men in a group' dynamic here's no defense against him, like an invasive species. The closest thing to an antecedent is perhaps Major Horace Applegate (Charlie Ruggles) in Bringing Up Baby's or the US Army as a collective whole in I was a Male War Bride. But those were pure comedies, with major stars in the forefront and veteran support who knew their job was to give the stars room to breathe rather than forcing them off camera and sucking the air out of their lungs.
Perhaps we can understand late period Hawks well by contrasting his two tame leopard-in-a-bathroom scenes, the one in Bringing up Baby (1938) and the one in 1962's Hatari!. In Baby, savvy Susan Vance, lounging in her cool NYC apartment, pretends she's being attacked by a leopard in order to get naive David (Cary Grant) to charge over to her and 'save' her (he doesn't yet know it's a tame leopard and she doesn't tell him). In Hatari!, smarmy Red Buttons takes advantage of a naive journalist's natural fear of a leopard walking in on her in the bath (unaware it's a tame leopard) to charge in with chair to pretend save her. But while Grant's over-acting was--and he knew you knew--a front, a grown man play-acting in a Cavellian comedy of remarriage, in Hatari! Red overacts and gesticulates as if an amphetamine-spiked Mickey Rooney crash landed in the middle of Rio Bravo and tried to turn the whole thing into an Andy Hardy picture before Hawks came back from the bathroom.
Sorry to vent, but I've always hated cockblockers. I HATE THEM SO MUCH! Sex is hard enough to arrange on its own, especially in an uptight country like America. We don't need any more interruptions than we already have. I'm from the school of thought where when you see a buddy hooking up you don't interrupt, you quietly fend off the other suitors, dive on any grenades if needed, or otherwise just give him some room and leave him to it. I always thought Hawks felt the same, and I'm sure he did once. But just imagine if Bacall's attempted seductions of Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944) were continually undone by Brennan's drunk character randomly barging into the room without knocking, lighting her cigarette before she can ask for a match, asking for change or talking about the dead bees, over and over and over... for three hours. Never giving them a chance to be alone together. But Brennan would never do that. Not ever.
Anyway, Wayne has enough problems without Red as it is. Smoking cigarettes and getting older with every drag, the red sand radiation from The Conqueror mutating his cells, he seems always at risk of stretching his cowboy actor legs once too often in taming of wild animals, like he could wind up like Clark Gable in real life after that mustang in The Misfits (1961) and break something in himself that his body's too old to repair. Hawks and Wayne would be better off back in Hollywood, or on location someplace with an ocean breeze, instead of the animal dung and tsetse fly-ridden dust of Kenya before the rainy season. At this stage in his life, Hawks should be like John Ford, presiding over pointless Irish brawls in paradise instead of racing around after rampaging rhinos and wildebeests or giving a coiled Irish ham like Red Buttons an inch of improv leeway.
And I wish to god I was with 'em.
Unless they were in goddamned Africa.
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| Center: the normal-height human who won Ann Darrow |
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RED LINE 7000
1965 - **1/2
This saga of interwoven young racers and the women who chase them is one of Hawks' harder-to-find and hardest to like later films. Shot in a full frame (1:85) ratio (at least that's the only version available), which is odd for a 1965 racing movie, it's on Amazon streaming finally and the stock car races are thrilling in a dusty STP sign and authentic stock car race kind of way, with great fiery spinouts and crashes so seamlessly interwoven into the storyline you'll swear the real actors are in the wrecks. Was Hawks' camera just hanging around waiting for crashes or were these stunt men? Or did he take stock footage of crashes and then reverse engineer them (paint a car to look like one that had already crashed, and then put one of his stars in a mock-up, etc.)? Knowing Hawks, all three and then some. A lifelong race car driver, he was one of the stunt drivers for the film (at age 69!) and unlike 90% of racing movies there's never a doubt which character is in which car. The sound is so solid you can feel the engine throbbing in its exhaust RPM through your couch, even without a subwoofer.
Red Line is Hawks down to its rims, but it lacks an axle; the wheels just spin right off the car and off into the gutter. None of the women are exactly Hawksian (Charlene Holt aside), they're far too masochistic and self-abasing (they're just racing groupies- with no other career or interests), and the men are all unattractively stunted on some level when it comes to women. Misogyny has always been anathema to Hawks except in his two racing pictures, where the men seethe with contempt over any girl turned on by their speed. Red Line includes the first time ever in Hawks' canon where a 'good guy' hits a woman. Worse, it's James Caan! He gets jealous over his new girlfriend (Hill) while shouting "Slut!" at her because she slept with his on-track rival, albeit before meeting him. Usually that's enough right there to warrant a man getting killed, or at least pistol-whipped into releasing Walter Brennan. Here the girl seems to be more concerned with the condition of her man's knuckles than her black eye. These women soak up abuse, and then hurry to mop their blood off the floor so their man won't slip on his way to another woman's boudoir.
That, in the end, is what's left over from The Crowd Roars, the ugly core of why I don't like that movie either. This antagonistic relationship between the groupies of the racing circuit, their slavish devotion arouses the self-hating drivers' death wish contempt. As one who's known and loved rock groupies as a youth, I sneer at the misogynistic sneering of these Hawks racers!
Still, I like Red Line gallons more than Hatari! For one thing, most people are on the same page, i.e. they're American and able to tap the Hawksian esprit d'corp. The one foreign accent here belongs to Mariana Hill--as a yeh-yeh vivant French racing groupie--but it works because she's actually American doing a French accent. A member of the Actor's Studio, Hill offers a classic example of what I meant earlier about American actors doing foreign accents being better than foreigners speaking English as far as overlapping screwball dialogue (ed note: I edited that out from the Hatari review, but you get the gist). There are also a lot more girls than in Hatari!, and they're way better looking. Also the boys aren't terrorizing any animals. They're not exactly doing anything heroic, just racing around in circles, but they're hurting only themselves, their tires, and eventually the ozone layer.
Like Hatari, Red Line operates in a day-night cycle, with nights at the motel and its nearby restaurant / tavern owned by Lindy (Holt). These bar scenes could have been the heart and soul to the film, but Hawks dulls them with some terrible royalty-free country-tinged electric rock, and way too-many weird-looking (presumably) real-life racing figures doing walk-ons. Lindy talks about knocking down a wall in her place, to make room for a band and dancing, now that Holly (Gail Hire)--a recent 'racing widow' dating Caan before swapping with Gabbi for Dan (Skip Ward)--has become a partner. Got all that? What the film really needs though, more than a rock band or a knocked-down wall, or romantic triangle entanglements, is a rewrite. There's no Leigh Brackett or Charles MacArthur or Jules Furthman or Ben Hecht to add the right sense of wit to the repartee. Asking a guy you're having a one-night stand with to: "tell me about the other girls" is an example of the kind of numb-nuts dialogue they would have tweaked to be witty and wild and sharp and alert, cutting through the layers of crap instead heaping them on. Even Hawks might have changed it to "Who was the girl, Steve?" instead of something so dull and flat "tell me about the other girls" --i.e. acidly curious about why he's such a shit instead of being a blank Westworld automaton eager to take notes of all the geisha-like submissive states that please her prospective new beau. As I wrote awhile back about The Crowd Roars, one came away realizing that Anne Dvorak and Joan Blondell were teaching not only Cagney about women, but Hawks as well. But in this film one gets the impression he forgot all over again, but no girl present was up to the challenge. Blondell and Dvorak would have put these men in a headlock and beat sense into them with their heels.
And as always with Hawks, music is more than just a lull in the action, it's as essential to the bonding of the group as cigarettes (though there are but few of those this time), pouring drinks (again less emphasis than usual with Hawks), and sitting down to dinner at restaurant tables where you know everyone in the place on a first name basis, including the owner/waitress. But then there's the fake band playing fake 'rock' (ripping sax solo and no sax player, drummer barely even hitting his skins, etc--no relation whatever to the music) and the dancing all starts to resemble some terrible AIP beach party freak-out.
Far better use is made of motel patio pool and a Pepsi machine, the strip of rooms and lights on the pool all paint a very vivid and familiar portrait to anyone who's ever been drunk at a motel and been out trying to find the ice machine while seeing double and getting picked up by a girl you hope is not a prostitute or a shakedown honeytrap. Gabbi comes onto Caan out there while he's getting a Pepsi and it's a groovy scene. Gabbi's supposed to be Dan's girl, so why is she pouring it on?
It doesn't make sense but what does? And Holly thinks she's unlucky, a kind of black widow of the race track, so wants to avoid Dan's love so she doesn't jinx him. The team owner's tomboy daughter (Laura Devon) champions the towheaded oaf played by John Robert Crawford (he seems way too big and heavy for a racer, like a 200 pound jockey), who throws her over as soon as he wins a single race. But don't worry, though they went on one date and he blew her off after winning his first big race, she goes running to his hospital bed after he's back on the bottom. It's sickening, the kind of thing Hawks never stooped to before.
Hawks' films at their best offer a utopian ideal of professional competence and stalwart support that is tested against terrible danger. It's the sort of thing that, as a man, is as heartening as an evening out with your cool older brother and his friends when you're ten years-old, But in the comedies that stalwart support gives way in the wake of a wild woman and the existential terror of sex, with death revealed below like a trapdoor opening to Hades. The same mythic problems of his comedies muddles his latter adventures, like Red Line 7000; the casting, usually so spot-on with Hawks, seems here culled wholesale from a Where the Boys Are post-spring break yard sale. There's a feeling Hawks didn't rehearse them too much; that they didn't know each other that well before being thrown into a scene. And Hire is a real liability. The great Ed Howard sums up Hire's performance eloquently, getting at the fundamental problem of later Hawks, implying he was losing his Svengali ability to turn normal girls into 'Hawksian women' with deep, sexy voices, which for Hire failed though Hawks didn't seem to notice: How could Hawks, always justly acclaimed for the quality of the performances he could coax out of nearly anyone, have thought this was acceptable?"
Personally, her awful performance doesn't bother me that much (and I just fast forward past her song), and more than Bacall she seems to be imitating Paula Prentiss in Man's Favorite Sport? who does a kind of playful take-off on the Hawksian woman. That was fine because it was true to Prentiss' own persona, and done with real affection. With Hire and the other kids though, they either need more rehearsal time, a decent script, decent sets, or all of the above. James Caan's whole thing of how he only wants to sleep with virgins and not any 'secondhand' stuff seems like a problem made up by a man who was pushing 70 in the age before Viagra, angry at his libido for giving out right before the arrival of "the pill." Caan's obsessive Victorian era jealousy leads to a fight with Skip Ward (Hank in Night of the Iguana, where he was perfectly cast since he was supposed to be a sincere dimwit), the only guy who's not an ass, and as a result Hire goes to see him and his new girlfriend, a sexy French racing enthusiast who first shagged the repulsive cornfed oaf. That's life, man, but just seeing Hire there sends Caan into a fury. And we're somehow supposed to care? Robert Mitchum he isn't. 
I mention Mitchum of course because the presence of Charlene Holt (right) made me think of El Dorado, again with Caan, made (hard to believe) the following year. There the the star wattage of both Wayne and Robert Mitchum boosted her own charm level considerably; as their "shared" girl (she says she's more than enough for both of them --we believe her) she plays off their grounded energy marvelously, never trying to steal a scene or do more than her natural-if-limited talent allows. Here there's not a watt to be found for Holt to light up with, and the problem is Hawks doesn't know it. He's forgotten what's important as far as where to point the camera when it's not on the race track and when to recognize a scene is dead and either rewrite it, recast it, or cut it altogether. Wayne could have reminded him, Leigh Bracket would know too and only they probably had the clout to at that moment.Luckily, there's the racing to save it: unlike so many racing movies, thanks to distinct color coding you can always tell which car is whose and what they're doing to each other, especially as the furious Caan tries to run Skip Ward into the wall. But the thing is, the shots between drinks or drinks between shots are undone since there's no male group camaraderie (only competition) though there's some scenes with the girls bonding by themselves (they're never catty or competitive, even when dating each other's 'second hand' cast-offs), there's not nearly enough drinking or smoking.
Maybe that's the key to good Hawks morale - take away the booze and the tobacco and the coolness dissipates to nothing. Maybe that's why Hawks returned to the western for his last two films, thus doubling his western output. Hard to believe he'd only made two up to that point, and that they were two of the genre's best -- RED RIVER and RIO BRAVO.
But Howard, most of us left this cage, long ago... the marshall came and took Joe Burdett, and we moved out of the jail back to the comfort of the hotel. We don't even pass out cigars anymore. We don't, because there's no 'where' to go once you're everywhere at once. Now the only aspect of our lives we can't duplicate with an image, a keyboard and a mouse is that feminine vice clamp flytrap magnet that pulls us ever inwards towards our projector eye self. To not blaze away from its gravity with as much horsepower as we can cram under that mortal hood takes raw courage; every second we don't press that pedal down is a victory. As Tom Waits sang- "If you get far enough away / you'll be on your way back home." Racing around in an endless oval, these maniacs avoid that risk, kind of - they don't go home, but never get far enough away from it, either, or even see a single sight. If only there was a reason for winning that boiled down to something more than a junky's fear of withdrawal, a fear strong enough to conquer even his fear of death... or intimacy.
Fantastic read! Real men running away from something
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