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Until the mid-1930s Hawks was known primarily as a director of dramas and action films. However, working with a script by Hecht and Charles MacArthur, he crafted Twentieth Century (1934) into an enduring screwball comedy, establishing (along with Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night [1934]) the genre’s conventions: seemingly mismatched lovers at the centre of unlikely romances, off-the-wall characters and behaviour, and zany situations. Carole Lombard gave a classic comic performance as a shop girl who is transformed by her lover, a manic Broadway director (John Barrymore), into a superstar but who grows tired of his control over her life and deserts him for Hollywood. Their confrontation during a coast-to-coast train ride is a model of exquisite slapstick timing and machine-gun repartee. Indeed, this is the film that would cement overlapping dialogue as one of Hawks’s trademarks as a filmmaker. While Twentieth Century was not a huge commercial success, it gave Lombard’s career a new direction, establishing her as, arguably, the preeminent screwball comedienne. Hawks, meanwhile, would go on to become the master of the new genre.
Barbary Coast (1935), also written by Hecht and MacArthur, followed but was an unremarkable period romance. Ceiling Zero (1936), an adaptation of a play by former pilot Frank Wead, was better. It starred Cagney as an indomitable airmail pilot and Pat O’Brien as his hard-boiled boss. Hawks’s next project, The Road to Glory (1936), was unrelated to his earlier film of the same name. A World War I drama based on another screenplay by Faulkner, it told the story of a father (Lionel Barrymore) and son (Warner Baxter) who end up fighting in the same unit. The lively Come and Get It (1936), from an Edna Ferber novel, was shot primarily by Hawks, but toward the end of the production, Samuel Goldwyn fired him (or Hawks quit; their accounts of the event differed), and William Wyler shot the final scenes.
Hawks returned to comedy with the lunatic Bringing Up Baby (1938). Widely recognized as the definitive 1930s screwball comedy and as one of the masterpieces of American cinema, it is the ultimate expression of Hawks’s connoisseurship of the zany. Cary Grant was at his funniest as a hapless paleontologist trying to recover a purloined dinosaur bone. Katharine Hepburn (in a tremendously appealing performance) played the dotty heiress who falls for him but succeeds only in making his life miserable. The scenes shared by the two performers are electric, and the comic timing of their often nonsensical banter and their reactions to wildly improbable situations resulted in among the most memorable moments in the history of film comedy.
Grant served Hawks well again in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), an engaging adventure scripted by Jules Furthman about airmail pilots working at a remote station in South America. Grant and Jean Arthur, playing a stranded showgirl, provide the romance, while Rita Hayworth, in one of her first featured roles, injects steamy sensuality into this hazardous, hypermasculine environment. In many of his films, including some of his most memorable works, Hawks depicted similar scenarios in which men bravely, uncomplainingly, do a job only to slowly realize that they need a special woman to complete them. For Hawks in these films, as for so many of the literary protagonists created by his good friend Ernest Hemingway, grace under pressure was paramount.
Films of the 1940s
At the peak of his storytelling powers, Hawks reimagined the Hecht-MacArthur-scripted newspaper comedy The Front Page (1931) as His Girl Friday (1940), cannily changing the gender of the editor and reporter at the centre of the story from two men to a man (Grant) and a woman (Rosalind Russell), respectively. By adding romantic bickering to the incisive satire of the ultracompetitive business of tabloid journalism, Hawks found new avenues of humour, and His Girl Friday is one of the funniest, fastest-paced comedies of its era thanks to the rapid-fire delivery of its dialogue.
Hawks spent a few weeks working on Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw in 1940, finally removing himself from the production after he found Hughes’s meddling to be intolerable, and then happily moved on to the Jesse Lasky production of Sergeant York (1941), which would become his biggest hit. Gary Cooper starred as the eponymous hero of this biography of Alvin York, the pacifist who became one of the greatest heroes of World War I. Although he seemed too old for the part, Cooper was York’s choice to play himself, and he won the Academy Award for best actor. Moreover, Sergeant York earned Hawks the only Academy Award nomination of his career, for best director.
Ball of Fire (1941), written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, was a well-conceived romantic comedy centred on Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. The patriotic Air Force (1943) transposed Hawks’s Air Corps experience and men-at-work ethos to World War II, with John Garfield, Gig Young, and Arthur Kennedy as part of the heroic crew of a B-17 bomber.
Hawks’s next big film, To Have and Have Not (1944), was the first pairing of one of cinema’s most iconic couples, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Hawks had signed Bacall to a personal services contract after his wife, Slim, noticed the arresting teenager in the pages of Vogue. Reminiscent of Casablanca (1942), the story, set in the Caribbean during World War II, concerns a charter-boat captain (Bogart) who sneaks an underground leader off Martinique while romantically fencing with another passenger (Bacall). Loosely based on the 1937 novel of the same name by Hemingway, Hawks’s film jettisons the book’s existential outlook and much of its plot. Instead, the focus is on the sassy romantic dialogue written by Faulkner and Furthman. For much of at least one generation of filmgoers, the term screen chemistry was virtually defined by what Hawks’s cameras captured between Bogart and Bacall.
Hawks called on Faulkner and Furthman again—along with Leigh Brackett, a writer of pulp-detective and science-fiction stories—to help adapt Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe mystery The Big Sleep. Fashioned as a follow-up showcase for Bogart and Bacall, Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946) offered the same sort of entertaining romance and mayhem as To Have and Have Not.
As with Hawks’s Bogart-Bacall films, it was the screen chemistry between two actors—this time John Wayne and (in his first screen role) Montgomery Clift—that fueled the powerful epic western Red River (1948). Wayne and Clift played a father and his adopted son who are leading a cattle drive, and the Oedipal interplay between them had overtones of Frank Lloyd’s Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).
A Song Is Born (1948) was Hawks’s musical remake of his own Ball of Fire, with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo substituting for Cooper and Stanwyck. It was followed by the riotously funny I Was a Male War Bride (1949), set in the aftermath of World War II. It starred Grant as a French army officer who marries an American serving in the Women’s Army Corps (Ann Sheridan). The only that way he can accompany her to the States is to masquerade as a woman.
