“He’s just too damned enjoyable.” – Quentin Tarantino on Howard Hawks

Reading David Thomson’s really interesting and entertaining (and, at times, self-indulgent) book (rumination, really) about Hollywood, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. I say “self-indulgent” in a way that I mean it as a compliment. I find myself rolling my eyes from time to time at the same time that I find myself thinking, “You go, David. You go out on that poetic limb. I wish more people would go out on a linguistic and emotional limb like that!”

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Here’s an excerpt about Howard Hawks:

You can argue that [Fritz] Lang never appreciated the golden nature of his Hollywood, just as he never grasped (or was impressed by) the nature of America. But Howard Hawks is his obverse: a man insouciant about where he worked, yet equally confident that in any factory or range he would recreate his world and vision. Hawks made many films touched by darkness, yet taken as a whole his work is more than golden. It is a paradise. This is not just because of the optimistic, fantasizing vision of men and women; it’s because Hawks sees movies as a garden of delights, a playground, a way of holding back mortality even. Hawks was a man who rode in his own aura of success and happiness, as much as Lang was forever cornered by darkness and dismay. He was also a natural businessman and a lifelong winner. As Quentin Tarantino put it, “He’s just too damned enjoyable.”

After the great success of his flying picture The Dawn Patrol (1930), Hawks made a directing deal with First National for $25,000 a picture (the results were The Criminal Code, on loan, The Crowd Roards, and Tiger Shark). His rate jumped up when Goldwyn gave him $60,000 to do Barbary Coast, which turned out to be one of his duller efforts. By the late thirties, he had a new contract with RKO for $130,000 a year.

Part of that deal was the undying Bringing Up Baby, where the blithe sublimity of the picture makes a pretty contrast with its financial turmoil. With Cary Grant hired in for $75,000 and Katharine Hepburn at $72,500 (plus 5 percent of the gross from $600,000 – $750,000 and 7.5 percent after that – a lady, but a careerist, too), the picture was budgeted at just over $767,000. After all, it was a small comedy to be filmed entirely on sound stages. But Hawks fell in love with its rare madness and fussed no end to get the dream just right. RKO did not stop him. There were overages for the stars (they ended up taking $120,000 each) and the picture finally went over $1 million.

But it did disappointing business from the start. Hawks guessed that it was because there was no one normal in the film (though the leopard is like most leopards you meet). Today that is regarded as the brilliance of the film. Still, it did only $715,000 domestically, with another $390,000 from foreign. The studio lost money (after the marketing costs), and it was a principal reason why Katharine Hepburn was labeled “box-office poison”.

As a result, Only Angels Have Wings and His Girl Friday (both at Columbia) were done a touch more modestly. They are masterpieces of the factory system, in which there is a kind of exultant, enclosed bliss to the pictures, as if to say how blessed we are to be shut up in this kind of factory. The newsroom in Friday, the South American airfield in Angels are both cloud-cuckoo island settings (patently fabricated) for Hawks’s dream of how he wanted the world to be. But they are also containers of some of the best, subtlest talk and interaction ever put on the American screen.

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Here’s a post I wrote about the opening sequence in Only Angels Have Wings.

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1 Response to “He’s just too damned enjoyable.” – Quentin Tarantino on Howard Hawks

  1. george says:

    “But it [Bringing Up Baby] did disappointing business from the start. Hawks guessed that it was because there was no one normal in the film (though the leopard is like most leopards you meet).”

    Well, the second leopard was like most leopards you meet. The first fit in nicely, fittingly not normal.

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