Paid To Love

Howard Hawks' Paid To Love is one of the director's early silent films, made before his style really crystallized during the transition to talkies. The film revolves around an utterly silly plot: the poverty-stricken imaginary kingdom of San Savona is trying to get a loan from the American banker Peter Roberts (J. Farrell MacDonald), but before it can, the King (Thomas Jefferson) must marry off his son Prince Michael (George O'Brien), who is more interested in cars than women and whose perpetual bachelorhood represents a threat to the kingdom's stability. The King and Roberts thus try to find a woman to attract Michael's attention, an "alarm clock" to wake him out of his disinterest in love and sex. After a trip to Paris, the King and Roberts locate the performer Dolores (Virginia Valli), who acts like a wild woman in Parisian bars to entertain gullible tourists, and they decide that she'll be perfect to seduce the Prince and draw his attention to the pleasures of women.

There's an obvious gay... well, it can't even be called a subtext it's so obvious. The clear implication initially is that Michael is gay: a bachelor, uninterested in women, who prefers to do guy things like fix cars and shoot at target ranges. In one early scene, he's contrasted against his cousin, the lascivious ladies' man Prince Eric (William Powell, delightful as ever even without the use of his voice). The two men enter the throne room in turn, each of them passing a pretty maid in the hallway. As each man passes, Hawks playfully inserts a closeup of the maid's legs below her skirt as she sashays past. Eric of course turns his head to look, so the closeup suggests his lecherous point of view, admiring the female beauty he sees everywhere (earlier, his face is hidden for the first few moments of his first scene by the girl who's passionately kissing him). Michael, however, seems blithely unaware of the maid and her legs, so when Hawks cuts to the closeup of the maid's legs, it's no longer a point of view shot but a reminder of what the Prince is missing as he walks by, barely looking at the maid. Michael seems totally oblivious to female charms, but naturally all it takes to change him will be a glimpse of the right woman, and immediately he'll fall in love.

The film's premise is the stuff of goofy sex comedy, but Hawks only delivers on the promise of sexy mayhem in small, concentrated bursts and some particularly effective sight gags. For the most part, the physical comedy is stiff and unfunny, and the film's pace is a little on the languid side for such a lightweight comedy. Hawks' slapstick is inert, though there are early signs of his interest in a comedy of humiliation, especially in the scene where Roberts is discomfited by his inability to straighten out his uncomfortable-looking suit for his first meeting with the royal family.


The film is at its best in the isolated moments when it displays bursts of naughty invention and sly humor. In one scene, Eric waits in hiding for Dolores, who, through some tortuously set up misunderstandings, has been seducing him instead of Prince Michael. As Dolores walks into the room, not noticing Eric sitting in the corner, she begins undressing, and Hawks keeps cutting between tantalizing glimpses of undergarments and flashes of fabric being pulled off and Eric, sitting quietly in the corner, leering and, hilariously, peeling a banana, suggestively touching its tip as he watches. It's one of those jokes so blatant in its symbolic sexuality that one can hardly believe the filmmakers dared, and those moments, though spread out thinly through this film, represent its best bits.

Hawks' style is simple and direct, though hardly static. He makes interesting use of slow pans and tracking shots, subtly suggesting connections and characters' thoughts with movements of the camera. In one scene, Dolores has arrived at Michael's home unaware that he's the man she's being paid to seduce — because, of course, the conventions of such romances require that the bad girl genuinely fall in love with the man she's planning to con. It's a rainy night and her car stalls out, and after a struggle through the mud and steep slopes outside she collapses at the Prince's doorstep. When she wakes up, she's naked in bed, a sheet draped across her body, and the camera pans around the room from her point of view, taking in the sight of her clothes strewn around the room, on the floor and draped on chairs, until finally her gaze settles on Michael. Without a hint of overt sexuality or nudity, this pan economically suggests the mental picture that's certainly running through Dolores' head at this point, of this stranger undressing her and slipping her naked body into bed.

Paid To Love represents a time when Hawks was still more or less a novice director rather than the fully formed master he'd develop into soon after the switch from silents to talkies. The mostly functional intertitles occasionally contain a wry pun or punchline, but the bulk of the film's humor is visual and physical; Hawks' gift for verbal banter couldn't really develop in text form, particularly since so many of his best later films featured torrents of words in a constant, fast-paced rush. This film isn't even as indicative of the director's future direction as the marvelous A Girl In Every Port, though there are certainly hints, here and there, of Hawks' sensibility forming even at this early point. For that, and for its moments of unsubtle sexual humor, it's worth seeing for Hawks' admirers, though the director's true breakthroughs were still several years ahead of him.

Rio Lobo

This is a contribution to the Late Films Blogathon being hosted by David Cairns at Shadowplay.

Howard Hawks' final film, Rio Lobo, is an awkward, limping, but still often poignant and entertaining goodbye from the great director. It is the concluding chapter of his loose, self-plagiarizing trilogy of John Wayne Westerns, another film cast from the mold that produced the classics Rio Bravo and El Dorado. Like its predecessors, Rio Lobo centers on Wayne as a tough but good-natured man of principle, in this case the Union officer Cord McNally. McNally is looking for justice following an incident at the end of the Civil War when a Union traitor allowed a gold convoy to be hijacked by Confederate troops, with one of McNally's best friends dying in the attack. With the war over, McNally enters into an unlikely alliance with two former Confederates, the Mexican-French Cordona (Jorge Rivero, an exceptionally unlikely Confederate officer) and Tuscarora (Robert Mitchum's son Christopher, singularly lacking in his father's screen presence). This trio, eventually joined by the lovely drifter Shasta (Jennifer O'Neill) and Tuscarora's crotchety, cross-eyed old father Phillips (Jack Elam), set out to find McNally's justice while also resolving a battle over land rights in the town of Rio Lobo.

The film has all the ingredients of a classic Hawks adventure, taking a disarmingly offhand approach as the heroes rush headlong into danger. The script has the signature laidback feel of late Hawks, spiced with some mild banter and goofy humor, but something feels off about it all. A big problem is the casting, which is almost top-to-bottom awful. Hawks' other two late Wayne Westerns had been packed with supporting turns from Robert Mitchum, James Caan, Arthur Hunnicutt, Walter Brennan and Angie Dickinson, and their ease and charm with the quick-witted scripts were crucial to the films. For Rio Lobo, Hawks pulled together a cast nearly as inexperienced and undistinguished as the young troupe he'd gathered for his equally clumsy racing picture Red Line 7000. Only experienced character actor Jack Elam is really fun to watch, in a campy, over-the-top role; the rest of the cast is simply lackluster. The usual Hawks charm occasionally shows through anyway, which is to say that one gets what he's going for, even if the actors can rarely pull it off. O'Neill has a certain appealingly matter-of-fact attitude that makes her laughing banter go down easy, but she has no depth, no feeling, and Hawks did her no favors by casting her in basically the same role, of the proud woman with a checkered past, that had previously been played with far more wit and pathos by Angie Dickinson.

But O'Neill at least makes an impression. Most of the rest of the cast is utterly unappealing. Hawks' great hangout Westerns had relied on a minimum of gunplay and a maximum of relaxed wordplay, and for that he'd needed actors who could be comfortable in their skins, and with one another, who could be captivating while simply lounging back in a chair and verbally sparring. He comes up empty here, and seems to know it. Even Wayne, who was near the end of his own career and ailing, seems ill-at-ease, and in any event his laconic manner can't compensate for the non-entities he's surrounded with. The actors can't shoulder all the blame, though, because the script is nearly as haphazard as the performances. There are some fun lines — asked why Cordona had taken Shasta's clothes off after she'd fainted, he replies that he and McNally flipped for it, and he won — but otherwise there's a whole lot of clunky exposition and banal dialogue. There's too much purely functional chatter, the kind of placeholder fluff that one suspects the Hawks of a few years earlier would've improvised or rewritten on the spot, but perhaps he didn't have the energy anymore.


In that respect the film is kind of sad, as though it bears the marks of Hawks' age, his inability to marshal all his tremendous talents the way he once had with such verve and wit. He'd live another seven years, but he wouldn't make another film. In many ways, the film is about saying goodbye, is about what it's like to be the man of action growing old. If one reads between the lines, Rio Lobo begins to seem like Wayne and Hawks, two old men at the ends of their careers, wondering what old age could possibly mean for men like them, men who had in many ways defined themselves by youth and virility and vigor. To see Wayne, old and sickly and bulkier than ever, struggling to mount a horse, is to know that Rio Lobo is a kind of farewell to the cowboy who'd grown old onscreen — it's a long way back from here to the young, surprisingly skinny gunslinger defining his iconic image in John Ford's 1939 Stagecoach.

One sees the difference in Wayne's relationship to the women, too. Wayne had never been the most comfortable actor in romantic situations, and Hawks had always gleefully taken advantage of that discomfort, making it the chink in the tough guy's armor, pushing him into situations where beautiful younger women could upstage him with their frankness and their beauty. In Rio Lobo, though, the duo finally acknowledge Wayne's unlikelihood as a romantic hero; he's now the aging father, uninterested in women and uninteresting to them. When Shasta throws in with McNally's group, Cordona immediately latches onto her, aggressively pursuing her, but she spends the night cuddled up next to McNally — not because she wants him, but because he's "comfortable," because he's not a sexual threat the way the fiery, passionate Cordona is. McNally laughs it off but the way he keeps bringing it up subtly underscores how much it stung, how much he took it as an insult. The tough guy, the gunslinger, the cowboy, has become sexually irrelevant, to the extent that this beautiful young woman doesn't even consider him in terms of sexuality. She thinks nothing of spending the night curled up next to him under a blanket because she obviously considers him sexless, safe, and one feels how much that must hurt McNally — and by extension, Wayne and especially Hawks, who always prized his ability to win the attention of far younger women.


Hawks' insecurity with this theme leads him, perhaps, to counterbalance it with a scene where Cordona, fleeing from the bad guys, stumbles into a young woman's house, where the topless Amelita (Sherry Lansing) waits, barely covering herself with her hands. The scene reads as racy and flirtatious — and it might've come across as funnier if the actors weren't so bland — but it's an obviously gratuitous display of T&A, a particularly blatant bit of pointless, seedy pandering. The moment is redeemed only slightly by the film's climax, in which Amelita, thirsty for revenge, proves her mettle as a tough Hawksian woman.

Still, this is a Hawks film, and if the casting and scripting aren't up to his normal standards, there are still pleasures to be had here. Perhaps to make up for the lack of compensating joys in the characterization, the film is much heavier on action than either Rio Bravo or El Dorado, and the action is well-staged and viscerally exciting. During the lengthy opening sequence, Confederate bandits rob a Union train using a string of contrivances — a nest of hornets, torches, grease, ropes strung across the tracks — that are ludicrously convoluted but play out great on screen. The robbery leads directly into a cleverly staged pursuit from the Union troops, with the troops splitting up at each fork, so that eventually McNally is riding through the center of a shallow stream all by himself, seeking out his prey. Later, the trio of McNally, Cordona and Phillips lead an assault on the ranch of their enemy Ketchum (Victor French), and Hawks' tense staging of their stealth dispatching of the ranch's bodyguards is impeccable.

But he has the most fun with the grand finale, after the ranch shootout. At one point, when McNally calls a huddle and tells his allies that they're going to hole up in a jail, it's a kind of metafictional wink: he might as well have turned to his friends and said, "hey, did you ever see Rio Bravo or El Dorado?" The actual jail hangout sequence is pretty short, but Hawks quickly follows it up with a re-enactment of the prisoner exchange and shootout with which he ended Rio Bravo. This time, though, it's the bad guys who think to throw dynamite into McNally's position, along with other subtle variations that show Hawks having fun recycling old plots and old situations. The film is frequently clunky and awkward, but it's also often charming, exciting and, in its examination of the aging Western archetype — and the aging filmmaker behind the camera — surprisingly poignant.

A Song Is Born

Howard Hawks amassed such a consistent, and consistently fascinating, oeuvre by always making, with very few exceptions, only the films he really wanted to make. In an era when directors had very little power or prestige in Hollywood, Hawks was notable for working largely independently, outside of the usual studio system; he moved from studio to studio, breaking contracts and going elsewhere when he couldn't get his way. Hawks thus earned a reputation as a director who seldom bowed to the pressure of producers, who always stuck to his own vision. One of the few exceptions to this independence was A Song Is Born, which Hawks made at the insistence of Samuel Goldwyn, who got Hawks to say yes to the project by, quite simply, offering him an exorbitant amount of money. The resulting film feels like the work of a man who's just earning a paycheck, too. It's not so much a remake of Hawks' Ball of Fire as it is a shameless pilfering of the earlier film, barely bothering to alter the example set by its predecessor; the film basically counts on fresh audiences who hadn't seen Ball of Fire. Hawks of course was famous for such pilfering and recycling. If a bit worked in one film, he wasn't afraid to translate it into a new context, and late in his career he kept remaking the basic scenario of Rio Bravo, riffing on its relationships and structure in interesting ways. This is nothing like that: A Song Is Born simply repeats, by rote, the best lines and moments from the earlier film, barely bothering to offer anything new. It's stale, and dull, and comes off as the one thing Hawks otherwise never made: a formulaic flop.

The basic set-up is taken right from Ball of Fire. Seven professors, six old bachelors and a younger man named Hobart Frisbee (Danny Kaye), are researching an ambitious musical encyclopedia that would chronicle the entire history of music, with accompanying recordings of various musical forms. In the earlier film the professors needed to learn about slang, but in any event the film's plot is triggered by Frisbee's realization that he's out of touch, that he needs to go out into the world and get refreshed on current events in his field, folk music. In other words, he needs to learn about jazz. The film's enduring appeal — indeed, virtually its only appeal — comes from the inclusion of musical appearances by some of the great jazz musicians of the era, including Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Mel Powell, Lionel Hampton and many more. At its best, the film is merely an excuse to throw all these musicians together into massive jam sessions. It's fun stuff, and Hawks thankfully put his foot down by refusing to segregate the black and the white jazz musicians, one of the few stands he took on a picture he otherwise didn't seem to care about at all.

The jam sessions and the scenes at jazz nightclubs thus incorporate both white and black musicians, refusing to ghettoize the black players or maintain a racist separation. The notoriously conservative Hawks was at least enlightened enough to recognize that such attitudes would have been as out of place in the free-wheeling jazz milieu as they were in the lily-white Song of the Thin Man, which was shot the year before and similarly tried to chronicle the jazz scene, but with no black musicians at all. Hawks' film is thus notable for acknowledging the music's black roots — one number explicitly chronicles the nascent origins of jazz in slave spirituals — and the importance and talent of black musicians. The whole crew reportedly wasted a lot of time simply jamming and listening, both on camera and off, but not much of this no doubt lively atmosphere really makes it into the film. A lot of the music is infectious and enjoyable, but there's not enough of it to distract from the rote dullness surrounding it.


Part of the problem is Danny Kaye, who Hawks was saddled with since the film was conceived by Goldwyn mainly as a vehicle for the MGM comedic star. There's also the problem of Virginia Mayo, taking on the Barbara Stanwyck role from the earlier film, as singer and gangster's moll Honey Swanson. Mayo doesn't have Stanwyck's side-of-the-mouth toughness, or her edgy sex appeal, just as Kaye doesn't have the earnest goofiness that Gary Cooper brought to the role of the stiff professor in Ball of Fire. Instead, Kaye's Frisbee just seems stiff and boring, which is fitting for a stuffy, starched professor but doesn't leave much wiggle room for his eventual realization that he loves Honey and wants to be looser and freer. Hawks can't coax the comedic performance he got out of Cooper from Kaye, nor can he get Mayo to give Honey quite the edge she requires. Mayo's actually fine here, radiating a cheery girl next door quality, and she infuses the best patter from Ball of Fire — like her veiled naughty allusions when trying to convince Frisbee to let her stay overnight — with just enough zing to get them across. But she lacks the slight dangerous quality, the realistic vibe of a been-there-done-that kind of gal, that Stanwyck naturally brought to the role. If there wasn't that precedent to compare her against, Mayo would probably seem perfectly okay.

So in one sense, the only real problem with A Song Is Born is coming second. If it weren't for the familiarity of it all — and a majority of the film is outright stolen, line for line and sometimes shot for shot, from the earlier film — A Song Is Born might be a slight but enjoyable musical comedy. Unfortunately, as it is it's impossible to avoid the comparison, and A Song Is Born can't help but seem especially wispy in relation to its source. There's just no imagination here, none of the playfulness that Hawks so often brought to his best works. Kaye is allowed to simply be a dreary killjoy, rather than being lovably shy and naïve. And unlike in Ball of Fire, Hawks never manages to do much with the gangster subplot that takes over the film for its finale, as the gangster Tony Crow (Steve Cochran) arrives to claim Honey as his girl. The whole thing just seems rote, so much so that Hawks even skips over the great gag where Frisbee, confronted with fighting Crow, quickly teaches himself boxing from a book before pummeling the thug. Hawks skips the joke and just has Frisbee pounce on the gangster and beat him up.

That's the film's dominant aesthetic: cutting corners, recycling earlier bits but without the edge, without the humor, without the unpredictable chemistry of fine actors bouncing off one another. The basic elements are all there, the framework of the fine film that Hawks had, in fact, already made just seven years earlier. This time around, the framework is all there is; it's never filled in with any of the warmth and excitement that would've been needed to make this one of Hawks' more creditable attempts at a remake, like the way in which El Dorado riffs on the central conceit of Rio Bravo. Instead, Hawks took his money and turned out a generic film that's only enlivened by its sporadic bursts of music and its status as a Hollywood record of the era's jazz scene.

El Dorado

[This review has been cross-posted at Decisions At Sundown, a blog started by Jon Lanthier and dedicated exclusively to the Western genre. I cross-post all of my Western reviews with this blog, where I am one of several contributors.]

El Dorado is a sneaky kind of movie, in terms of narrative. It starts out like it's got purpose, a strong forward drive the likes of which hadn't been seen anywhere near Howard Hawks' increasingly languid cinema in years. It sets up, quickly and economically, a rivalry over water rights between kindly farmer Kevin MacDonald (R.G. Armstrong) and the nasty Bart Jason (Edward Asner). Stuck in the middle of this conflict are two old friends, the town sheriff J.P. Harrah (Robert Mitchum) and his older mentor Cole Thornton (John Wayne), who came into town as a hired gun for Jason until he realized what was going on. The film's opening section establishes a tense situation, a classic Western pressure cooker, and when Cole accidentally kills one of MacDonald's sons and then himself gets shot in revenge by the clan's feisty daughter Joey (Michele Carey), things look to be really heating up. Hawks, of course, takes the opportunity to insert the first of the film's radical ellipses, shifting away from the action and leaping forward, in a few quick scenes, several months into the future, with Cole now safely away from the town of El Dorado. It's almost a panicked reaction, as though Hawks was afraid he was getting to the climax too fast. The rest of the film pretty much meanders, slowly but surely, back towards the tension of those opening scenes.

A funny thing happens along the way, too, as not only does Hawks take his time getting back to the center of the action, but he begins morphing the film into a virtual remake of his previous John Wayne Western, Rio Bravo. This predecessor is already hinted at in the film's opening minutes, with a shot of Cole walking along a street that runs diagonally across the frame, a composition that recurred throughout Rio Bravo as Wayne's John T. Chance patrolled his town. By inserting the shot here, into the opening's series of establishing shots, Hawks hints at his eagerness to revisit his earlier success. The joke goes that Hawks liked Rio Bravo so much he made it twice more, with El Dorado and its successor Rio Lobo, and at times it virtually is a joke. One can sense Hawks and Wayne and company chuckling at getting away with remaking their own picture just seven years later, and the way the plot begins to fall in line with its ancestor is decidedly tongue-in-cheek. The result is another light, low-key charmer of a Western from Hawks, an amalgam of everything that made his previous efforts in the genre so much fun; there's even a visual reference to the cattle drive from Red River, this time with a herd of horses filling the screen. Once Cole makes his way back to El Dorado, the film's mirroring of Rio Bravo becomes more and more complete, as various pieces fall into place. It seems that during one of the narrative ellipses, Mitchum's J.P. got his story crossed up with Rio Bravo's Dean Martin character: a no-good girl whirled into town, seduced him and broke his heart, leaving him a useless drunkard and the town laughingstock.

Naturally, this leaves him singularly unable to deal with the MacDonald/Jason rivalry, which is just now reaching a head as Jason hires the ace gunman Nelse McLeod (Christopher George). Mitchum is arguably a perfect choice for the drunk sheriff, the formerly noble and strong-willed lawman brought low by a bad woman. With his sleepy eyes and hunched posture, he stumbles around, grasping his stomach, slumped over, slamming into things. His performance is both more harrowing than Martin's, and also somehow more broadly comic, even cartoony, channeling the same pop-eyed lunacy he brought to his homicidal preacher in Night of the Hunter. At one point, when Cole hits him over the head with a metal pan, J.P. freezes stiffly, his eyes wide, looking like one of Bugs Bunny's frazzled opponents. There's nothing here as iconic as Martin's scrambling for a coin thrown into a spittoon, but Mitchum's performance is complex and multilayered, heartrending and hilarious in roughly equal measures.


The film is packed with such bravura performances, which is good because even more than Rio Bravo itself this is a true hangout movie, a movie about dialogue, about the easygoing exchange of barbed witticisms. Filling out the cast of Rio Bravo analogues are Bull (Arthur Hunnicutt in the Walter Brennan cranky old man role), Mississippi (James Caan standing in for Ricky Nelson's cocky young fighter) and Maudie (Charlene Holt replacing Angie Dickinson). The cast may be different, but the dynamics are startlingly familiar, so the pleasures here are in seeing how Hawks and company weave variations on the formula they'd established. Certainly, Mississippi gets a great introduction, stepping into a bar and announcing to an older gunfighter that he's after revenge for his dead friend. It turns out, he's a knife-fighter rather than a gunfighter, a Wild West anomaly, further set apart by his goofy hat and his general naïveté. He provides much of the film's comic relief, along with Hunnicutt's Bull, who often communicates through his trumpet. As for Holt, she had previously been great in small roles for Hawks' middling Man's Favorite Sport? and Red Line 7000, an electrifying and sexy presence on the fringes of those films, and here she finally gets a good showcase in an actual peak Hawks production. Her banter with Wayne is typically awkward, marked by the stop/start rhythms that reveal the aging tough guy's discomfort with romance and emotional expression. It's a virtual repeat of the hesitant Wayne/Dickinson chemistry, though Holt doesn't get quite as much to do, beyond memorably reprising Dickinson's va-va-voom lingerie modeling scenes.

These kinds of mirrors recur throughout the film, and part of the fun is waiting to see when Hawks (with screenwriter Leigh Brackett) is going to stick to the script, and when he's going to shake things up. Again and again, he riffs subtle variations on Rio Bravo's key scenes, like the one where Cole and J.P. track a killer to a saloon full of hostile gunmen. Here, instead of hiding in the rafters and revealing himself with blood dripping into a beer glass, the killer is behind a piano and reveals his presence through the nervous piano player's wrong notes. Elsewhere, Hawks stages a great gunfight at a church, where the bullets pinging off the bells not only provide a deafening soundtrack to the scene, but contribute to the strategy of the battle. The film is packed with great moments like this, scenes where Hawks' careful, deliberate staging turns every cut, every movement, into something graceful and purposeful, whether he's shooting an action climax or a simple dialogue exchange. The dialogue is fantastic too, especially since the amazing ensemble cast does such justice to that characteristic Hawks looseness, and to Brackett's witty writing. The recurring gags, like J.P.'s absentmindedness about just who Mississippi is, are as good as Rio Bravo's best running gags (and Walter Brennan's crankiness about always being told to stay in the back of the jail is given a nod here in the form of a similar brief scene with Hunnicutt).

The crackling dialogue also asserts itself in the film's emphasis on storytelling over action; the characters spend a lot of time talking, telling tales, rather than doing anything. Mississippi's vengeful showdown is paced by his languidly meted out story about his dead friend and his mission of catching up with the men who killed him. Then McLeod tells Cole a story about a drunk sheriff and a no-good woman, not realizing that 1) he's talking about Cole's friend; and 2) he's retelling the story behind Rio Bravo. One of the funniest of these stories is a brief interlude with a Swedish gunsmith, who tells the tragicomic tale of the nearly blind gunman who previously owned Mississippi's shotgun. Later, Maudie tells J.P. about her long friendship with Cole, and her great debt to him, and we realize that she's another Rio Bravo echo, beyond her faint resemblance to Angie Dickinson and her sexually suggestive wit (best showcased in some hilarious dialogue about a "bouncing" bed). Like Dickinson's Feathers, Maudie is also a gambling widow; she's just further along in her relationship with Wayne's character when we meet her. Indeed, her character's familiarity allows Hawks the freedom to omit key scenes, like the late reconciliation between her and Cole, which takes place offscreen, relying on the memory of Rio Bravo's Wayne/Dickinson showdown over the girl's skimpy performing outfit.

Ultimately, what's great about El Dorado is how Hawks and his cast take what should have been an utter throwaway project, a shameless retread of a relatively recent film, and turn it into something special of its own. It's a roughshod film, casually skipping over long periods of time with inexplicable edits — and sloppy editing is also responsible for the one sight gag that just plain doesn't work, a lamely executed stunt that's supposed to show James Caan leaping under a charging horse's hooves. Somehow, though, these elliptical narrative shenanigans only add to the film's indelible charm. This is especially apparent in the ending, when after the final showdown Hawks jumps ahead a small amount of time to show J.P. and Cole patrolling the town together, both injured, both limping with crutches, bickering and laughing. It's a wonderful moment, these two crotchety gunmen propped up on crutches, patrolling the town: it's absurd, strangely touching, and funny all at once, just like the film as a whole.

Red Line 7000

No one but Howard Hawks could have made Red Line 7000. It is a truly Hawksian picture through and through, bearing the distinctive imprint of his work in every frame. Not that this means it's any good, because for the most part it really isn't. In fact, it's an almost defiantly bad movie, as though Hawks was trying to figure out just how awkward and lackadaisical most of the film's elements could be while still making a picture that, overall, always feels like a Hawks picture. His signature themes are all there: the antagonistic relationships between men and women, the camaraderie of men in dangerous occupations, the anxieties of the women who love them. But it's all so naked here, so unvarnished; it's the essence of Hawks without the pleasures afforded by his crackling dialogue, his ability to mold performances, his feel for characterization. The characters are stripped-down to nothing, the script is flat and resolutely undramatic, and the dialogue is mostly utilitarian and mostly given to the women; the men all but grunt and slur out monosyllables.

For the story, Hawks returned to very early in his career, to the fascination with stock car racing that generated his early James Cagney talkie The Crowd Roars. Like the earlier film, Red Line 7000 is set at a race track, in a tightly knit milieu of drivers, mechanics, and the girls who hang around waiting for their men to either crash and burn or win the glory. But while the earlier film focused on the races and relationships of just two men, more or less, Red Line disperses the action between a loose group of men, none of them very clearly defined or developed. There's the wiry, angry Mike (James Caan), who's got a chip on his shoulder and insists that he won't take anything "secondhand," including his women — which unfortunately counts out the woman who most catches his eye, the French Gabrielle (Marianna Hill), who showed up with Dan (Skip Ward) but was soon available. There's Ned (John Robert Crawford), a beefy farm boy eager to prove himself, to become a big shot both on the track and off. There's Pat (Norman Alden), the knowing older man who presides over the younger racers and tries to dispense his wisdom to them. There are also the women who love them. Holly (Gail Hire) showed up looking for a racer who'd died the day before, and is convinced she's cursed until one of the men convinces her otherwise. Pat's sister Julie (Laura Devon) pines pathetically for her man even though he abandons her. And the wise bar owner Lindy (Charlene Holt), after losing two husbands to car crashes, has decided to marry a banker instead.

Among this entire cast, there's very little screen presence or real acting talent. Caan, of course, is promising in an early role, projecting a side-of-the-mouth tough guy defiance that really becomes something special in the late scene where he's required to be contrite and abased while still holding up this tough guy façade. Hill is also fun to watch, in much the same way as the rather awkward, rough multinational cast of Hawks' earlier Hatari!, in which Hill would've fit nicely with her vivacious manner. Her character seems modeled roughly on Elsa Martinelli's in the earlier film, as a lively exotic foreigner. The rest of the cast, composed almost entirely of inexperienced newcomers, amateurs and TV actors, ranges from merely boring to jaw-droppingly awful. In the latter category is surely Crawford (who indeed never acted again), one of several anonymous, hulking Aryan blonde types glaring his way through the film from beneath a heavy caveman brow. But there's a special kind of terrible in Hire's performance, which seems to have been modeled off of Hawks' famed coaching of Lauren Bacall for her first roles. Hawks even gives Hire a song to sing, or more accurately lip-sync along with, but there's no comparison with Bacall's memorable ballad from To Have and Have Not, despite Hawks' blatant attempts to make the connection through his mise en scène. (Though this bizarre number does have its own campy charms, possessing a peculiar breed of outrageous awfulness.) Likewise, 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?

Of course, even if the cast here had been up to the standards of Hawks' previous work, the film would still have more than its share of problems. Foremost among these is the shockingly indifferent quality of the script, which despite being based off of a Hawks story, shows little of his characteristic flare. As in most of his late work, there's also pretty much no story: a series of races, a few small dramas, some romance, hints of rivalry. But whereas films like Rio Bravo and Hatari! compensated for their formlessness with verve and wit and complex characters, there's nothing here to distract from the numbing blankness of the script. Here, the characters aren't even remotely likable, let alone fun to spend time with. And when the audience has to be rooting for not just one, but two of the central romances to fail because the men are such obnoxious, unrepentant jerks, there's clearly something wrong — especially since Hawks, in a sappy denouement that has the women all but throw themselves at these assholes, shows no awareness of just how insipid these characters are.


All of this means that the film's primary pleasure is, as in The Crowd Roars (which had suffered from similar problems over 30 years earlier; so much for maturity), the viscerally exciting racing footage. As always, Hawks has a feel for danger, and the races are vibrant and tense, with inserts of the red speed needle inching its way up into the danger zone as the men jockey for position. In a weird way, the undistinguished nature of the cast actually amps up the suspense. If there was a strong central driver or two who dominated the action, there'd be little real suspense about Hawks killing his stars off early in the film. But in this case, no one stands out so everybody's equal, and everybody's in danger; the races feel especially vital because nobody ever seems really safe. This is perhaps the philosophy behind Hawks' occasional preference for non-star group casts, and in his more successful films in this vein — like Air Force or The Thing From Another World — the films project a democratic spirit of cooperation and equality, a sense that everyone's important, both to the film and to the job being done within the film. There are hints of that spirit in Red Line 7000 as well, in the moments of emphasis given to the pit crews, which contribute anonymously to the success of the drivers.

The film is also interesting for its treatment of the women, who are at least arguably less boring than their male counterparts. Hawks, as always, was interested in how women could be incorporated into a distinctively male world, and in this respect the introduction of Julie marks her out as a potential successor to the line of strong Hawksian women. She rides up on a motorcycle and immediately begins bantering and arguing with Ned, who says he thought she was a boy at first. Later, it becomes apparent that she tries to fit in with the guys because of her brother, who's always treated her like a pal. "Cut it out," he says, "you're acting like a female," and her retort is one of the film's few real flashes of Hawksian wit: "well, what do you think I am, your brother?" Unfortunately, despite Julie's spunky demeanor in her first appearance, she quickly descends into a mire of weepy melodramatics, and has an utterly silly love scene with Ned where she keeps pathetically asking him if she's sexy while lounging on top of him in her underwear.

All in all, Red Line 7000 has to be considered Hawks' worst film, and it's a failure in a distinctly Hawksian mold; it's a bad film that could only be Hawks' bad film. That's something, I guess, and there are sparks of the director's characteristic talents here and there. The final scene, in particular, is quite good, summing up the typical Hawksian virtues of endurance and commitment under pressure. The three central women (Julie, Gabrielle and Holly) are sitting in the stands at a race, watching the action, standing up in unison whenever there's a close call, their eyes darting back and forth around the track. Slowly, over the course of the race, Hawks keeps returning to the three girls, framed in a head-on shot together, more and more frequently, cutting away from the actual race more and more. Finally, he settles on them as they roll their eyes, smile and make jokes to each other about the repetitive nature of their lives, waiting for men who they're afraid might die at any time. It's a perfect shot, a direct statement of the conflicted ideas about masculine pursuits that have woven throughout Hawks' entire oeuvre. Then Hawks abruptly cuts away from the women to a fiery crash, and the film simply ends there, as though suggesting that there really is no end, that the cycle will continue to repeat itself in endless variations long after the camera has stopped rolling on these characters.

Rio Bravo

[This review has been cross-posted at Decisions At Sundown, a blog started by Jon Lanthier and dedicated exclusively to the Western genre. From now on I will be cross-posting all of my Western reviews with this blog, where I am one of several contributors.]

Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo is the pinnacle of the director's late style, in which he increasingly stripped his films down into ambling, nearly plotless examinations of his signature themes and the interactions of his characters. Hawks' cinema was always more about relationships than stories: relationships between male friends, between men and women getting to know one another, between professionals working on dangerous jobs together. Rio Bravo is about all these things, and as in much of Hawks' other late work, all the extraneous stuff, like the narrative, is pared away to focus more directly on these relationships as they develop and change. The plot itself is utter simplicity. Small-town sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) arrests Joe Burdette (Claude Akins), the brother of the notorious outlaw Nathan Burdette (John Russell). Chance holds Joe in the town's tiny jail, while Nathan schemes to break his brother out. The film was famously inspired by Hawks' well-known hatred of Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, in which Gary Cooper's small-town sheriff must plead with the unwilling townspeople to help him face off against an outlaw who's coming for revenge. The macho Hawks obviously despised this show of weakness, and conceived of Chance as standing virtually alone against the encroaching outlaws, aided only by a motley assortment of true friends: the drunken former deputy Dude (Dean Martin), the old cripple Stumpy (Walter Brennan), and eventually the quick-shooting young Colorado (Ricky Nelson).

From this slight material, an archetypal white hat/black hat story, Hawks developed one of the great works of cinema. His patient pacing allows plenty of time for the character arcs to develop naturally. Dude was once a proud, tough man, brought low by a woman and reduced to a pathetic drunkard, memorably introduced in the opening scenes stooping to pick up a coin that a man throws into a spittoon for him. Throughout the film, he struggles with his alcoholism, trying to regain control of himself, to reassert his dignity and intelligence and bravery, as well as his formidability with a gun. Chance is, in comparison, a bedrock of stoic self-confidence and moral rigor, though Hawks emphasizes that he's merely human too by including all of the fumbling, awkward love scenes with Angie Dickinson's ambiguous bad gal Feathers. These scenes play off of Wayne's own obvious discomfort in romantic scenes, infusing a layer of metafiction into each of them: is Chance thrown off balance by Feathers, or Wayne by Dickinson? Seemingly the only thing that can ruffle Wayne's drawling onscreen persona, pushing him out of his comfort zone, is the presence of a pretty girl, a fact Hawks would take advantage of again in Hatari!, to equally amusing effect.

There's a lot more going on in this film, too, even as virtually nothing actually happens. The film simply rambles along, the connective tissue between set pieces often consisting of lengthy scenes where the characters just sit around and shoot the breeze. Much of the film takes place in the tight, constricted space of the jail, where Hawks is comfortable filming tight, constricted compositions crammed with people. The joy of the filmmaking is palpable in every frame; there are few Hollywood movies that are so relaxed, so carefree. Watching Rio Bravo feels like spending a few hours on the set with Wayne, Brennan, Martin and Nelson, hanging out, cracking jokes, sparring sometimes in jest and sometimes in earnest, shifting between the two so smoothly that it's hard to tell when the characters' jokes bleed over into genuine hurt. The film is packed with incident, but somehow it never seems to add up to a real forward-moving plot, perhaps because the whole film is based around stasis: it's a waiting game. That's what gives it its unique charm.

The easygoing pace also allows Hawks the time to examine his themes and characters in depth, with subtle touches rather than broad gestures. There's surprising nuance and emotion in set pieces like the one where Stumpy nearly blows off Dude's head when the latter enters the jail unexpectedly. On its face, its a comic bit of action, a near-miss that the men can laugh about because it wasn't a hit. But it also lays bare some of the deeper emotions at the core of the story. Stumpy doesn't recognize Dude to begin with because the former drunk has cleaned up and gotten sober, has taken a bath and donned some new clothes, replacing his old threadbare, filthy rags. He looks like a real man again, and Stumpy, accustomed to seeing him as a ragged beggar, doesn't even realize it's him. It mirrors the earlier scene where the rancher Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond) doesn't recognize Dude because he'd never seen him sober before. Underneath the violent humor of the incident, there's this poignant undercurrent, as Dude is reminded yet again of how far he'd fallen, while Stumpy, behind his ornery chatter, is horrified by what he almost did to his friend.


Hawks treats these complex emotions seriously, but he never allows them to truly overwhelm the film's surface charm, its low-key wit and humor. After all, this is a film in which, at a pivotal moment, the characters decide to take a break and have a good old singalong, showcasing the star voices of Nelson and Martin. It's a wonderful moment, a perfect indication of the film's total commitment to its anti-narrative languor: when the tension is at its peak, the final showdown approaching, the characters break out into not just one but two folksy songs in a row, as though they had all the time in the world. Dude is lying on a cot with his hat shading his eyes, Colorado plays the guitar, and Stumpy hollers and plays the harmonica, all while Chance looks on, smiling benevolently, too stiff to join the fun but not to enjoy it. Indeed, one would have to be pretty stiff not to enjoy this film, which encourages the audience to revel in the sparkle of the dialogue and the ways in which the charming personalities of these likable actors blend seamlessly into their characters. Hawks, though he appreciated fresh faces too, was always adept at using star personalities in interesting ways, zeroing in on the essence of an actor and channeling that into his or her onscreen persona.

Here, the confined space of the jail allows Hawks to play these personalities off of one another, ricocheting Brennan's manic grouchiness off of Martin's slouching, half-speed delivery, while Nelson's boyish confidence resonates as a nascent version of Wayne's mature persona, his unflappable manliness. The film juggles these different personalities admirably, and the film's tone shifts smoothly between comic patter, hesitant romance, slow-building suspense, and action. Indeed, despite the laidback pace, Rio Bravo boasts some exceptional action sequences, not only the justifiably famous final shootout, in which Chance and his allies finally defeat the bad guys with dynamite, but also an earlier scene in which Chance and Dude track an assassin to a saloon filled with Burdette's men. This scene is formally precise, rigid in its geometry and use of the bar's space. It's through angles that Chance and Dude control the room, lining up the men at gunpoint in a straight line on one side of the room. The way Hawks frames this scene emphasizes how the two heroes remain on opposite sides of the room, both angled towards the disarmed bad guys, forming a triangle with the bar at its base and its point balancing on the line of criminals. The scene's denouement, in which Dude discovers the hiding assassin by noticing the man's blood dripping down into a glass of beer from above in the rafters, is similarly precise in its formal mastery.

For all these reasons and many more, Rio Bravo is one of Hawks' most sublime achievements: it's more like an old friend than a film, a familiar place to visit and revisit over and over again, always enjoying the company and the ragged charm of its storytelling.

Man's Favorite Sport?

Man's Favorite Sport? finds Howard Hawks revisiting and recycling situations and ideas from throughout his career, most obviously from the comedy of humiliation films he made with Cary Grant. Indeed, this film is a remake of Hawks' screwball classic Bringing Up Baby, and the director even wanted Grant and Katherine Hepburn to reprise their earlier roles. Instead, Paula Prentiss took the role of Abigail, the ditzy, slightly daffy girl who causes so much trouble for Rock Hudson's staid, stuffy Roger Willoughby. Roger's a fishing expert at a sportsman's store, but he hides a dirty secret: he's never actually been fishing and all his knowledge comes from listening to those who actually have. However, his secret is endangered when Abigail and her friend Easy (Maria Perschy), who work at a prestigious fishing tournament, get Roger entered into the tournament, thinking that such a well-known expert will bring publicity to the event.

Once he's in the tournament, it falls to the two girls to actually teach him how to fish so his secret won't be revealed. The result is a silly, low-key, occasionally awkward film, a retread of Hawks' earlier comedies without quite reaching the heights of comic genius he so often scaled in the past. Certainly, Hudson and Prentiss are no Grant and Hepburn, as far as romantic comedy couples go, and the antagonistic chemistry between them only sparks sporadically, while many scenes play out stiffly and uncertainly. There's actually much more vitality in the relationship between Abigail and her German friend Easy. The two girls have a very natural friendship, exchanging mischievous glances and smiles, trading off quips and virtually finishing one another's sentences — it's a playful, fun to watch friendship that brings to mind Hawks' treatment of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Playing off of Perschy, Prentiss is relaxed and witty and fluid, while in her scenes with Hudson she often tries to affect a nervous energy that doesn't quite come off, especially when she slips into a deep-voiced purr to convey her excitement.

Hudson, for his part, isn't a born comedian, but he gamely plods through the film's slapstick gags and verbal sparring, and it's not really his fault if a lot of the physical humor seems flat and unfunny. At their best, the scenes of him trying to catch fish are fast-paced and frenetic, as the inept fisherman goes splashing around in the water, literally taking a flying leap to grab an escaping fishing rod or nearly backing up into a bear. At their worst, these scenes are stiff and extended for way too long, with Henry Mancini's bouncy score rather desperately trying to make the images seem humorous even if they're not.

Actually, though, the film's best scenes have nothing to do with fishing, which is just a pretext for another of Hawks' explorations of the way antagonism between men and women can be a prelude to love. Roger is continually subjected to one embarrassment after another on account of Abigail and Easy, as the girls put him into one tough position after another. Because of them, he falls upside down into a car, gets stuck in a sleeping bag, is trapped in a pair of inflatable waders that flip him upside down in the water, and gets put in a fake cast that makes him arm stick up in the air like he's permanently giving a salute. Many of these situations have a distinctly sexual component, as when he gets his tie stuck in the zipper on the back of Easy's dress (a scene recycled from Bringing Up Baby) or when he comes home to find Abigail asleep in his bed (a repeat of a scene from Hatari!). The girls, particularly Abigail, are constantly getting him into compromising situations, seducing him through humiliation without even seeming to realize it themselves. In one especially racy scene, the two girls are talking to Roger at a campsite during a rainstorm, their backs facing to the camera, and the water pouring down their backs makes their shirts see-through, revealing the lack of any bra underneath. Roger's stammering attempts to tell them what's happening are hilarious, as is the girls' nonchalance about their de facto nudity.


The film is especially great in the few scenes featuring Roger's fiancée Tex (Charlene Holt), who doesn't appear for more than a few minutes but makes quite an impression in her brief screentime. Her arrival is perfectly timed to cause the maximum problems for Roger: he's got Abigail sleeping in his bedroom, while he spent the night in a sleeping bag in the living room. When Tex walks in, Easy is there as well, trying to unzip him from his sleeping bag. Tex's bemused, chilly reaction is brilliant, maintaining a cordial smile, enjoying Roger's squirming discomfort, and casting bitchy double entendres at the German girl. "Oh, so you're Easy," she deadpans, her inflection leaving no doubt that she's aware of the double meaning. Even better is her retort to Roger's lame excuse for the situation: "Oh, just trying out some new equipment?" she drawls, casting a sidelong glance at Easy as she says "equipment." It's a subtly funny, delightfully naughty scene, encoding sexual puns into the dialogue, and Holt plays it perfectly; Tex seems to relish tormenting her wayward man, at least until Abigail stepping out of the bedroom makes the scene seem much less innocent.

Scenes like this have the energy and wit of the best Hawks comedies, even if other sequences show the director recycling old ideas or engaging in uninspired sight gags. The film is drastically uneven, and it's not helped by its relentlessly studio-bound aesthetic. After the gorgeous, unforgettable African vistas of Hatari!, it's disappointing for a Hawks film to look so flat. Its colors are bright and its compositions as perfectly framed as ever in Hawks' work, but there's still something off-putting about the film's artificiality, which seems to be of a piece with the occasional stiffness in the performances. The best Hawks films are driven by naturalism — not realism, because nobody used as much stylized dialogue as Hawks, but naturalism in the sense of the flow of the conversations, the way the characters interact with ease and wit. In a Hawks film, one believes in the various relationships between the characters because the words flow between them with such snap and verve. Here, this flow is often disrupted.

Still, the film remains interesting in the context of Hawks' continued fascination with male/female dynamics and sexuality. When Roger is talking on the phone with Tex, trying to make up with her, on her end she's wearing a filmy, flimsy bit of lingerie, looking unbelievably sexy, as though suggesting what Roger's going to miss out on. In contrast, Abigail looks awkward and ungainly in her night clothes; not unattractive, by any means, but somehow a little dorky, her long thin legs sticking out of very short pants, her slender body all angles and sharp corners. One of the film's main differences from its predecessor Bringing Up Baby is that in the Grant/Hepburn film, Grant's fiancée was distinctly unappealing, a businesslike secretary with no passion in contrast to Hepburn's wild unpredictability. Here, Tex is sexy and genuinely likable, possibly even more so than Abigail. Hawks deliberately plays up Tex's appeal even though the film's only possible outcome, really, is that the hero winds up with Abigail; it accentuates the unpredictability of love, its lack of logic or rationality. It's a film about a guy who falls in love with a woman who does nothing but aggravate and inconvenience him, but it doesn't have to make sense. It's just love, and when Roger and Abigail kiss Hawks cuts away to black and white footage of two trains crashing together. He outdoes Hitchcock's famous fireworks kiss by suggesting that love isn't just bright and pretty and exciting, it's as inevitable and as dangerous as a violent collision.

Hatari!

Hatari! is a rambling, discursive, nearly plotless film from late in director Howard Hawks' career, and it's something of a compendium of the director's obsessions and signature themes, a summation of his career up to this point. It's hard to imagine a more typically Hawksian film: an outdoor adventure about a group of men living in the African wilds, hunting and capturing animals in order to sell them to zoos. The men are tough and professional, they work hard and celebrate just as hard when the day is over, and they only grudgingly allow women to infiltrate their tight-knit clan. The men are led by Sean Mercer (archetypal Hawks star John Wayne), a real man's man derived from the same template as Cary Grant's Geoff Carter in Only Angels Have Wings, a professional man doing a risky, physical job day after day, wounded by a girl in his past who just couldn't understand his way of life, who forced him to make a choice between her and his job — a choice he made, obviously, but one that continues to haunt him, especially in his dealings with women.

Of course, the arrival of a new woman at the camp stirs up this psychological drama within Mercer. The Italian photographer who the men quickly nickname "Dallas" (Elsa Martinelli) makes Mercer wonder if maybe she, unlike his old flame, could accept him as he is. As usual in the Hawksian world, it's the woman who has to come towards the man, and there's no doubt that Dallas has to be initiated into this world: she makes a fool of herself with over-confidence when she first arrives, and has to apologize to the men for her feminine silliness. Of course, it's also typical of Hawks that once this initial fazing period is over, Dallas is accepted as one of the men, and proves herself just as capable and resourceful as they are, if not more so; she's able to tame three baby elephants and take their care entirely into her own hands when no one else can figure out what to do. Hawks has often been accused of misogyny for requiring his women characters to compete on masculine turf, but Dallas is among his best female characters, strong and whip-smart without ever sacrificing her femininity (or her sexual allure).

This male/female struggle is just one of the elements threading through this sprawling, patiently paced film. Never before had Hawks seemed to care so little for plot, even in his most rambling earlier films like The Big Sky. This epic stretches to nearly three hours long without ever mustering up a really big conflict or a truly dominant plotline. Instead, the men at the camp, in between adventures catching various animals on the plains, simply goof around, sparring and jockeying for position with the women, drinking, telling stories, playing music, playing cards. It's a light, fun atmosphere, with plenty of room for diversions and gags. And the cast flesh out these characters with depth, warmth and good humor: the goofy former New York cab driver Pockets (Red Buttons); the German race car driver Kurt (Hardy Krüger); the aging mentor the guys simply call the Indian (Bruce Cabot); the stout little Frenchman "Chips" (Gérard Blain), so nicknamed because he carries a big chip on his shoulder; the coltish young Brandy (Michèle Girardon), who these guys have raised since she was a kid, and who is starting to attract some of their attentions as a woman. The cast is multinational and eccentric, and it shows in the sometimes stiff acting in English. At the same time, the variety of accents and personalities melding together is a great metaphor for Hawks' characteristic concern with group dynamics, and the energy and vitality of these actors more than compensates for their rawness.

The structure of the film is loose and free-wheeling, comprised of a stitched-together series of incidents rather than a coherent storyline. It's like watching a selection of pages snatched from a diary documenting the group's three months together. This sprawling, relaxed structure is both to the film's benefit and its detriment. Over the course of the film's length, the actual animal-hunting scenes, visceral and thrilling at first, shot at high speeds with two jeeps full of men racing alongside the galloping wild animals, begin to feel perfunctory and overly familiar. Thankfully, Hawks increasingly intersperses these scenes with many fun scenes back at camp. There are too many to mention: the great sequence when Kurt and several natives try to herd some escaped ostriches back into their pens; the many scenes of Dallas with the elephants, who adore her like a mother; Pockets' ingenious and crazy plan to capture 500 vicious little monkeys using an enormous net and a rocket; the drunken "who's on first" routine between Mercer, Pockets and Kurt when Dallas first arrives at camp; the climactic slapstick chase through an African village with a trio of elephants charging through the streets.


What makes this film so charming is that Hawks is combining his comedic mode and his adventure mode, which in most of his work exist independently of one another. Not that Hawks' adventures and dramatic works don't contain any humor — it's the rare Hawks film that doesn't have at least some great zingers in the dialogue — but he seldom blended comedy so heavily into the kind of tight-knit professional milieu that characterized his dramatic films. The result is a Hawks film that has nearly everything, that's like a dazzling visual encyclopedia of Hawks. There's the obligatory scene clustered around a piano, with Dallas tickling the keys while Pockets play harmonica. There are love triangles and even love squares, particularly forming around Brandy, who suddenly finds herself the center of attention as Pockets, Chips and Kurt all vie for her affection. In typical Hawks fashion, this arrangement serves as a sparking iron on which to forge the masculine friendship of Chips and Kurt, who open the film by punching one another and at the end are poised to head off to Paris together, locked together in a homoerotic companionship that references all the way back to the beginning of Hawks' career in A Girl in Every Port. As usual, male rivalry is a form of bonding, in which the woman who's the ostensible goal isn't nearly as important as one's rival.

Despite its overstuffed thematic underpinnings and riotous surface thrills, Hatari! occasionally stumbles over the course of its length. In fact, that length is one of its principle problems, since it sometimes feels bloated and repetitive in its structure, particularly when the nth animal-chasing sequence plays out in nearly the same way as the first. The cinematography in these scenes is undoubtedly gorgeous, though, with Hawks fully exploiting the widescreen frame, positioning the action horizontally so that the animals and trucks race across the screen, the pale blue sky stretched out in the distance behind them, dust kicking up everywhere. It's thrilling stuff, though Hawks returns to this well perhaps one time too many in the slightly slack middle section of the film. Moreover, for such a long film there are times when the scene-to-scene flow is surprisingly abrupt. The editing is occasionally jarring and ragged, as though transitions between scenes are missing. It's obvious that Hawks cares much more about the structure of individual scenes than he does about the ways they might fit together in the completed film. Each scene is perfectly constructed and engaging in its own right, but the connections between scenes sometimes seem to have been left on the cutting room floor, and there are sometimes the kinds of narrative ellipses that one expects in a shorter and more plot-driven film but which are inexplicable in such a sprawling work.

More troubling is a brief but rather awkward sequence in which, as a joke, the guys allow Dallas to be kidnapped for a ritual by the local Masai, who return her dressed in native garb and painted more or less in blackface. It's a weird, uncomfortable gag, and only serves to point up the general obliviousness to race issues in this lighthearted film where the only black characters are servants and primitive natives. Even so, Hatari! remains a fascinating and compelling late work from Hawks. Not only is it one of his most purely fun and engaging films, but it's one of the best examples of Hawks allowing femininity, jokes and romance to liven up the typically grim, death-obsessed atmosphere of the Hawksian professional man. The Indian is the one holdout from earlier Hawks films, the one who predicts death and misfortune at the peak of hunting season, when the men finally face down the dreaded rhino who has done so much harm to their group. This would-be climax surprisingly passes by with the same breezy tone as the rest of the film, casually defusing the danger inherent in this scenario. This is Hawks at his most disarmingly light, obviously having as much fun behind the camera as he manages to capture on film.

Land of the Pharaohs

During his four decades in Hollywood, Howard Hawks worked on virtually every type of picture possible within the studio system of the time. Though he is today known primarily as a director of manically fast screwball comedies or rambling, low-key Westerns, he also made musicals, proto-noirs, sci-fi and war movies, along with now-forgotten genres like racing pictures and aviation adventures. And he also made one grand historical epic, Land of the Pharaohs, a big-budget blockbuster on a truly staggering scale. On its surface, it's an odd type of film for Hawks to make, considering his usual comfort with small-scale wit and romance, his touch for handling simple stories of people interacting, forming relationships and friendships. His best and best-known films are the definition of what the critic Manny Farber appreciatively called "termite art," films where the director's aesthetic and thematic concerns gnaw away subtly beneath the surface. Land of the Pharaohs would seem to be the very opposite, a towering "white elephant" carrying its pretenses aloft and carving its themes out of tremendous stone blocks.

Indeed, the film is grand in every sense. Its epic story takes place on a level almost entirely above human concerns, taking to a bird's eye perspective from which individuals are just dots in a sea of similar dots. The film's events are set in motion by the powerful Egyptian Pharaoh Khufu (Jack Hawkins), a man who arguably sees other human beings from exactly this aloof vantage point. According to his people's customs, he is the embodiment of a god on Earth, and by divine right he is able to command his people to do nearly anything. He is beyond worldly concerns, beyond any thought of his fellow beings. What consumes him is the thought of his afterlife, the eternal rest after his death, in which he will be buried with the massive treasure he has accumulated through the bloody wars he fought while on Earth. He dedicates the final two decades of his life to the construction of an enormous and elaborate pyramid, a crypt designed with clever traps and rigged so that, upon his death, once the lid is lowered on his coffin, the pyramid will be sealed with solid stone, the great pharaoh and his treasure unreachable for grave robbers or other desecraters who would come along after he was gone. Towards this end, the Pharaoh enlists one of his prisoners, the architect Vashtar (James Robinson Justice) and his son Senta (Hawks regular Dewey Martin), to devise the pyramid's ingenious self-sealing mechanisms. In doing so, Vashtar knows that he dooms himself, but he agrees if the Pharaoh will release his people as prisoners.

The human dramas in the film are generally sketched out on a broad scale like this; motivations tend to be simplistic and characters are defined by one trait. For the Pharaoh, it's a love of power and a greed for gold, both attributes that find their match in his rebellious mistress Nellifer (Joan Collins), a proud princess who marries the Pharaoh but secretly lusts after his treasure, scheming and plotting to undo him. This is a lurid melodrama with a schematic plot, with both Hawkins and Collins turning in stark, iconic performances, their characters reduced to walking symbols. For his part, Hawks hardly seems interested in these petty human affairs. He's working on a very abstract level here, populating the film with literally thousands of extras — reportedly close to 10,000 for one scene — and dramatizing the mechanical and physical processes involved in constructing the pyramid rather than the human dramas behind the scenes. Next to the spectacle of massive slabs of stone being hauled across the desert via complicated pulley-and-crane systems, the Pharaoh's love affairs and the machinations of his mistress seem trite and inconsequential. The actual human events play out in disconnected vignettes, with large gaps of time yawning in between. In one scene, Senta is a boy; in the next, it's fifteen years later and he's grown into a man. Similarly, at one point early on the Pharaoh tells his first wife (Kerima) that he wants an heir, which might've provided another film with its driving force and drama, but this script simply presents the boy not long after, already around ten years old.


If the film's human dramas are largely inert and so elliptical as to nearly disappear, this hardly means that the film is without drama altogether. It's merely that the characters here are consistently dwarfed by the physical spectacle of the processes they set into motion. There are long sequences in which Hawks fully exploits both the long Cinemascope frame — the first time he'd shoot outside of his favored Academy ratio — and the tremendous quantity of extras he had at his disposal. The frame is frequently packed with people, thousands of them struggling through the desert sand like ants scurrying around in the dirt, hauling massive stones with ropes and complex riggings. Long trains of people and animals sprawl across the desert in dense crowds and rigidly uniform lines. Hawks always maintained an interest in documenting how real people work, and here was the ultimate subject for him, the ultimate group effort: thousands of people subjugating their identities to the will of the pharaoh in order to accomplish a demanding, impossibly complicated task of building and design. His images, remote and sweeping, strain to take in the entirety of this bustle of activity within a single frame. There's an epic grandeur to these images, a sense of large-scale work and action that Hawks had only ever approached before in the exhilarating cattle drive sequences from Red River. This film's pyramid-building scenes lack that same excitement, since Hawks proves equally adept at capturing the drudgery of this work, the slow process by which the Egyptian workers, initially happy to be working for their Pharaoh in this way, begin to wear down, to become bitter and sluggish, driven on only by the pounding of the work drums and the crack of the whip.

These sequences reach their fruition in the film's great final set piece, following the Pharaoh's death, when the mechanisms that will seal the pyramid's tomb are at last set in motion. This is a harrowing sequence, staged from a perspective at the heart of the tomb: all around the interior of the pyramid, various stone slabs slam into place with a crushing finality, accompanied by a reverberating and terrible clamor. It's a claustrophobic nightmare of being locked up behind impenetrable stone walls, buried alive, a horror worthy of Poe. Hawks accentuates the geometry of the pyramid's labyrinthine interior, the elegant interlocking structures that come together once Vashtar's brilliant design is triggered. Stone slabs crawl across the frame, slowly blotting out the lines of sight through the pyramid's interior, closing off all exits, each door closing accompanied by that final sinister thump, the sound of another escape being closed off. This sequence traps the audience along with those at the pyramid's center, the retainers and workers who are sealed up with their dead master.

The grim automated processes of this final scene are indicative of the macroscopic interest Hawks takes in this story. His grandly effective mise en scéne comes alive whenever he's charting the hefting of a stone block into its position within the pyramid's architecture, or visualizing the vast hordes of slaves working on this massive construction project. The more human scale of the story fails to advance beyond clichéd melodrama. Moreover, the Hollywood convention of casting white actors as Egyptians yields the distracting and uncomfortable spectacle of Joan Collins made up in brownface makeup that darkens her skin to a strange glossy orangish hue.

Equally distracting is the overbearing music, and especially the periodic outbursts of singing, clapping and chanting. The Baptist fervor of the music turns quite a few of the early scenes into weird approximations of Christian masses rather than Egyptian rituals; one almost expects the chanting Egyptians to shout out "Hallelujah!" Indeed, these early scenes sometimes seem like subtle commentaries on religion in general, slyly suggesting that all religions, with their convoluted, fanciful conceptions of the afterlife, are equally deluded. Hawks has the most sympathy for the pragmatic architect Vashtar, who, though obviously modeled on the Jewish people, has a skeptical detachment from all this fascination with the afterlife and would much rather live for the present than the future. It would seem that, within the overbearing façades of this "white elephant" of a film, Hawks the termite was nicking away at the stone edifices of his creation, subtly tweaking the solemn religiosity of his protagonists and their vain desires for immortality.

The Big Sky

The Big Sky was Howard Hawks' second Western after his iconic John Wayne/Montgomery Clift classic Red River, but this second stab at the genre is today largely forgotten, particularly in comparison to Hawks' other Westerns. Considered overlong by the producers and distributors of the time, it was chopped down by 20 minutes after its initial release, and it mostly survives today — on lousy bootlegged prints, when it's seen at all — in this shortened form. Even so, it's apparent that the film is much better than its reputation suggests; it's an ambling, nearly plotless adventure yarn in which a group of frontier men set off down the Missouri River into uncharted territory, aiming to be the first white men to get so far and trade with the notoriously unwelcoming Blackfoot Indians. The cuts made to the film to trim it down to an even two hours apparently haven't done much damage to Hawks' overall aesthetic, eliding some of the subtleties and details from certain scenes and relationships without drastically altering the shape or feel of the film.

From the beginning, Hawks is interested not so much in telling any particular story as evoking a time and a place and a type of man: the film harks back to the frontier spirit of early American history, when large swaths of unexplored land were waiting for intrepid men to penetrate them and discover their mysteries. It's surely no coincidence that one of these men, the aging adventurer and Indian trader Zeb Calloway (Arthur Hunnicutt), calls the beautiful Blackfoot lands "wild and pretty like a virgin woman." Hawks has nothing but admiration for these men who are tied down to nothing and go running off caring only about the taste of adventure. There's a reason that the only period films Hawks was ever comfortable making were Westerns. This frontier spirit — the taming of wild country with sheer ingenuity, toughness and determined group effort — is perfectly suited to Hawks' cinematic sensibility. The film plays out like a blueprint for Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo: a journey up a choppy, hard-to-navigate river in which the men's physical exertions often literally push and pull the boat through the worst rapids. When the going gets too tough, the crew gets out and tugs the boat along the shore with heavy ropes.

Hawks films all of this with a raw physicality and intensity that captures the rigor of the journey in all its detail. He seems to care little for the actual plot, which is really nothing much to speak of anyway, just a loose framework on which to hang all the incidents and scenes that contribute to this vivid portrait of frontier life. Zeb and his French partner Jourdonnais (Steven Geray) have a plan to be the first men able to trade in Blackfoot country. They have a Blackfoot princess, Teal Eye (Elizabeth Threatt), who had been captured by a rival Indian tribe and then escaped, far from home. By returning Teal Eye to her people, the traders know they'll ingratiate themselves to the Blackfeet, thus finally opening up the standoffish tribe to outside trading. The only thing that stands in their way is the local fur company, which certainly doesn't want to see a group of independent operators open up this untouched territory. The narrative is simple: the boat struggles upriver, beset by attacks from the fur company's hired mercenaries and the local Crow Indians who've been stirred up onto the warpath.


In the midst of this adventure, Zeb takes on his young nephew Boone Caudill (Dewey Martin) and Boone's friend Jim Deakins (Kirk Douglas). The two young men are friends in a very Hawksian mold, harking all the way back to his early silent film A Girl in Every Port — Hawks cleverly tips his hat to the earlier film by repeating the bit of business where one of the men, after a fight, pulls the other's finger to pop his joint back into place. Hawks, often predictable in the kinds of stories he's drawn to and the things he finds interesting about them, makes this film about the camaraderie of these men as they head into danger, seemingly for no better reason than having something to do. When the film opens, Boone and Jim meet, fight each other and becomes friends in the process (again, like the heroes of A Girl in Every Port), then immediately set off looking for Boone's Uncle Zeb. When the three men meet up in jail, it's assumed that the two younger men will be coming along on Zeb's latest trip upriver. They all treat the journey like a lark, an excuse to have fun, and Hawks obviously has great fun himself in capturing the campfire bonhomie of the men.

There's an early, very Hawksian scene where Boone and Jim engage in a cheerfully drunken song with a French barmaid squeezed between them, the trio clustered together in the midst of a frame packed with activity and smiling, drunken faces. This cluttered, intimate atmosphere is carried over, once the journey gets under way, into campfire singalongs on the river bank and bull sessions where the men swap stories and pass whiskey jugs back and forth. Hawks even applies this cheery atmosphere to a scene in which Jim, after mangling his finger on a tree branch, has to have it amputated. The men get him good and liquored up, and Boone and Zeb, performing the surgery, get pretty tight themselves, just to be "sociable" with their injured friend. The whole thing becomes suddenly hilarious, the actual surgery performed offhandedly amidst the laughter and drunken camaraderie. Hawks had originally wanted to include a similar scene in Red River, until John Wayne balked at finding humor in something like that. It's obvious that Hawks, more than his actor, understood these kind of men, who wouldn't take a thing like that so seriously that they'd let it get in the way of a good time. The scene ends with an appropriately ridiculous image: most of the camp down on all fours, stumbling around looking for Jim's amputated finger, which somehow got lost in the confusion.


The film is packed with moments like this, and indeed it's structured around such moments. Its narrative simply wanders from scene to scene, taking its time studying the details while the boat meanders upstream towards Blackfoot country. The pacing is slow and deliberate, and the action minimal: there's an Indian skirmish and a pair of tense standoffs with the fur company's men, resolved with lightning-fast economy. Hawks doesn't care about telling a story so much as conveying the texture of the setting, the wild country and wide expanses of open sky that are impressive even in the disappointing prints that are the only way to see the film for now, until a definitive DVD is finally assembled. This disinterest in narrative structure only becomes distracting towards the end of the film, when the love triangle between Boone, Jim and Teal Eye, underplayed subtly throughout the film, abruptly becomes of central importance, with Hawks leaving it to Hunnicutt's folksy narration to fill in the details.

It doesn't help, either, that the central performances of Douglas and Martin are at best likable and slight. Neither actor was Hawks' first choice for this long-delayed project and there's not much energy or passion in their relationships with each other or with Teal Eye. The supporting performances, on the other hand, are uniformly colorful and entertaining, and Hunnicutt is especially great in the Walter Brennan-type old coot role. Zeb's outrageous tall tales and deadpan humor — reminiscent of the Squint character from Frank King's great newspaper comic strip Gasoline Alley — are consistently funny, especially his anecdote about sewing a friend's severed ear on backwards, so that whenever he heard something thereafter, he always turned in the wrong direction. Threatt, too, is compelling, even without a word of English dialogue in the entire film: she acts with her wide, flashing black eyes and the stubborn pride of her posture. The Big Sky is a loose, episodic film, driven by the accumulation of its incidents rather than the meager forward drive of its narrative. It's a true Hawksian Western, a celebration of man's taming of wild nature and the bonds between men that make such grand adventures possible.

O. Henry's Full House

The stories of William Sidney Porter, written under his pen name O. Henry, are almost universally known. Even today, when Henry's penchant for twist endings and cleverly ironic touches has somewhat fallen out of favor, many of his tales endure as part of the pop culture landscape. Five of these stories were adapted by five different directors for the anthology film O. Henry's Full House. Henry Koster, the most obscure filmmaker to contribute to the omnibus, opens the film with The Cop and the Anthem. This is essentially a showcase piece for the actor Charles Laughton, who plays a bum called Soapy, a man who had once been well-to-do and a part of society, and who still retains the vestiges of his sophistication and pride even as he sleeps on park benches with newspapers padded into his coat. As winter approaches, Soapy's thoughts turn to finding a warm, comfortable place to sleep in the cold weather, and he plots — as he apparently has for years — to get himself arrested so that he might spend the next three months in jail, with a nice warm bed.

Laughton is a delight in this film, a perfect choice to play a man who's fallen far but who was obviously once much better off — his rich, dulcet tones and florid manner of speaking are well-suited to Soapy's overblown dialogue. One can't imagine any actor but Laughton pulling off this part without turning him into a pretentious windbag. Instead, Laughton allows us to see the sadness and dignity beneath Soapy's pretensions. He is a proud man, unwilling to accept charity, preferring to do things for himself, even if it means resorting to thievery. One of his schemes for getting arrested is to walk into a fancy restaurant and order an extravagant meal, which works because he projects an aura more suited to a man of great means than a bum. Throughout the meal, the waiters hover obsequiously around his table, eager to do his bidding, silently taking his insults, until at the end he admits, casually, that he has no money, ripping up the check as he does so.

Another of Soapy's attempts involves bothering a young lady (a cameo from Marilyn Monroe) window shopping along the street, hoping that a nearby cop will take notice and break it up. Soapy miscalculates, however, because the lady turns out to be a prostitute, initially mistaking his advance for a come-on, and she's just as eager to avoid the cops. She's just happy to have Soapy call her a "lady." The great thing about the irony of these incidents is that it's often double-edged — the humor emerges not just from Laughton's blustery performance or the irony of wanting to get arrested and being unable to achieve it, but from the subtle reversals in social status that accompany Soapy's dilemma. What's not often acknowledged about O. Henry's stories is that the best of his ironic twists are not simply humorous, but prod at the underlying tensions and emotions laid bare by these ironies. Koster wisely stays out of the way, with a simple style that highlights the great comic performances of Laughton and his fellow bum Horace (David Wayne).

Prolific Fox director Henry Hathaway helms the second segment, The Clarion Call, a much more prosaic O. Henry yarn in which the police detective Barney Woods (Dale Robertson) investigates a murder case. A key piece of evidence tips him off to the fact that the murderer is an old friend of his, the wild Johnny Kernan (Richard Widmark), but he is torn over turning the man in because he owes a debt to Johnny. When they were younger and Barney was struggling with gambling, Johnny helped him out by lending him $1000, a good deed that Barney still hasn't been able to repay. This debt hangs over Barney's head now, as he knows that Johnny committed a murder but feels like he can't do anything about it until he pays off what he owes. It's a contrived moral dilemma that's underscored by the counterfeit bills that Barney is holding onto as evidence; some of the segment's unspoken tension arises from the suspicion that this is leading to Barney compromising himself by paying off the murderer in fake currency.

In addition to the tired premise, Hathaway lazily carries over Widmark's character from the actor's debut role in Kiss of Death, which Hathaway himself had presided over five years earlier. Johnny is a virtual copy of that film's Tommy Udo, the sneering, cartoonish, maniacal killer who catapulted Widmark to attention as a brilliant noir villain. Johnny's petulant, child-like manner and outbursts of uncontrolled violence (and even his black suit/white tie wardrobe) are copied wholesale from the earlier film, which further dilutes this segment's appeal. It's always fun to watch Widmark at his most unhinged, and his pop-eyed performance is in some ways as much nasty fun here as it was in Kiss of Death, but there's still no getting around the feeling of familiarity and repetition in seeing him do the same schtick the second time around. Probably the film's best moment is a little throwaway scene of Johnny's girl (Ava Norring) playing with a kitten before he viciously throws her out. The rest of the segment feels like watered-down noir, and its final twist lacks the emotional and thematic resonances that mark the capper to The Cop and the Anthem.

Jean Negulesco's The Last Leaf opens with a wonderful silent sequence in which the director's deliberately skewed compositions reinforce the emotional turmoil of his protagonist, Joanna (Anne Baxter), after she's rejected by her actor boyfriend for another woman. Throughout these opening scenes, the camera is tilted and cocked at an angle, forcing diagonal lines on the compositions as the distraught young woman stumbles home through the snow, overcome by despair. Negulesco isolates her in the sheets of white, and the cant of his camera suggests the instability of her mental state at this point: it looks as though the entire world is tilted and she might fall off its surface at any point. Her unsteady walk home is marked by a tremendous effort merely to remain on her feet, to keep herself straight against the weight of gravity. It's a great scene, visually representing her crushed dignity; it's implied in later scenes that Joanna is so upset because she slept with the man, who then discarded her once he got what he wanted.

Following this scene, Negulesco's characters begin to speak, and that's unfortunate because the rest of the film is a rather conventional weepy melodrama in which Joanna catches pneumonia and is tended to by her worried sister Susan (Jean Peters) and their upstairs neighbor, a struggling painter named Behrman (Gregory Ratoff). Ratoff's performance echoes that of Laughton in the film's first segment, a man with nothing to his name but with reserves of dignity and pride to spare. He's convinced that he's a great artist, but his abstract compositions won't sell in the time of the story — the script contains a subtle joke on modern art when an art dealer tells Behrman that maybe his paintings will sell in the 1950s, but nobody understands or wants them now. He's an interesting character, but the story isn't centered around him. Most of the segment is dedicated instead to the static melodrama of the ailing sister who has given up on life, who isn't fighting her illness but simply waiting to die, waiting for the last leaf to fall from the vine across the street so that she can go with it. Peters and Baxter are both overacting in the same maudlin register, and Behrman's more subtle evocations of an increasingly drunken and despairing old man are pushed to the fringes. This segment is a relatively minor and forgettable short, notable only for Ratoff's fine turn and its suitably destabilized opening shots.

Howard Hawks' The Ransom of Red Chief is the most often maligned segment of this anthology, seemingly hated by critics and audiences alike. When the film fared badly in previews, this segment was chopped out entirely for most of the original theatrical run. And yet Hawks' ridiculous farce is one of the most delightful parts of Full House, a low-key trifle from the great director and yet nevertheless an entertaining one. A pair of con men, William (Oscar Levant) and Slick (Fred Allen), concoct a plan to kidnap a boy from a small rural town, then extract a ransom for his return. The plan goes awry, however, because nobody's exactly in a rush to get back the little terror they wind up kidnapping, a ten year-old named J.B. (Lee Aaker) who prefers to be known as Red Chief. The film's jokes are aimed at easy targets, namely the slow-witted rural folk and the hapless kidnappers, but its deadpan farce is no less funny for its predictability. Allen and Levant are brilliant, playing their parts with a strangely formal back-and-forth patter, much slower and more deliberate than Hawks' usual fast-paced screwball dialogue, like screwball slowed down to the speed of parlor room chit-chat.

As for Red Chief himself, he's a determined little monster who taunts and assaults his kidnappers right from the start, making it clear that he's the one who's actually in charge; before long, they just want to get rid of him. Most of the sketch's physical gags aren't particularly noteworthy, and the middle stretch of the segment drags a bit. Hawks seems to have more fun with the stylized banter of the two kidnappers, or the way they subtly mock the rural locals while extracting information from them — proving that no matter how dumb you are, there's always someone lower on the totem pole to abuse and make fun of. Later, Red Chief's insistence that the two men play Indians with him provides the silly image of the con men looking forlorn and weary in warpaint and feathers. This echoes the similar images in Hawks' Monkey Business, which he had just finished making, further suggesting that the director's view of childhood and children was far from idyllic. Both films present kids as destructive and malignant little monsters. This segment is ultimately lightweight and inconsequential, buoyed by Hawks' efforts to transform the original story into a mean-spirited, cynical farce. The cynicism and ugliness of this segment is very much at odds with O. Henry's sensibility, but then Hawks is obviously not a director well-suited to adapting this particular writer. Instead, he bends Red Chief to his own preoccupations and delivers a strange but endearingly funny little film.

The anthology's closing segment, The Gift of the Magi, is quite possibly one of O. Henry's most famous stories, though its familiarity does little to dull the impact of Henry King's sentimental but heartfelt adaptation of this classic Christmas story. A pair of young newlyweds, just getting by on the husband's meager salary, make secret plans to treat each other to lavish Christmas presents by selling some of their most prized possessions. The wife (Jeanne Crain) sells her luxurious long hair, which her husband so loves, to a wig maker in order to buy her husband a platinum watch fob. At the same time, her husband (Farley Granger) sells his watch in order to buy some beautiful combs for her hair. The irony is obvious, and not particularly complicated, but this simple reversal is invested with rich emotional depths. The love between the young couple is convincingly portrayed by Granger and Crain, who communicate the affection and tenderness of their relationship, as well as their understated regret that they don't have more to offer one another in material terms.

King's adaptation of the classic story is straightforward, relying on the actors to get across the emotional stakes of such ordinary acts as buying a Christmas present. Along with the first story, this is the anthology's most emotionally satisfying installment, a beautiful ode to love and the spirit of generosity that overcomes any deficiencies in wealth. It ends Full House on a very warm and beautiful note, with one of O. Henry's most genuinely moving messages. As a whole, this anthology is as uneven as most such multi-director films tend to be, with a few forgettable segments and at least a few others that deserve to be remembered. At the very least, O. Henry's Full House is worth a look for Koster and King's heartfelt adaptations of two of Henry's most moving stories, for Hawks' contrarian comic sketch, and for isolated moments at least in Negulesco and Hathaway's segments.