Reading #7 MASTERS OF THE AMERICAN CINEMA

Hawks was born in 1896 in Goshen, Indiana. His family moved to California when he was ten. His parents were wealthy, with considerable holdings in the lumber industry and in paper manufacturing. Their three sons enjoyed many of the prerogatives of the rich. Howard, the oldest, attended Phillips-Exeter Academy, and went on to Cornell University, where he took a degree in mechanical engineering in 1917. During summer vacations, he worked as a prop boy for Famous Players-Lasky, which eventually became Paramount Pictures. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, Hawks was a barnstorming pilot, and when the United States entered World War I, he enlisted in the fledgling Army Air Corps. After the war he returned to work for Jesse Lasky, who put him in charge of the story department at Paramount. Even at this early date, Hawks's tastes ran to action and adventure tales, and he turned to such distinguished authors as Jack London and Joseph Conrad for story ideas.

Thanks to an inheritance, Hawks became a small-time producer-director in 1922. Most of his productions were two-reel comedies. He also worked as a scenarist at the Fox Film Corporation during this period. In 1926 the studio allowed him to direct his first feature, The Road to Glory. He stayed with Fox until 1929, directing a total of eight silent features, primarily comedies and action films. He wrote as well as produced most of these movies, which were successful at the box office. After 1929 he refused to sign any more long-term contracts, and throughout his lengthy career, he worked at virtually every major studio as a producer-director. He occasionally helped write the films of others, however, and he would also undertake directing studio projects from time to time if a friend asked for help or if he needed cash.

Hawks was able to work independently within the industry because his movies were popular with the public. To be sure, almost none of them was a huge box office hit, but most of them turned in a respectable profit. "Fortunately, I have found that what I like, most people also like," Hawks explained, "so I only have to let myself go and do what interests me." He selected his studio on the basis of which stars it had under contract, and the front office rarely interfered with the way he worked. Hawks chose the writers and casts, personally shaped the story materials, and he enjoyed the privilege of final cut. Within the industry he was regarded as a competent professional. He was respected, but not highly touted. Since his métier was comedy and genre pictures––which enjoyed comparatively little prestige within the industry––his movies were seldom cited for their artistic excellence. Only Sergeant York (1941) was a big critical and popular success, and it was also the only Hawks film to win an important Academy Award (Gary Cooper, for best actor). Interestingly, this somewhat pretentious war movie is untypical of Hawks's output, nor is it much admired by critical commentators today.

Personality is what interested Hawks as an artist, and his own was appealing. Scenarist Ben Hecht, who was not given to gushing, described Hawks as "mysteriously romantic." His rugged appearance appealed strongly to women: he was married and divorced three times and had many attractive female friends. He dressed conservatively, though with an elegant flair. Tall (6 feet, 3 inches) and well built, the athletic Hawks excelled in many sports. He loved speed and was a professional racer for several years after he graduated from college. In 1936 he built an eight-cylinder car that won at Indianapolis. He was a lifelong motorcycle enthusiast and continued riding until he was seventy-six years old. In addition, he was an aviator, skier, and horseman. In the movie colony, only Gary Cooper surpassed him as a marksman. Hawks was also an accomplished silversmith and gunsmith. A "man's man," he frequently went off on hunting and fishing trips with such friends as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Ordinarily these writers hated talking about their books, but both men enjoyed discussing literature with Hawks because they respected his judgment. He was also a successful businessman and died richer than he was born. In short, he embodied those virtues he admired above all others: competence and style.

Hawks enjoyed working in genres. For him, it was simply a convenient way of organizing and focusing the story materials. He often turned to pulp subjects as a starting point, but the story was essentially a pretext for exploring some personalities that intrigued him. He delighted in scrambling the conventions of genres. For example, instead of boy chases girl, he often reversed the formula. He decided that the Hecht-MacArthur play, The Front Page, would make a better movie if the ace reporter were switched from a man to a woman and the central plotline converted to a love story. Most commentators are agreed that Hawks's film (retitled His Girl Friday, 1940) is the finest of the three versions of the play. "All that stuff is kind of fun," Hawks said of his formula reversals; "it taxes your imagination to try to do something no one else has done." He often repeated a successful gimmick even in dissimilar genres, and he was pleased when people recognized his self-plagiarisms. "I love to copy myself," he cheerfully admitted. Unfortunately, when his inspiration flagged, and especially when his comic sense deserted him, he often fell back on genre clichés, particularly in the action films.

Hawks insisted that the only difference between comedy and drama is the point of view: in his action movies, the situations are dangerous; in the comedies, they're embarrassing. As critic Robin Wood has pointed out, the action films can be viewed as inversions of the comedies. In the adventure movies, rugged males master their work and environment through their professional competence; in the comedies, hapless males are stripped of their competence through a series of humiliations. Hawks introduced comic elements into virtually all his movies. Scarface is such a gleeful takeoff that Wood categorizes it with the overt comedies. Similarly, both The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo are among the funniest of their genres.

"Whenever I hear a story, my first thought is how to make it into a comedy," Hawks claimed, "and I think of how to make it into a drama only as a last resort." His sense of humor was bizarre. He was fond of recounting a story which took place during the filming of Red River, a western starring John Wayne, one of Hawks's favorite players. The director told his star that a funny scene could be built around Wayne's getting drunk and having his finger amputated. Somehow the finger gets lost near the campfire, and the other characters then have to search on their hands and knees for the missing member. Understandably, Wayne thought the idea wasn't funny. In fact, he thought it was weird. Hawks didn't press it. Instead, he included the scene in another western, The Big Sky (1952), with Kirk Douglas. The missing finger episode turned out to be one of Hawks's most celebrated scenes, and after viewing it, Wayne vowed never again to reject Hawks's ideas, no matter how ghoulish.

In fact, it was Hawks more than any other director who encouraged Wayne's considerable comic talents. The two worked together on four westerns, which all begin seriously, then veer off into comedy––sometimes right in the middle of scenes of violence. A line from Rio Bravo almost invariably breaks up audiences. Wayne smashes the villain's face with a gunbutt, bloodying him hideously. When his sidekick rushes to restrain him, our hero turns away, drawling contemptuously, "I'm not gonna hurt him." These eruptions of sardonic humor became Hawks and Wayne specialties. The four Wayne westerns might almost be regarded as a personality study in four parts. Rio Bravo, El Dorado (1967), and Rio Lobo even use the same basic plot. As Hawks explained, the genre artist's creativity lies not so much in inventing narrative materials but in how traditional materials can be treated freshly: "You're telling the same old story, and the only way you can change it is by getting different characters. And the only different characters you can get are funny ones."

Hawks believed that all good directors put their personal stamp on their work. His own output was epitomized by an outlandish craziness. He thought that almost anything had comic possibilities. For example, when he learned that the character actor Walter Brennan wore false teeth, Hawks worked it into Brennan's characterization in Red River. Brennan loses his teeth to an Indian in a poker game, and throughout the remainder of the movie, the cantankerous old timer must borrow them back each time he has to eat. Scarface is steeped in comic grotesqueries. The protagonist, played with strutting flamboyance by Paul Muni, delights in parading his dressing gowns, ties, and garish hankerchiefs. Intoxicated by his swanky apartment, he proudly displays it to a bewildered female guest. "It's kinda gaudy, isn't it?" she ventures, in genuine awe. "Isn't it though? Glad you like it," is his delicious reply.

Hawk's comic brilliance is best represented by his screwball comedies, a genre he and Capra introduced in 1934, with Twentieth Century and It Happened One Night. The heyday of the genre was roughly 1934 to 1945, though Hawks's postwar comedies, like I Was a Male War Bride (1949) and Monkey Business (1952), contain many screwball elements. Essentially love stories, these films featured zany but glamorous lovers, often from different social classes. Capra and Hawks were the foremost practitioners of the genre, which became the most popular type of comedy in the American cinema of the later depression era. In part, this was because it was a "healing" type of humor, emphasizing the unity of all social strata, as cultural historian Andrew Bergman has pointed out. Caste conflicts are neutralized into personality antagonisms, and the marriages which conclude these films often symbolize the reconciliation of the classes. Capra's screwball comedies became increasingly social as the decade wore on, but the apolitical Hawks wasn't interested in ideological issues. Since Capra's screwball comedies were more popular with the public, other important directors of the genre––like Mitchell Leisen, Gregory La Cava, William Wellman, and Preston Sturges––tended to explore it along the social lines of Capra rather than the formalist vein of Hawks.

More realistic than the slapstick of the silent era, screwball comedy is also more collaborative: the contributions of the director and writer are as crucial as those of the actor. The genre attracted the most gifted comic scenarists of the period, including Ben Hecht, Robert Riskin, Charles MacArthur, and Charles Lederer. The sophisticated dialogue crackles with cynicism, witty repartee, and proletarian wisecracks. Sappy, sentimental speeches are often intended to deceive. Screwball comedy produced a bonanza of charming comediennes, including Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Barbara Stanwyck, Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, and Katharine Hepburn. The most famous screwball comedienne was Carole Lombard, who became a major star of the 1930s after her performance in Twentieth Century. Beautiful, sexy, and funny, Lombard was also an accomplished dramatic actress. Cary Grant, Hawks's favorite comedian, was the most gifted male actor of screwball comedy. The genre was dominated by Columbia, RKO, and Paramount.

The premises of most screwball comedies are absurdly improbable, and the plots, which are intricate and filled with preposterous twists and turns, tend to snowball out of control. The movies center on a comic and romantic couple rather than a solitary protagonist. Often they are initially antagonistic, with one constantly trying to outwit or outmaneuver the other. In Hawks's comedies, the hero is sometimes a scheming, egregious egomaniac, determined to foist his will on an uncooperative heroine, as in Twentieth Century and His Girl Friday. In other movies, however, the dim-witted hero is stalked by a clever, resourceful heroine, as in Bringing Up Baby and Ball of Fire. Much of the comedy results from the utter seriousness of the co-protagonists, who are usually unaware that they're funny, even though they engage in the most loony masquerades and deceptions. Sometimes one of them is engaged to a sexless prude or a humorless bore; this lends an urgency to the attraction between the co-protagonists, who are clearly made for each other. The genre usually includes a menagerie of secondary characters who are as wacky as the lovers.

Hawks's screwball comedies stretched the genre to its utmost limits, and are generally more farcical than the works of other directors in this form. He loved packing his movies with pratfalls, brawls, men dressed in drag, Sennett-like chases, and wildly improbable coincidences. Only Hawks could dream up the scene in Bringing Up Baby in which two zanies (Hepburn and Grant) try to entice "Baby," a stubborn pet leopard, off a roof by singing its favorite song, "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby." In another scene, Grant is deprived of his clothes and is forced to wear Hepburn's frilly negligée until they're returned. Thus attired, he sulks on some stairs until Hepburn's prim matron aunt discovers him and expresses amazement at his sartorial eccentricity. The poor devil leaps to his feet, agitates his arms frantically, and sputters, "I just went gay suddenly!"

In his pre-World War II movies, Hawks tended to prefer tight, compact stories, with plots that are usually clear and straightforward. Often they are organized around a journey of some kind, a job that needs to be done, or a constricting situation that requires immediate relief. In the comedies, the stories usually concern the corralling of a mate. Most of the stories take place over a brief period. Hawks seldom bothered with much exposition or resorted to flashbacks. He was flattered by the adulation lavished on him by his French admirers, who tried to imitate his work, but somewhat impatient with their indifference to plot: "I think a director's a storyteller, and if he tells a story that people can't understand, then he shouldn't be a director."

Consistency, however, was not Hawks's forte. For example, the aviation movie, Only Angels Have Wings (1939), is relatively static, with only the barest rudiments of a plotline. On the other hand, critic Donald Willis has called the plot to The Big Sleep virtually incoherent: It suffers from too much story. "You don't have to be too logical," Hawks instructed his scenarists before they began adapting Raymond Chandler's intricately plotted novel; "you should just make good scenes. You follow one scene with another and stop worrying about hooking them together." Like most of Hawks's best movies, The Big Sleep has the conviction of immediacy, but no one could figure out who killed one of the eight victims. When Hawks called up Chandler for clarification, even he was unable to identify the killer. The director's later works tend to be more relaxed and informal in their plotting. Even the westerns are loosely structured, especially the final three Wayne pictures. All center around the Wayne hero whose friends come to his assistance. All involve a love story, the rehabilitation of a buddy who has known better times, and that old staple of the genre, the triumph of the good guys over the bad guys in a shootout. The digressiveness of the plots gives them an almost improvisatory air, as if anything––however outlandish––could happen before the inevitable showdown in the final reel.

Despite his insistence that he was “just a storyteller," in actual practice, Hawks's orientation was generally toward the individual scene rather than the overall structure. He thought in terms of situations and gags and often would save leftover material for his next movie. For example, El Dorado contains scenes that were originally conceived for Rio Bravo. "My recipe for making movies has always been to give an audience two or three really top-notch scenes," Hawks modestly claimed, "and to try not to annoy them the rest of the time." This casual attitude toward plot is what produces the uneven passages in his films. Even his best works have sections that sag: the stories don't always build dramatically, but depend in large part on the inspiration of the moment.

Manny Farber, who was one of the first American critics to champion Hawks's movies, also believes that no artist was less suited to a discussion of profound themes. John Peter Dyer goes even further and insists that Hawks's best films are his most unoriginal thematically. His worst––like Sergeant York and Land of the Pharaohs (1955)––are his most ambitious. Intellectual and social concerns seldom fired his imagination. For example, in To Have and Have Not (1944), the political subplot is formularized, in frank imitation of the earlier Bogart success, Casablanca, which was directed for Warner Brothers by Michael Curtiz the year before. To be sure, certain thematic preoccupations recur throughout Hawks's work, most notably the integration of an individual into a group, professionalism as a regenerative force, and the necessity for self-respect. But these are hardly novel themes, especially in the action genres the director favored.

Much of the controversy surrounding Hawks's work centers on the action films. Critics tend to fall into three camps concerning his output in this genre. His French admirers and their Anglo-American disciples enthusiastically applaud these works, especially for their energy, virility, and thematic consistency. Diametrically opposed to this view are such critics as Pauline Kael and Raymond Durgnat, who scoff at Hawks's narrow notions of masculinity, which are steeped in adolescent fantasies and sentimental clichés about "what it is to be a man." Like its feminine counterpart, the woman's picture (contemptuously known in the trade as weepies), the genre is simply too corrupted by mawkish platitudes to be taken seriously as art, these critics claim. In fact, one wag described the action film as a "male weepie." The third and perhaps most persuasive group of critics, typified by such commentators as Manny Farber and Donald Willis, agree that Hawks's action films can be childish, banal, and even simple-minded. But they also insist that the movies can be immensely enjoyable, providing a maximum of speed, excitement, and wit, "with the least amount of flat foot," to use Farber's memorable phrase. Willis maintains that the surface excitement is what's best in these movies, not their "depth." Audiences respond to the charm of the performers and the skillful way they carry off the action, not the philosophical significance of the action per se. In short, Hawks was no deep thinker, artistically speaking, and to criticize his action films for their lack of thematic originality is to miss the point.

Like any other genre, the action film has its specialties. It centers on he-men occupations that require courage, skill, and a stoical acceptance of the possibility of injury or death. "The best drama for me is one which shows a man in danger," Hawks claimed. "To live or die. What drama is greater?" Often these movies are based on stories which originally appeared in men's magazines. The films are fast and violent and require a considerable technical proficiency in order to convey the thrills of the action. The subgenres are categorized by occupational emphasis: racing, flying, hunting, and so on. They usually focus on an all-male society, in which a deep respect and camaraderie exist among its members. The highest value is placed on the efforts of the team rather than the contributions of a single member. There is an emphasis on masculine codes of honor and gallantry. A man is measured à la Hemingway, by how "good" he is at his work. That is, how cool, stylish, and professional. Domestic life is viewed with indifference, if not outright hostility. Generally it's portrayed as constricting, compromising, and dull. Except for the female lead, women are usually kept at the peripheries. Sweethearts are normally patient, forgiving, and very nervous. They can also be drags.

Hawks's most entertaining action films are usually in direct proportion to the amount of comedy they contain and the degree of prominence of their female star. As critic Joseph McBride has pointed out, the director's lack of interest in stereotypical female roles allowed him to create unusually strong, independent, yet still emotionally open heroines. Hawks admired women who were direct and aggressive and who enjoyed the same kind of activities as men. Significantly, he is the only action director to evince much sympathetic interest among feminist film critics. Furthermore, as Gerald Peary has noted, a life of action is not sufficient unto itself in most of Hawks's movies. The hero needs both male friends and a good strong woman.

Hawks enjoyed writing, and he worked on most of his scripts even in the earliest phases of his career. He seldom took credit for his contributions, however, because of a Screenwriters Guild regulation, which stipulated that a director couldn't receive credit as a scenarist unless he wrote at least 50 percent of the script. Since Hawks preferred working with teams of writers, he never bothered keeping track of who wrote what. His specialty was thinking up bizarre situations for his characters. ''I'm interested first in the action and next in the words they speak," he said. However, he also wrote some of the dialogue for his pictures. While working on the script of his first talkie, The Dawn Patrol (1930), he emphasized an indirect, understated writing style which the front office at Warners criticized for not being dramatic enough. Hawks claimed he derived this oblique style from his friend Hemingway, who also avoided direct emotional statements in his dialogue. When The Dawn Patrol proved popular with the public, Warners periodically screened the movie for its writers as an example of what good dialogue should sound like. In fact, the films Hawks made at this studio in the 1930s helped set many of the conventions of what came to be known as the Warners style during this decade.

Not that Hawks wanted his scripts to sound literary, though he was a lifelong devotee of good literature and had many writers as friends. He simply believed that speech was capable of energy and wit and ought to be entertaining in its own right. Some of his most celebrated passages he wrote himself, like Lauren Bacall's famous "whistle" speech to Bogart in To Have and Have Not. "I never follow a script literally," the director claimed, "and I don't hesitate to change a script completely if I see a chance to do something interesting." In Tiger Shark (1932), he totally reconceived the hero's characterization when it failed to come to life as written. His star, Edward G. Robinson, agreed that a new approach was needed, and each morning he was handed new dialogue which Hawks had written the night before. In the comedies particularly, the conflicts are verbal as much as physical, and he was especially stimulated by the challenge of dreaming up outré exchanges of dialogue between the lovers.

Several of Hawks's scenarists were successful novelists and dramatists in their own right: Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Jules Furthman, William Faulkner, Charles Lederer, Dudley Nichols, Leigh Brackett, John Huston, Billy Wilder, and many others. Critic Pauline Kael once quipped that Furthman wrote about half of the most entertaining movies to come out of Hollywood, and Hecht wrote most of the other half. Furthman helped create the spirited heroines of such movies as Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Rio Bravo. The novelist Leigh Brackett, a "fresh-looking girl who wrote like a man," as Hawks described her, contributed substantially to the westerns and action films. Lederer's speciality was deflating pomposity with a well-placed wisecrack. Many of the comedies centering on rituals of male mortification were coscripted by him.

The legendary wit and ex-newspaperman Hecht, who collaborated on at least eight Hawks films, appealed strongly to the director's cynical side. Hecht's sense of humor was brazenly malicious and sardonic. He delighted in satirizing hick values and conventional morality. When Hawks suggested that the gangster hero and his sister in Scarface ought to be characterized as a Chicago-style Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, Hecht was exhilarated by the prospect. The resultant script was one of his most flamboyant literary revels, crammed with outrageous metaphors, incongruous cultural allusions, and racy vulgarisms. Hecht also helped create several of Hawks's other Machiavellian schemers, like the monstres sacrés of Twentieth Century and His Girl Friday. Critic Richard Corliss believes that Hecht's sensational headline style was derived from his experience as a journalist. Some of his best stage and screen writing was created in collaboration with Charles MacArthur, his lifelong friend and fellow zany. Hawks admired their dialogue above all others. Corliss suggests that Hawks's masculine mystique was reinforced by this famous friendship and by Hecht's Chicago pressroom camaraderie.

Faulkner was a special case. Hawks admired his fiction long before he was taken seriously by the American literary establishment or had been "discovered" by the French intelligentsia. He met the novelist in the early 1930s, when he was scratching out a living as a clerk in a bookstore. Although he had already written several volumes, none of them had earned much money. Hawks urged him to go to Hollywood and work as a scenarist. Faulkner accepted, and he worked there on and off for the next twenty-two years. Except for his work with Hawks, he didn't take his film writing very seriously after he noticed that industry regulars were somewhat insensitive to literary excellence. He referred to his tenure in Hollywood as his "sojourn downriver." Not that he despised screenwriting per se. Like Fitzgerald, he thought it was a highly sophisticated art, but he was too committed to his own fiction to ever learn the craft properly. "I don't like scenario writing because I don't know enough about it," he admitted. But Hawks thought that Faulkner's script contributions were inventive, tasteful, and visually exciting. He called Faulkner "a master of his work, who does it without fuss." The novelist made major contributions to the script of Today We Live (1933), which was based on his own short story, "Turnabout." He also contributed to the scripts of The Road to Glory (1936), Air Force (1943), To Have and Have Not, and The Big Sleep. Hawks even allowed Faulkner to write from his home in Oxford, Mississippi, a privilege seldom allowed even to the most prestigious scenarists. In this way, Faulkner could divide his energies between his own fiction and Hawks's scripts. The two became close friends and often went fishing and hunting together. The novelist remained stolidly loyal to Hawks, and after Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1950 and was regarded as America's foremost living author, he would still come to Hawks's assistance to help with story problems, difficult scenes, or additional dialogue. Though Faulkner's royalties now provided him with a handsome income, he would even abandon his own work in progress to help his former mentor, much to the annoyance of Faulkner's publisher. But as the novelist explained, "Mr. Hawks has carried me in pictures, seen that I got screen credits I really did not deserve. Whenever I needed money, he was always very good to me, and if he needs me now, I'm going." Their last collaboration was in 1954, with the writing of Land of the Pharaohs.

All Hawks's best films are centered on the personality of his stars. Many of the movies were especially tailored with specific stars in mind, especially the Grant comedies, the Wayne westerns, and the Bogart thrillers. He generally cast only people he liked personally and those performers he thought were naturally funny, like Walter Brennan, one of his favorite character actors. In fact, Donald Willis points out that the credibility of Hawks's work is almost entirely due to the conviction of his players, especially in the action movies. In those few works in which he didn't use stars, like Red Line 7000 (1965), or in which the acting is weak, like Hatari! (1962), there's simply not much to watch, Willis observes, except for the exciting action footage.

An authoritative director, Hawks seldom had to deal with problems of temperament from his stars. Even that notorious prima donna and drunk, John Barrymore, minded his manners on Hawks's set. Bogart was an incorrigible needIer and troublemaker who enjoyed testing people's nerve. On his first day of shooting To Have and Have Not, Hawks was the recipient of some of Bogart's infamous lip. The director strode up to him, grabbed him by the lapels, lifted him off his feet, slammed him against the wall, and quietly explained that on his sets he was accustomed to calling the shots. After that, Bogart was a pussycat. Eventually they became good friends: both men admired a certain forthrightness of manner.

Grant and Wayne were immensely fond of Hawks, and would try anything the director suggested, for they trusted his artistic instincts. His harshest criticism was to call a performance dull. When a scene failed to work in rehearsals––and Hawks rehearsed a lot to get that "unrehearsed" quality––he would often try to make it more comic by thinking up some mad piece of business for his actors. It was he who suggested to Grant that he whinny like a horse whenever he's exasperated in His Girl Friday. He encouraged his players to act with their entire bodies, not just their faces and voices. In the comic films especially, much of the humor lies in the way the characters move or stand, the way they talk (usually very fast) the funny clothes they wear, and the way they handle props, like telephones, cigarettes, and hats. Some of the most memorable images of Hawks's movies involve a quintessential gesture, like Cagney sashaying saucily between the racing scenes of The Crowd Roars (1932) or the flying episodes of Ceiling Zero or Wayne's familiar lumbering gait, as though he were favoring a slight pain in his back but doesn't want to make a fuss about it.

Hawks's visual style is one of the plainest of the American cinema. "I like to tell a story as simply as possible," he explained, "with the camera at eye level." He disliked virtuoso camerawork and showy lighting effects. There are few "memorable shots" in his movies, though occasionally he imitated a poetic effect from the westerns of his friend John Ford. The exquisite lighting of Scarface was entirely due to its cinematographer, Lee Garmes, Hawks insisted, almost as though such concerns were rather effete. "I want to see the scene the way it would look if I were looking at it," he said. For Hawks, that usually meant eye-level medium shots. Like many directors of his generation, he believed that the best technique is that which seldom calls attention to itself. As Andrew Sarris has noted,

Hawks's movies are fast paced, especially those of the pre-World War II era. Like Capra, he encouraged his actors to race their delivery, and to overlap their lines as much as possible. His dialogue usually consists of terse sentences, stripped of dependent clauses. "Get the scene over with as soon as possible," was his stated credo. Even violence is over with quickly, which he believed made it more realistic. His Girl Friday has been called the fastest of all American talkies. His French admirers were especially enamored of his speed. Indeed, critic Jacques Rivette claimed that Hawks taught the Cahiers group "all that was best in the classical American cinema." Hawks's postwar films, however, are less hurried in their pace. The final westerns especially have an easygoing, rambling quality that almost makes them seem like family reunions.

In his editing too, Hawks adhered to a plain, functional style. He disliked cutting his films, because on repeated viewing of his footage he noticed his careless technical mistakes. Like Ford, whenever possible he edited in the camera. He refused to take extra closeups or covering shots in case his footage wouldn't cut smoothly. The result is that some of his movies are marred by awkward inserts, crude transitions, choppy rhythms, and mismatched shots. However, these flaws are generally apparent only on repeated viewing.

Hawks's main artistic shortcoming is his unevenness. Many of his movies suffer from serious lapses in tone and mechanical contrivances in the plotting. He wisely avoided scenes of intense emotion and almost invariably made a mawkish mess of it when he didn't. Actually, Hawks was often his own best critic. He pointed out that in his best films the characters express emotions, not directly, but through action, inaction, hesitation, and outright silliness. His most serious flaws are generally found in the action movies, which are filled with such genre bromides as a driver (or flyer or hunter) who must expiate a previous act of cowardice; or a last-minute substitution which kills off the second male lead, thus conveniently saving the hero's life; or an insecure youth who proves his manhood by killing someone; and so on.