British film historian David Thomson once opined that if he could only save ten movies from a sinking ship, he'd take ten by Howard Hawks and leave the rest to the ocean deep.
Me, I'd reserve room for a DVD on boat building and another on edible plants, but I understand the sentiment. Hawks, more than any other director, covered the waterfront — Westerns, comedies, crime, war, action, sci-fi, musicals, straight-up drama, and even silent movies. And he didn't just make entertaining movies, he made genre-defining classics.
Hawks gave John Wayne his first great acting showcase, taught Katharine Hepburn how to play comedy and Lauren Bacall how to whistle, helped define 1930s gangster movies, 1940s film noir, and 1950s sci-fi spectacles, and put Marilyn Monroe in a slinky pink dress as she sang her signature song, "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend."
That he also directed two of the greatest Westerns in history, well, that's just showing off.
So what are my favorite Howard Hawks movies? Glad you asked.
In chronological order:
Scarface (1932) — Although Hawks had been directing since 1926 (including 1928's A Girl in Every Port, which put Louise Brooks on the map, and the first, best version of The Dawn Patrol in 1930), Scarface was the first indispensable movie of his career. I've written about Scarface at length (here, here and here) and I won't rehash any of that except to note that along with Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, this is one of the three great gangster pictures of its era. Brian De Palma remade it in 1983 with Al Pacino.
Bringing Up Baby (1938) — Some people, such as the aforementioned David Thomson, would include Hawks's 1934 comedy Twentieth Century here but although it made a star of Carole Lombard, to me it's more shrill than funny. Instead, I'll list Hawks's other screwball classic, Bringing Up Baby, in which a batty Katharine Hepburn and her pet leopard fall in love with a very goofy college professor played by Cary Grant. "Now it isn't that I don't like you, Susan, because, after all, in moments of quiet, I'm strangely drawn toward you, but, well, there haven't been any quiet moments." This was Hepburn's first comedy; it wouldn't be her last.
Only Angels Have Wings (1939) — Starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur and a young Rita Hayworth, this one explores one of Hawks's favorite themes: men of action behaving according to a professional code, and the women who learn to love them. Grant plays a pilot trying to get a fledgling air mail service off the ground; Arthur is a showgirl stranded at his hotel. For fun, take a drink every time somebody says "Calling Barranca" — you'll be in the hospital by the end of the first act! A personal favorite.
His Girl Friday (1940) — A (superior) remake of the comedy The Front Page, this one stars Cary Grant as a hilariously ruthless newspaper editor, Rosalind Russell as his star reporter — and ex-wife — and Ralph Bellamy as the man she intends to marry. One look at Grant and Bellamy, and you know how this one's going to turn out but what a wild ride getting there with a very modern moral to boot: a woman's place is in the office, not the kitchen. Career best performances by all three leads. Holds the record for the fastest dialogue in movie history. Must see.
Ball of Fire (1941) — Another comedy. Typically, in Hawks's dramas, women must prove worthy of the men they love. In his comedies, the formula is reversed. Here, Barbara Stanwyck is a showgirl on the run from her gangster boyfriend. Gary Cooper is the virginal professor who gives her shelter. When the film's writer Billy Wilder (who would later win Oscars directing The Lost Weekend and The Apartment) confessed he didn't understand the plot, Hawks told him "It's a remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Bingo!
To Have and Have Not (1944) — Set in French Martinique during World War II, Harry Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) has retreated from the messy political world into a cocoon of isolationism so complete he's willing to ignore the fascists in charge even as they are shooting his clients and pushing his friends around. Marie "Slim" Browning (Lauren Bacall in her first film role) teaches him how to whistle and forces him to realize that no matter how much he thinks he's successfully avoided sticking his neck out, his neck is out there. A loose adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel, the screenplay is by William Faulkner, to date the only time a Nobel Prize winner has written a screenplay based on the work of another Nobel Prize winner.
The Big Sleep (1946) — Bogart and Bacall again. This time, Bogart is Raymond Chandler's famous private detective, Philip Marlowe, while Bacall draws his eye as the beautiful, spoiled daughter of a rich client. The plot is incomprehensible (even Chandler didn't know whodunit) but the sparks fly and the dialogue sets some sort of record for sexual innuendo. Loads of fun.
Red River (1948) — One of the greatest Westerns ever made, John Wayne and his adopted son Montgomery Clift lead a cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail. Basically a retelling of Mutiny on the Bounty with Wayne as Captain Bligh. After seeing the movie, director John Ford (who had cast Wayne in the classic Stagecoach way back in 1939) exclaimed, "I didn't know the big son of a bitch could act!" Boy, could he.
The Thing from Another World (1951) — Based on John Campbell's classic novella "Who Goes There?" this is the story of soldiers and scientists in the Arctic Circle fighting an invader from outer space (and sometimes each other). Hawks is credited only as the film's producer but those who were there insisted he directed as well. Sure seems like it. Remade in 1982 by John Carpenter, this science fiction classic is full of danger and paranoia but also humor, camaraderie and a good-looking, no-nonsense Hawksian woman (Margaret Sheridan).
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) — Based on the novel by the immortal Anita Loos, gold digger Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) and her no nonsense pal Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell in her best role) set sail for France with a boatload of handsome Olympians, a rich, eligible bachelor (aged seven) and a private eye determined to catch Lorelei in flagrante delicto. Features Marilyn Monroe's signature song "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." One of the best musicals of the 1950s, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as much as anything, proves Howard Hawks was the master of any genre.
Rio Bravo (1959) — Ostensibly the story of a border town sheriff (John Wayne) who squares off against a rich rancher and his army of hired goons, Rio Bravo is really a study of a professional doing his job and doing it well despite the imminent threat of death, an idealized code of conduct Hemingway called "grace under pressure." This is Hawks at his most compassionate, not an attribute I would always associate with his brusque heroes and no-nonsense women. But John Wayne watches over his ragged crew — a drunk, a cripple, and later a girl, a young gunslinger and even the manager of the local hotel — like a mother hen, with a love that is sometimes tough and sometimes tender, but always genuine. With Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and Angie Dickinson. The best Howard Hawks movie and my all-time favorite Western — and you know how much I love a good Western!
Man's Favorite Sport? (1964) — The least well-known of all the movies on this list, but a personal fave, this is a comedy about an expert fisherman (Rock Hudson) who confesses to the woman who's organized a tournament in his honor that he's never fished in his life — never even touched a fish! Paula Prentiss, in the best performance of her career, takes him in hand and teaches him everything he needs to know, some of it having to do with a rod and reel.
El Dorado (1966) — A loose comedic remake of Rio Bravo, with John Wayne again, Robert Mitchum as the drunk, and James Caan as a poetry-spouting gambler in a funny hat. Caan has the best line in the movie while wrasslin' the voluptuous Michele Carey in a hay barn. "Hey, you're a girl!" No kidding, Jimmy.
And if that's not enough, you might also try Sergeant York (1941) (which won Gary Cooper an Oscar), I Was a Male War Bride (1949) (with Ann Sheridan and Cary Grant in drag), Monkey Business (1952) (No, not the Marx Brothers — Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe) and Hatari! (1962) (John Wayne basically playing a macho Marlin Perkins — and if you understand that reference, boy, are you old!).
In 1974, Hawks received an honorary Oscar as "a giant of the American cinema whose pictures, taken as a whole, represent one of the most consistent, vivid, and varied bodies of work in world cinema."
And that undersells him.
In 1996, Entertainment Weekly ranked Hawks fourth on the list of the 50 greatest directors of all time. In 2007, Total Film also ranked him fourth on its list of the 100 greatest directors of all-time.
And me? I have him on the Mount Rushmore of Hollywood film directors along with Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Steven Spielberg, a first among equals in my book. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Much celebrated in her day, Norma Shearer's name is now met by many with derision — including, once upon a time, by the sock monkey who writes this blog.
But only a bloviating narcissist determined to repeat his mistakes won't admit when he's wrong, and I was wrong to dismiss Norma Shearer without first seeing her pre-Code work.
In fact, before she got culture and started playing those maddeningly starchy good girls in bloodless MGM literary adaptations, Shearer turned in some of the best performances of the early sound era, playing — pardon my French — horny blue bloods too eager to get into a man's pants to worry about the impact on her social standing.
Thank God for pre-Code movies! All that misbehavior kids think they invented in the Sixties — sex, drugs, hot music, adultery, abortion — Hollywood was making movies about in the early 1930s, and making all that sin look like a helluva lot fun.
Too much fun as it turned out for the Puritans who get their mitts on the government from time to time. With censorship threatening their profit margins, Hollywood invented the Code, which not only banned onscreen depictions of all that naughtiness we're not supposed to enjoy but so obviously do, but also wholesome activities like a husband and wife sleeping in the same bed together, a fact of life every child in America was damn well aware of, else why bother to climb in there with them in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Who did they think they were fooling?
But I digress ...
I suspect Shearer's husband, the legendary producer Irving Thalberg, was only too happy to wrap his wife up in a shroud of respectability. Probably didn't want her audience to know the woman he had married was, in the words of the ever-classy Mickey Rooney, "hotter than a half-f***ed fox in a forest fire."
Well, some guys are like that.
As Walter Clemons once wrote for EW.com, "Thalberg was fatally afflicted with gentility. He cast his wife in movies with literary pretensions — O'Neill's Strange Interlude, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and as a mature Juliet in a suffocatingly tasteful rendition of Shakespeare. Norma gets a bad rap for these turkeys, but the reverence in which Thalberg's contemporaries held him is an unexamined delusion."
So what Norma Shearer movies should you see?
The 1939 comedy The Women would be an obvious choice — it's her best known film and it's a good one. But let's be honest, Norma is a bit of a sad sack in The Women — abandoned by her cheating husband, betrayed by her closest friends — and frankly, co-stars Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell blow her off the screen.
Instead, try these three pre-Code classics:
The Divorcee (1930) — When husband Ted (Robert Montgomery) has an extramarital fling, his wife Jerry (Shearer) retaliates with one of her own. Suddenly the gander, who always felt free to goose anything in a skirt, gets his feathers in a ruffle and files for divorce.
Separated, Ted drinks, Jerry parties, and neither is any too happy with the state of their affairs. Eventually, Jerry falls into the arms of a married man and ... well, there's enough here for a season's worth of Real Housewives, all of it unfolding in a brisk 84 minutes.
Shearer topped Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson, among others, at the 3rd Academy Awards for the only Oscar of her career.
A Free Soul (1931) — Even better than The Divorcee, in this sprightly 91-minute melodrama, free-spirit Jan Ashe (Shearer) falls for a gangster (Clark Gable in a star-making turn), discovering too late what kind of a man he really is.
When her ex-beau (Leslie Howard) comes to her rescue and winds up on trial for murder, Jan turns to her alcoholic father, a once successful attorney, hoping he can pull one more rabbit from his briefcase of lawyerly tricks.
Lionel Barrymore (at his hammy best as Jan's alcoholic father) won the Oscar for best actor, and Shearer picked up another nomination for best actress, one of five in her career.
Private Lives (1931) — In this faithful adaptation of Noel Coward's popular stageplay, two recently remarried divorcees, Elyot (Robert Montgomery, again) and Amanda (Shearer), find themselves honeymooning in adjoining suites at the same resort. The two ex-spouses are less interested in starting life anew than in tearing into each other, preferably with a wit so biting, the quips leave teeth marks.
And when the wit's not wounding enough, they use actual teeth!
You'd be tempted to call this a comedy of spousal abuse but for the fact that the two participants so thoroughly enjoy themselves. Elyot and Amanda are natural-born performers — drama queens, we'd call them — and after a season apart, they realize each is the other's best audience. They can't live together, but to live apart means they'd have to climb off their private little stages and start living with themselves — or more to the point, with their brand new spouses who, they quickly discover, bore them to tears.
In an essay for Bright Lights Film Journal, Dan Callahan called it "Shearer's finest, most well-rounded performance, and it's the only film that you can show to the uninitiated without fear of the dreaded Shearer-isms."
If you're only going to see one Norma Shearer movie, see this one.
Our long national nightmare is over! The sock monkey who types this blog finally got around to bringing the Katie-Bar-the-Door Awards up to date — we now have nominees and winners for the entire Oscar era, from 1927 all the way through 2024 ... and one big winner for 2025.
And what are the Katie-Bar-the-Door Awards? Not so much alternate Oscars as alternate Golden Globe awards, I have chosen movies, actors, directors and writers I think Hollywood should have honored over the years in the categories of drama, comedy/musical (broadly defined) and (in the best picture category) foreign language.
Other than the immortal Erik Beck, who does that? Well, what can I tell you — the Monkey is a full-service old-school blog!
I've written about Rob Reiner before (most recently here). He directed a run of classic movies from 1984 to 1992 that wasn't just the best of his day but rivaled similar runs by all-time greats Buster Keaton, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder.
In case you've forgotten, I'll repeat the list: This Is Spinal Tap, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery and A Few Good Men.
In the course of that run, he made stars of River Phoenix, Meg Ryan and Kathy Bates (who won an Oscar as James Caan's biggest fan); turned the mockumentary up to eleven, establishing a beloved comedy genre in the process; gave us Jack Nicholson's best known catchphrase ("You can't handle the truth!"); and most importantly, taught women everywhere how to fake an orgasm (Oh, no, sorry — I've just been informed they've been doing that since the beginning of time).
Throw in The Sure Thing (1985), a very funny screwball rom-com that put John Cusack on the map, and you can say Reiner's movies helped shape everything that came after.
The son of comedy legend Carl Reiner, he was also a very good comedic actor in his own right. On the groundbreaking comedy All in the Family, his performance as Mike Stivic — a.k.a. the earnest, sometimes misguided but always funny "Meathead" — twice earned him a Primetime Emmy.
Maybe of more significance, Reiner, with his comic foil Archie Bunker (the great Carroll O'Connor), helped left-wing and right-wing America carry on a conversation at a particularly fraught moment in our history.
If only there were such a cultural meeting place these days! But alas, times change and we're lucky now if we can agree on the day of the week much less things that matter.
Finally, on a personal note, Rob Reiner taught me how to put on my shoes — one foot at a time, of course, not like the rest of you animals, with your sock and a sock and a shoe and a shoe.
Saw that as a kid fifty-plus years ago and I've been walking in Rob Reiner's footsteps, so to speak, ever since.
For that, and for all those movies I still watch and love, thank you, Mr. Reiner. You will be missed.
August 1, 1930-to-July 31, 1931, was one of those movie years where the list of the Academy's nominees and winners would give you a completely distorted idea of what was actually going on in movie history.
1931 was a pivotal year. James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Clark Gable all went from bit players to stars within the space of twelve months and in so doing, they gave the cinema a distinctly American feel for the first time. Instead of actors aping polished stage performers with British or faux-British accents, audiences heard the inflections and rhythms of urban wise guys like Cagney and Gable, or in the case of Robinson — who was born in Romania and raised in New York's Lower East Side — the voice of the American immigrant experience.
Gangster pictures starring Cagney and Robinson — The Public Enemy and Little Caesar, respectively — proved to be big, if controversial, hits with both critics and audiences. Censors were not so thrilled, however, contending that the films (and Howard Hawks's Scarface the following year) glamorized crime.
Hollywood, as usual, proved to be of two minds on the subject, happy to bank the money that was rolling in while paying lip service at Oscar time to the notion that gangster pictures were bad for us.
It was the same story with Universal's cycle of great horror pictures, which began in 1931 with Dracula, and continued in November of that year (too late for an Oscar nomination) with Frankenstein. Their stars, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, would dominate the genre and box office for years to come without either ever receiving any recognition from the Academy.
There was also the groundbreaking western The Big Trail, starring an impossibly young John Wayne and featuring the first widescreen movie in history.
And, of course, Groucho Marx gave us what was perhaps the most famous monologue of his career, confessing to audiences, "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."
If, however, you look at the list of winners and nominees from the Academy Award ceremony held on November 10, 1931, you won't see any of these films or performers:
Picture: Cimarron
Actor: Lionel Barrymore (A Free Soul)
Actress: Marie Dressler (Min and Bill)
Director: Norman Taurog (Skippy)
Admittedly, although the Academy failed to recognize the revolution in their midst, Cimarron makes sense in the context of the times — it was based on a best-selling novel, critics loved it, and helped sell the notion that movies were high art. Not to mention the opening sequence is spectacular.
As for Marie Dressler and Lionel Barrymore, they were big stars and turned in good performances in solid films.
The only truly inexplicable award went to Norman Taurog for his direction of the comedy Skippy.
Skippy is pleasant enough, with a fine performance from child star Jackie Cooper, but in terms of what went on in the director's chair, it isn't much unless you count Taurog's threat to shoot Cooper's dog if the kid didn't cry on cue (he cried buckets and earned an Oscar nomination).
Nothing compared to the accomplishments of Charlie Chaplin and René Clair, who were eligible for the award, or Josef von Sternberg and Lewis Milestone, who were actually nominated.
Not to mention Taurog might be the worst director to ever win the award — aside from nabbing the Oscar itself, Taurog is mostly remembered now for directing nine Elvis Presley movies (and not the good ones either).
Well, okay, he directed Boys Town, I'll give him that. But that hardly makes up for Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.
Anyway, these are my picks:
1930-31 PICTURE (Drama) winner:The Public Enemy (prod. Darryl F. Zanuck) nominees:The Big Trail (prod. Winfield R. Sheehan); The Dawn Patrol (prod. Robert North); Dracula (prod. Tod Browning and Carl Laemmle, Jr.); Morocco (prod. Hector Turnbull)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin) nominees:Animal Crackers (prod. Adolph Zukor); Bimbo's Initiation (prod. Max Fleischer); The Front Page (prod. Lewis Milestone); Min And Bill (prod. George W. Hill)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:M (prod. Seymour Nebenzal) nominees:L'Âge d'Or (prod. Le Vicomte de Noailles); Le Million (prod. Frank Clifford); Prix de Beauté (prod. Romain Pinès); The Threepenny Opera (prod. Seymour Nebenzal)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner:Marie Dressler (Min And Bill) nominees: Virginia Cherrill (City Lights); Ina Claire (The Royal Family Of Broadway); Lya Lys (L'Âge d'Or); Jeanette MacDonald (Monte Carlo)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner:Fritz Lang (M) nominees: Tod Browning (Dracula); Howard Hawks (The Dawn Patrol and The Criminal Code); Josef von Sternberg (Morocco); Raoul Walsh (The Big Trail); William A. Wellman (The Public Enemy)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Charles Chaplin (City Lights) nominees: Luis Buñuel (L'Âge d'Or); René Clair (Le Million); Lewis Milestone (The Front Page); G.W. Pabst (The Threepenny Opera)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Drama) winner:Peter Lorre (M) nominees: Dwight Frye (Dracula); Clark Gable (A Free Soul); Fredric March (The Barkleys of Broadway)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Harry Myers (City Lights) nominees: Adolphe Menjou (The Front Page)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner: Lotte Lenya (The Threepenny Opera) nominees: Mae Clarke (The Front Page); Margaret Dumont (Animal Crackers); Marjorie Rambeau (Min And Bill)
SPECIAL AWARDS
René Clair (Le Million) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Makin' Whoopee" (Whoopee!) (Best Song); Fritz Arno Wagner (M) (Cinematography)
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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