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 tap into deep archetypal veins of mythic resonance, especially where men facing death in the service of some grand quest are concerned. Mail over the Andes, blazing the Chisholm Trail or being the first white men in Northern Washington, defending the north pole against a super-carrot, Hawks' men in a group are the men you want to be with. But there can't always be wars, or Dutchmen with open bars, or endangered ladies, or scoundrels in jail with rich brothers trying to get them out, or pilots trying to land in ceiling zero fog or mighty herds driven through a land rife with border gangs. And then, when noble danger-facing dries up, adrenaline junkies like Hawks' heroes have to risk death purely for their own pleasure, which is far less exciting... for us, at any rate. There's no noble existential pursuit to wanting to go super fast around a track, or to capture and cage wild animals for those uniquely 'human' environments known as zoos. To my mind, it's just the opposite, showing the heart of the Hawks' masculine camaraderie may be less honorable than we thought. In the absence of real danger, they have to go create it... for kicks. Hawks flew with Faulkner in WWI, hunted and fished with Hemingway, and raced.
Hawks made very few bad films in his long career, far fewer than John Ford, yet he receives far less lionization at the hands of the popular press, who tend to think of his best work more in terms of the stars that were in it (there's no 'Hawks box'), thus BIG SLEEP is a Bogie picture, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS a Grant picture, or even--god help us--a Jean Arthur picture. Part of it might be that his personal stamp is harder to discern, so comfortable is he across a spectrum of genres, sometimes within a single film, and his iconoclasm meant he stayed independent, making each studio less likely to claim him than any other. Still, for a lot of classic film lovers when we make our top all-time favorite film lists Hawks takes up at least half.
By the early 60s, we were a long long way from Hawks' days as a flier during WWI, an experience which left him far more clear-eyed about the courage involved in facing death than most directors of his time or ever. Nonetheless, even the last last few films in his oeuvre reward study, if only to further discern his master class iconoclasm. I've already analyzed the comedy MAN'S FAVORITE SPORT? (see: Fear of Fishing), and now....
HATARI!
1962 - ***
So amulets in the jumbles somewhere, or scoring the animals for zoos 'round the world or whatever, and John Wayne leading a crew of mostly a hearty and hail-full international crew of animal trappers in Kenya, racing after an array of giraffes, rhinos, and wildebeests. There's German actor Hardy Krüger in a pair of little Boer shorts so we can see his bandy little legs and Valentin de Vargas (he played the leather jacketed "Pancho" Grande in Touch of Evil) and in the role usually reserved for Ward Bond or Arthur Kennedy, Bruce "Kong-blockin'" Cabot as "the Indian." There's also a little French newcomer, Gérard Blain, who decides it's easier to share women with the similarly diminutive Krüger rather than compete for girls, which is an interesting resolution to a war their parents started some 20 years earlier.So right there, with this international cast of rough tough horny dudes, we have a ton of different accents and to add woe to the scene, there are only two girls to go around and neither are very captivating: French actress Michèle Girardon is a bit too mother earthy as the ranch owner Brandy, and Italian model Elsa Martinelli is too lean, literally, with all the tell-tale signs of an eating disorder.
Now, I have nothing against international casts, but it's hard to sound breezy and naturalistic while delivering a mouthful of Leigh Brackett dialogue if English is not your first language. So don't blame them if the camaraderie feels slightly forced, just try to enjoy it, because as with all Hawks, there is plenty of it. During the daytime of course there's the animal wrangling, feeding, and watering; and perks like the memorable Henry Mancini score, and the authenticity of all the hunt and capture sequences. Wayne and company had the guts to do all did their own animal-wrangling; there's no rear screen projection, no stunt doubles, no stock footage whatsoever... and it makes a huge difference (vs. something like MGM's Tarzan series, which relied on all three). These scenes of the chase, racing in a complex hunting strategy of racing jeeps and trucks chasing down an array of Serengeti plains roamers, even influenced Spielberg's Jurassic Park: The Lost World.
Alas, the forced-sounding breezy dialogue and compassion-based unease seeing innocent animals abducted for our amusement aren't even the only problems: I could live with either, but what keeps HATARI out of my DVD collection is something else, something all Hawks' other comedy-laced 'group of men facing danger' adventures didn't have to contend with... a hirsute little ginger attention hog cockblocker named Red Buttons.
Sure he's got a kind of hairy Arthur Murray tenement grace to his movements, but his hammy cowardice and shameless cockblocking drag the joi de vivre down like a steel mesh net. Whining, blowing up one of the Serengeti's few scarce acacia trees in order to abduct a whole tribe of monkeys (but looking away as his rocket-driven net flies over and engulfs the tree) and then getting drunk that night and asking about it over and over, refusing to let anyone else talk about anything but how he didn't look for his big moment of triumph, he's unbearable, as un-Hawksian as it's possible to get.
But that's not the worst of it, the worst is when he steals all the ice at cocktail hour for his poor widow ass (after he gets knocked over on it). And insult to injury: he winds up with Brandy instead of the Frog or the Hitlerjugend who've been dueling for her hand all through the first half of the film). It's not Hawksian to be so needy, so constantly demanding of praise, so ramped up with that short guy attention grabbing. It's not, perhaps, Buttons fault if he's the pisher left standing after the needle is lifted in Hawksian archetype musical chairs. He's the one 'new' kind of character in the Hawks oeuvre, at least he hasn't been seen since Bringing Up Baby's Major Horace Applegate (Charlie Ruggles). I guess that's okay in itself, but back to Brandy: Imagine if old Ruggles' Applegate wound up with Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo? Was you ever bit by a dead bee, indeed.
And if the usual easy breezy chemistry of the men-as-a-group adventure seems forced, the actors can't be faulted so much as the casting director, for the international vibe costs Hawks his usual entrainment of mood, and 'brave and skilled men in a group facing danger' style (vs. say, Hollywood actors as foreigners instead of foreigners as Hollywood actors).
Perhaps we can understand late period Hawks well by contrasting his two tame leopard-in-a-bathroom scenes, the one in BRINGING UP BABY and the one in HATARI! In BABY, Susan Vance pretends she's being attacked by the leopard in order to get David (Cary Grant) to charge over to her apartment and 'save' her (he doesn't know it's a tame leopard) but in HATARI, it's the girl in the bath who doesn't know the leopard is tame, and Red Buttons capitalizes on that to act like a hero, charging in with chair (top). 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, here Red overacts and gesticulates as if Mickey Rooney crash landed in the middle of RIO BRAVO and tried to turn the whole thing into a Andy Hardy picture before Hawks came back from the bathroom.
I've always hated cockblockers. 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, to ask for change or talk about the dead bees, over and over and over. Wayne has enough problems, smoking casually and getting older, 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 he tames that mustang in THE MISFITS (1961). Hawks would be better off back in Hollywood, or on location someplace temperate, near the beach, like with John Ford, presiding over pointless Irish brawls off the coast of Hawaii instead of racing around after rampaging rhinos and wildebeests.
And I wish to god I was with 'em.
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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, 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 footage stock car 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 drivers for the film. And so what, since the racing stuff is expertly filmed and super vivid, 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.
It's still Hawks down to its rims, but it lacks a center - there's no holding it, and none of the women are exactly Hawksian, and the men - all fine racers - are nonetheless stunted, at least on some level.
It's the first movie, for example, in Hawks' canon where a man is allowed to hit a woman, and have the woman go back to him, have him not get killed or worse: one of the racing champs (James Caan) get jealous and hits 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 in a Hawks film. Here the girl is one of the type who seems to be more concerned with the condition of her man's knuckles ("he needs those knuckles to drive!") than her black eye.
That, in the end, is what's left over from THE CROWD ROARS, this antagonistic relationship to the groupies of the racing circuit, and their slavish devotion, to a point. As one who's known and loved groupies as a youth, I sneer at the misogynistic sneering of these bookend Hawks racers! And what's involved in both films is essentially a kind of love hate battle with Mother Death: the racers all eventually crack up, one way or the other, and come back to the woman who loves them, or let the woman come running back to them to lick their wounds. Cary Grant and Bogart both were worldly enough to know, to paraphrase Tom Waits, if you ran far enough away from a woman you were on your way back to her, so don't run. Maybe it was the war that manned them all up so this callow posturing just wouldn't wash. Killing folks in Europe and Asia will broaden any man beyond the scope of his cock and naval.
At any rate, though it's not nearly as good a film, I like RED LINE gallons more than HATARI! For one thing, most people are on the same page, i.e. 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, a member of the actor's studio, and a classic example of what I meant earlier about American actors doing foreign accents being better at Hawks than the real thing. Another, there are more girls. A lot more girls, like more than HATARI's two, and way better looking. But mainly it's because the boys aren't terrorizing any animals. They're not exactly doing something heroic, just racing around in circles, but they're hurting only themselves, and eventually the ozone layer.
The more interesting bits like the restaurant watering hole owned by Lindy (Charlene Holt) could have been a heart and soul to the film, but Hawks dulls it with some terrible royalty-free country-tinged electric rock, and it gradually falls by the wayside. 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' there for the funeral of her last lover and then dating Caan before swapping with Gabbi for Dan (Skip Ward)--has "bought in." Bellowing like a bullfrog to get that Hawks woman voice, Hire seems like she's making fun of everyone (instead of just Rock Hudson, as when Prentiss did it).
What the film really needs though, than a rock band or a broke wall, is a rewrite, 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 nitwit romantic dialogue Leigh Bracket or Jules Furthman or Ben Hecht would have tweaked to be witty and wild and sharp and alert, cutting through the layers of crap instead heaping them on.
Oh well, it's still better than GRAND PRIX (1966).
I like that they all dance to a terrible fake band playing generic stock library 'rock' (ripping sax solo and no sax player, drummer barely even hitting his skins, etc) and get loose when a band shows up. 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 this time), pouring drinks (but less emphasis), and sitting down to dinner at restaurant tables where you know everyone in the place on a first name basis. Gabbi comes onto Caan in the hotel patio, by the Pepsi machine. Gabbi's supposed to Dan's girl, so why is she pouring it on. And has anyone ever not come onto the other in any scene. Oh 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 kill him. These women soak up abuse, and go running to clean up their own blood so their man won't slip on his way to another woman's boudoir. Meanwhile the team owner's tomboy daughter (Laura Devon) champions the dumb blonde monster 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 race.
Hawks' films are the fantasy of a kind if utopian ideal of professional competence and stalwart support that is tested against terrible danger. But in the comedies that support gives way, and the existential terror of sex and death is revealed below, without a safety net. Thus the same problem muddle RED LINE -- the casting is off--with a cast of men that seem culled wholesale from a WHERE THE BOYS ARE post-spring break yard sale, particularly hulking towhead John Robert Crawford, for whom the dialogue is far from natural... in fact it's not even there - the script is by a guy named George Kirgo. There's a feeling Hawks didn't rehearse them too much; that they didn't know each other that well before being thrown in to 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: "Hire's attempt at Bacall's distinctive, sexy low voice is simply embarrassing and awkward, and any scene with her is unintentionally hilarious just because of how stilted and awful her performance is. 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 (I just fast forward past her song), and more than Bacall she seems to be imitating Paula Prentiss in MAN'S FAVORITE SPORT? for whom Hawks' preference for smolder voiced deep women was an excuse to almost satirize that sort of persona, using her own deep voice almost mockingly; that was fine because it was true to Prentiss' own persona. With these kids they either need more rehearsal time, a decent script, decent sets, or all of the above. James Caan's whole thing of he only wants to sleep with virgins and not any 'second hand' stuff seems like a problem made up by a man who was pushing 70 in the age before Viagra. The result is that Caan's obsessive jealousy leads to a fight with Skip Ward (another tow-headed racer, he was Hank in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, where he was perfectly cast since he was supposed to be a dimwitted self-righteous upstart). He's the only guy who's not an ass to women, 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. I mean, what a complete asshole. And we're somehow supposed to care? 
Even so, when focusing on the cool little restaurant things are okay. She would be in El Dorado with Caan the following year, and the star wattage of both Wayne and Robert Mitchum in that film really elevate their performances by contrast (whereas here there's not a watt to be found). The problem is, of course, that Hawks doesn't know what's important as far as where to point the camera anywhere but the race track, since the women aren't really allowed to carry the film or sink 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 because she dared go talk to him. But the thing is the shots between drinks or drinks between shots are undone here since there's no male group camaraderie (only competition), though some with the girls by themselves (they're never catty or competitive) and not nearly enough drinking or smoking. Maybe that's the Hawks morale - take away the booze and the tobacco and the coolness dissipates to nothing. 
See, the French broad's not even jealous. The French are the best, aside from their inability to give Hawksian dialogue that necessary razzle dazzle, at least they have a healthy grasp of sex --that it's just a thing people do together, not 'to' each other. They're not obsessed with it to the point they rarely have it. Too bad there's no other French people around, just these lumbering blonde mastodons with their infantile obsessions and conviction that somehow driving in circles faster than anyone else makes them deserving of a girl who's not a racing "slut!" When what else are they going to meet?When the current of loyalty is undercut in a Hawks film, it begins to drift loose. He had the same problem with The Crowd Roars. Of course it's a problem men have, this weird thing where as soon as a girl comes into our lives we try to make her into our mother and then feel suffocated by the security, desperately looking for a way out of a cage we're too numb to realize we've already left, and so we cage ourselves by trying to escape. That's the thing, Howard. We left this cage, long ago... the marshall came and took Joe Burdett, and we moved out of the jail. We don't even need fast cars anymore, because there's no where to go once you're everywhere at once, unmoored, as it were, from that localized spot, that feminine vice clamp flytrap magnet that pulls us ever in, and it's all some men can do not blaze away from its gravity with as much horsepower as they can cram under that mortal hood, going so far so fast they wind up right where they started. 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, but who was the girl, Steve, who left them with such a high opinion of women? Maybe Hawks has been driving and flying and shooting so long by 1965, that even he forgot. As Dude said, a man forgets. But just because you forget what you're running from doesn't mean you stop. Crash after crash, the race goes on.
