"Howard Hawks", Robin Wood
In his
films, nothing is more important than the friendship between two men and the
professionalism with which they carry their work. They are films made with
great camera modesty, filmed essentially at the eye level, and with outstanding efficiency
in the narrative, unified in spatial and temporal terms. None of his characters make explicit their feelings, and it is by their behaviors that the audience
perceives the relationships they establish between them (e.g., when Bogart throws his matches to Bacall in To Have and Have Not). If Hawks
invested so much in his characters (less shaped by the screenplay than by the actors' personalities who incarnated them), it was because he believed that
they were more important than the story that contained them. Hawks was an
intelligent pragmatist ("Evidence is the mark of Hawks' genius" as Rivette once wrote), and so he never saw what he did as art, but only as business. He
was like his heroes: his concern, regardless of the circumstances, was to get
the job done. A job, as Andrew Sarris wrote, where is expressed "his
personal creed that man is the measurer of all things." [1]
Robin Wood
(1931-2009) was a critic and founder of the film magazine CineAction, a journal
also dedicated to a radical political agenda of socialism, feminism, Marxism,
and gay rights, keynoted by his essay Responsibilities of a Gay Film
Critic. Author of several monographs around filmmakers such as Hitchcock
or Ingmar Bergman, his literary work emphasizes the consistent and individual
vision that each director puts on his films. His critical career began with the
publication of the article Psychanalyse
de «Psycho» for Cahiers du
Cinéma. His texts show an authorial approach similar to that of the French film
magazine, but later on, they focused on semiotic and poststructuralist
theories. Howard Hawks is a dense, essential and passionate study on the
American director. Wood describes almost every theme of Hawks' films: the professionalism and integrity
of its protagonists, the friendship and mutual respect between men, and the
stoicism that they carry when facing death. It was first published in 1968. This edition is the most recent one and was published in 2006.
Excerpts:
“The
directness-the vital, spontaneous frankness-with which the characters confront
and attack each other is enormously affecting, because this urgency of contact
derives from their constant (not necessarily conscious) sense of the imminence
of death, of the surrounding darkness, a physical intuition that prompts them
to live, now, to the maximum.”
“[On Air Force] The crew
of the Mary Ann are less strongly individualized than is usual with Hawks's characters:
their separate identities merge into their group identity. The relative
evaluation of individualism and group responsibility, with the possibility of
reconciling the two to their mutual benefit, is principally developed through the
rear-gunner Winocki (John Garfield). The central thread of the first half of
Air Force is Winocki's integration into the group. (…) The crew baIe out,
Winocki remains-against orders-and brings plane and captain to the ground, in a
crash-landing. Winocki has achieved his ambition to be a pilot, but the
personal ambition has been assimilated into something nobler: it is the triumph
of individualism placed at the service of something beyond itself, plane and
Captain constituting the focal point of group unity.”
Link to the complete book in PDF:
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| Robin Wood |
[1] Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors And Directions 1929-1968 (Da Capo Press, 1968)
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