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THE MOVIE

His Girl Friday (1940) is Howard Hawks' speedy and hysterically funny, modern-style screwball comedy, and one of the best examples of its kind in film history. Although it has an 92-minute running time, the breath-taking, fast-paced film has more than enough dialogue for a 3-hour movie. The film marked the beginning of a number of screwball comedies in the 1940s that emphasized the conflict for women in deciding between love/marriage and professional careers.

The original film version of His Girl Friday was director Lewis Milestone's big hit The Front Page (1931), produced by Howard Hughes and released by United Artists. [Milestone had won the Best Picture and Best Director Academy Awards for the previous year's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).] This second screen version's screenplay, again by Charles Lederer, brilliantly transformed Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's newspaper classic - the George S. Kaufman-directed 1928 Broadway smash-hit play The Front Page, with a major script change.

One of the main male characters in the earlier film, Hildebrand 'Hildy' Johnson (played by Pat O'Brien), became female - renamed Hildegard Johnson (played by Rosalind Russell), to star opposite the major actor, Cary Grant. [Grant was the leading man from Hawks' two previous films: the male-dominated action film Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938), and had appeared in other romantic comedies at the time (i.e., The Awful Truth (1937), The Philadelphia Story (1940), and My Favorite Wife (1940)).] Other changes in the script involved removing topical references to the 1920s, and jokes about Prohibition.

The gender swap brought an entirely new angle to the film, making it more than a satirical view and social commentary on the operation of a newsroom under the management of a hard-boiled, smart-alec managing editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant in this version, Adolphe Menjou in the earlier film), and providing an additional feminine-romance angle.

This madcap, giddy film - originally titled The Bigger They Are, is best remembered for its overlapping dialogue and simultaneous conversations, rapid-fire delivery, breakneck speed, word gags, sexual innuendo, plot twists, "in" jokes, mugging, jousting, sarcastic insults, frantic pace and farcical script. With its plot about a ruthless editor, a marriage renewed by divorce and the threat of re-marriage, a politically corrupt city, and a questionable judicial system, the romantic comedy is both a love story and a sophisticated battle of the sexes (and duel of wits).

This screwball masterpiece lacked even a single Academy Award nomination. Cary Grant's un-nominated performance as the suave, calculating and exploitative managing editor, who attempts to lure and maneuver his ex-wife (and star reporter) back with the opportunity to write a breaking, front page news-story, is a tour de force of comedy - combining cartoonish faces, silent-film pantomime, slapstick, witty word-play, and irony into one remarkable characterization. Likewise, Rosalind Russell's role as the ace news-reporter to her ex-husband and ex-managing editor, who is wooed back from marrying a staid, dull, but devoted insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), is her greatest comedic portrayal, following her similar role in The Women (1939). Film posters exclaimed how she holds up as Grant's equal: "SHE LEARNED ABOUT MEN FROM HIM." [Ironically, Grant's other film in this same year, The Philadelphia Story (1940), had a similar plot about him trying to win back his ex-wife (Katharine Hepburn) from her very soon-to-be-wed fiancee.]

Director Billy Wilder attempted a remake with a third film version: The Front Page (1974) with Jack Lemmon (as Hildy Johnson) and Walter Matthau (as Walter Burns). It was again remade (with the same gender twist, but newspapers were updated to a TV news environment) as Switching Channels (1988) by director Ted Kotcheff, with Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner in the lead roles.

Howard Hawks

Howard Winchester Hawks

b. May 30 1896, Goshen, Indiana.
d. December 26 1977, Palm Springs, California.

by David Boxwell

Howard Hawks was born into a wealthy and well-connected Midwestern family who migrated to Southern California in the halcyon days of the early 1900s. He attended Throop Polytechnic Institute (which later became the California Institute of Technology) before heading to the East to attend the exclusive prep school Phillips Academy and then matriculate as an engineering student at Cornell University. According to biographer Todd McCarthy these educational experiences were crucial to the formation of Hawks' studied persona as a patrician outdoorsman and practical man. Hawks learned to fly in the U.S. Army Air Service during the Great War, a stint which only temporarily interrupted a nascent career as a production assistant for some of the most notable members of the first generation of Hollywood film directors: Cecil B. DeMille, Allan Dwan, and Marshall Neilan. Hawks also cultivated friendships with such key figures as Victor Fleming, then a cinematographer for Dwan, and producer Irving Thalberg.

Working steadily as a producer and scenarist in the first half of the 1920s at Paramount, Hawks moved up the ranks to begin directing at the Fox studio in 1926. For the most part, Hawks subsequently acted as his own producer, only rarely entering into agreements with more powerful studio executives, and only then committing for a limited period. By sheer force of will and personality, Hawks was able to retain a great deal of autonomy in the studio system. He frequently rewrote screenplays, improvised and filmed sequences on the spot without the previous approval of the Motion Picture Producers Association censorship authorities (the Hays Office), and dictated casting. In effect, the auteur theorists had an easier job elevating Hawks to the pantheon in the 1950s and 1960s than they did with virtually any other director (Hitchcock excepted). Hawks lived a long, physically active life, enjoyed his lofty critical stature, and gave interviews which cannily contributed to his legendary status. He was still planning films, including a remake of the 1928 A Girl in Every Port (to star John Wayne), at the time of his death in 1977 after complications from a fall at his home in Palm Springs.

What is especially noteworthy about Hawks is the sheer range of films he made. He worked in virtually every conceivable genre but, more remarkably, he left his characteristic mark on so many of them. Far from being hemmed in by genre conventions, Hawks was able to impress upon these genre films his own personal worldview. It is essentially comic, rather than tragic, existential rather than religious, and irreverent rather than earnestly sentimental. Among the genres Hawks enriched with his contributions: the Western (Red River [1948], Rio Bravo [1959], El Dorado [1967]); the screwball comedy (Twentieth Century [1934], Bringing Up Baby [1938], His Girl Friday [1940], Man's Favorite Sport? [1963]); film noir (The Big Sleep [1946]); the historical epic (Land of the Pharaohs [1955]); the musical comedy (A Song is Born [1948], Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [1953]); science fiction and horror (The Thing [1951]); the combat film (Air Force [1943], The Dawn Patrol [1930]); the biopic (Sergeant York [1941]); the adventure film (The Big Sky [1952], Hatari! [1962]); the gangster film (Scarface [1932]); the racing film (The Crowd Roars [1932], Red Line 7000 [1965]); the prison film (The Criminal Code [1931]); the aviation film (Ceiling Zero [1936], Only Angels Have Wings [1939]). This generic diversity was matched by other significant contemporaries (Ford and Hitchcock did indeed make films other than Westerns and thrillers, respectively), but Hawks benefited from being able to avoid 'typing' himself as one kind of director, and therefore was able to move across genres. Irregardless of what genre he was working in, Hawks played around with gender conventions without ever absolutely undermining them, so that (to take just one example) the representation of 'effeminate' men occurred in films as generically different as Scarface and Bringing Up Baby. Yet gender play enabled Hawks to give his films the same kind of wry tonality.

This carnivalesque world of inversion and role reversal is most obviously expressed by the large number of nicknamed characters in many of his most characteristically 'Hawksian' works. There is little or no reverence for the traditional family in Hawks' work; even names given to characters at birth have little permanence. Some of the most distinctive films Hawks made just kinda lope along in an episodic way (Hatari!, El Dorado, and The Big Sky to name just three), and the seeming ease and informality of the story-telling is reinforced by a regular folksy or playfully sexy renaming of characters. Also, nicknames point to the primacy of the group over the individual; the value of male bonding through rivalry or through rite of passage; the elevation of male communities validated by codes of ethics and professionalism; the potential for women to gain access to male groups in unconventional ways; and the articulation of mystique-laden alternative forms of social and sexual arrangements outside of Hollywood's idealisation of the nuclear family. These are the traits of Hawks' work which are almost universally noted by film critics. Hawks, as a director who also had a hand in most of the screenplays of his films, created a separate world (one deracinated from history, politics, class) populated by male characters called, in chronological order of their appearance in 40 years of films, Spike, Salami, Speed, Buddy, Spud, Pipes, Dizzy, Jake, Texas, Smiley, Buzz, Baldy, Poppa, Bat, Kid, Pusher, Skip, Stooky, Cricket, Steve, Frenchy, Doghouse Reilly, Cherry, Skeely, Beeky, Chance, Dude, Stumpy, Colorado, Pockets, Chips, and Mississippi. And even more memorably, there are women called Tommy, Texas, Slim, Fen, Nikki, Feathers, Brandy, Dallas, Easy, Tex, Gaby, and Maudie. These colourful nicknames are the product of an inventive Adamic creator whose characters reinvent themselves, or who are reinvented in collaboration with other self-fashioned characters, and often in amused and amusing conflict.

Recognising nicknames in his films enables us to also recognise how much Hawks' films refuse or counteract, as Robin Wood wrote in 1981, the dominant ideology espoused by most Hollywood studio product. That is to say, as Wood puts it: "capitalism, the right to ownership; the home, the family, the monogamous couple; patriarchy. . ." (1) Between men, nicknaming is frequently the overt articulation of complex and fraught processes of male bonding, enabling the integration of an inexperienced male character into a group by his more experienced, and previously integrated, elders. In effect, the renaming serves as a kind of baptism into a masculinist world which would otherwise denigrate his real name, and hence identity, as 'effeminate'-as happens with Alan Bourdillon Traherne (James Caan) in El Dorado. Traherne's name provokes comic incredulity and ridicule, so his renaming as "Mississippi" by Cole Thornton (John Wayne) and Sheriff J.P. Harrah (Robert Mitchum) provides a step in his rite of passage as a man. Nicknames also enable men to express a depth of feeling for each other (including the homoerotic) in ways otherwise unavailable or socially unacceptable.

In Only Angels Have Wings, the greatest of Hawks' aviation films, Cary Grant's "Poppa" is the boss of the much older Kid (Thomas Mitchell), whose adoration of his taciturn employer exemplifies the frequent role inversions or role reversals in Hawks' films. It is probably likely that Hawks learned the value of nicknaming in his aviation career during the First World War-the renaming among aviators is still a testament to the men's desire to inhabit carefully constructed quasi-mythic romantic narratives. In aviation, nicknames are an essential component of the mystique of flight. And Hawks' films most directly centred upon aviation (Ceiling Zero, Only Angels Have Wings, The Thing, Air Force) are also the films that have the greatest abundance of nicknames. But the glamour inhering in nicknames in what are essentially male romance narratives translates to other masculinist genres, especially the Western. Rio Bravo, for example, contains a small group of flawed individuals who earn their redemption through group effort and the rejection of individual self-reliance. The rejection of given Christian names and the exclusive use of nicknames (Chance, Dude, Colorado, Stumpy) by this small band of misfits and underdogs exemplifies a necessary process of collective self-invention into an effective and cohesively self-contained force for good.

Certainly women are nicknamed in Hawks' films to indicate that they, too, have gained acceptance by men in groups on masculinist terms-they shed their conventional gender identities as passive, domestic, and feminine to become 'Hawksian women' who are involved in male formations and institutions in something more than just peripheral roles. The Hawksian woman's nickname signifies her status as a person permitted to join the men, if not on equal terms, then at least on terms that grant her something other than traditionally subordinate status. For example, Hatari!'s Anna Maria D'Allessandro (Elsa Martinelli) spares the Americans at the Kenyan animal farm the challenge of twisting their clumsy tongues around her 'foreign' name and she ingratiates herself with them by telling them that it's just fine to call her "Dallas." The film depends on her becoming an integrated part of the group dominated by Sean Mercer (John Wayne). After some typically Hawksian slapstick humour at her expense, she does. In The Thing, we don't even know Nikki's (Margaret Sheridan) real Christian name-she's got a nickname based on her surname, which befits a woman who can drink the square-jawed hero (Kenneth Tobey) under the table and best him at badinage. She plays an integral part in the operation of the Arctic base. In To Have and Have Not (1944) Marie (Lauren Bacall), for example, earns recognition for her cool stoicism in the face of danger in Vichy Martinique when Harry Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) renames her "Slim," while she reciprocates by dubbing him "Steve." As Hawks critics often note, "Slim" was the director's own nickname for his second wife, Nancy Gross, and Hawks' films never seem more personal than when they have 'fun,' that prized Hawksian virtue, with renaming. And Nikki's name reminds us how much Hawks mentored and cast female actors, like Bacall and Margaret Sheridan, who could be remade by Hawks into fantasy versions of ideal women like his second wife. And if Hawks' worldview was, in essence, a comic and carnivalesque one which revelled in gender/sex inversion, the informality, but importance, of nicknaming characters attest to a director's vision that disdained existential tragedy, conformity to institutions and authorities, and empty formality in social relations.

Hawks' distinctiveness as a filmmaker is apparent when comparing the Steve and Slim of To Have and Have Not with the Harry Morgan and Marie (renamed Lucy) in Michael Curtiz's version of Hemingway's novel in The Breaking Point (1950). A straighter rendition of the literary source, Curtiz's film has none of the 'fun' of Hawks' insolent, innuendo-laced classic, and glum Harry and Lucy are stuck with those names. It's a dour film noir, with a more frustrated, thwarted Harry Morgan enacted with more existential pain by John Garfield. Lucy is a sexless housewife whose one attempt to remake herself by dying her hair blonde is a domestic catastrophe. While To Have and Have Not hews closely to Hawks' own characteristic plain vanilla style (eye-level camera privileging dense formations of actors in the frame), Curtiz's film is frequently composed of characteristically expressionistic close-ups of individuals, shot from a low angle with wide-angle lenses, making Harry's conflicts torturously claustrophobic. "A man alone ain't got no chance," he intones repeatedly in his delirium at the end of the film. True enough, but Hawks' male protagonists understand that without going through such isolated agony. And, most notably, Curtiz's film abides by standard Hollywood ideological imperatives by making Harry and Lucy married parents of two noisy, demanding little girls. While Bogart and Bacall's characters seem more likely to ignore social norms about marriage and reproduction, in a typically Hawksian disregard for them, Garfield and his apron-clad drudge are required to remain together, even after Harry has lost his boat and his arm in order to provide for his family's constant demands for rent and "treats" for the girls. Curtiz's film firmly anchors the hero in the 1950s American family, premising a future redeemed by Harry's acceptance of running his father-in-law's lettuce farm and giving up the pipe-dream of being an independent fishing boat captain. His amputated arm is symbolic of Harry's social and sexual neutering in a typically bleak resolution for film noir; for Garfield's Harry, there is nothing but entrapment. To Have and Have Not, by stark contrast, ends with no such insistence on settled domesticity-Slim wiggles her way out of the dive she's performed in, and Harry takes pride and pleasure in her status as a public performer and alluring object of other men's desire. There's no suggestion in Hawks' film that Harry would give up his boat to settle for the dubious comforts of domesticity with wife and kids.

Therefore, if To Have and Have Not can stand as a prototypical Hawksian work, it's easy to pose it in antithesis to the work of many, if not most, American film directors. Hawks created a remarkably consistent popular body of work which promised freedom from constraints posed by organised religion, traditional family structures, and the vicissitudes of history and politics, or even nationalistic myth-making. It's a body of work that has been accused of ahistorical and adolescent escapism, but Hawks' fans rejoice in his oeuvre's remarkable avoidance of Hollywood's religiosity, bathos, flag-waving, and sentimentality.

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© David Boxwell, May 2002

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Endnotes:

1. Robin Wood, Howard Hawks. London: BFI Publishing, 1983: 1

Filmography

Films directed by Hawks:

The Road to Glory (1926) (and Story, Prod)

Fig Leaves (1926) (and Story, Prod)

The Cradle Snatchers (1927)

Paid to Love (1927) (and Prod)

A Girl in Every Port (1928) (and Story, Prod)

Fazil (1928)

The Air Circus (1928) (primarily a silent film, with some sound sequences, directed by Lewis Seiler)

Trent's Last Case (1929)

The Dawn Patrol (1930) (and Story [uncredited], Co-scr)

The Criminal Code (1931) (and Co-prod)

Scarface (subtitled: Shame of a Nation) (1932) (and Co-Prod)

The Crowd Roars (1932) (and Story)

Tiger Shark (1932)

Today We Live (1933) (and Prod)

The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933) (uncredited Dir, completed by W.S. Van Dyke)

Viva Villa! (1934) (Co-scr and uncredited Dir; completed by Jack Conway)

Twentieth Century (1934) (and Prod)

	Bringing Up Baby

Barbary Coast (1935)

Ceiling Zero (1936) (and Co-Prod)

The Road to Glory (1936)

Come and Get It (1936, film completed by William Wyler)

Bringing Up Baby (1938) (and Prod)

Only Angels Have Wings (1939) (and Story, Prod)

His Girl Friday (1940) (and Prod)

The Outlaw (1940) (uncredited; completed by Howard Hughes)

Sergeant York (1941)

Ball of Fire (1941)

Air Force (1943) (and Co-Prod)

Corvette K-225 (1943) (film credited to Richard Rosson; Co-scr, Prod and Dir Supervision)

To Have and Have Not (1944) (and Prod)

The Big Sleep (1946) (and Prod)

Red River (1948) (and Prod)

	Red River

A Song is Born (1948)

I Was a Male War Bride (UK title: You Can't Sleep Here) (1949)

The Thing (subtitled: From Another World) (1951) (film credited to Christian Nyby; Co-scr, Prod, and Dir Supervision)

The Big Sky (1952) (and Prod)

O. Henry's Full House (1952) (episode: "The Ransom of Red Chief")

Monkey Business (1952)

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) (musical numbers directed by Jack Cole)

Land of the Pharaohs (1955) (and Prod)

Rio Bravo (1959) (and Prod)

Hatari! (1962) (and Prod)

Man's Favorite Sport? (1963) (and Prod)

Red Line 7000 (1965) (and Prod)

El Dorado (1967) (and Prod)

Rio Lobo (1970) (and Prod)