The Big Sleep; or: Films that don't make any sense; or: Howard Hawks: classic or dud?

complete NYC retro

http://www.movingimage.us/films/2013/09/07/detail/the-complete-howard-hawks/

Wow.

damn!

Eric Rohmer, who wrote in Cahiers du Cinema in 1953, “The best Westerns are those signed by a great name. I say this because I love film, because I believe it is not the fruit of chance, but of art and men’s genius, because I think one cannot really love any film if one does not really love the ones by Howard Hawks.”

otm

Twentieth Century proves the truism that only very good actors can play really bad actors. As director Oscar Jaffe, John Barrymore’s hamminess is knowing, calibrated, hilarious—but it is also genuinely and juicily hammy, an expression of true delight in the indulgence of dramatic excess. Carole Lombard’s performance as actress Lily Garland is much more varied and quicksilver in its transformations, from awkward, wide-eyed amateur to posturing diva who throws tantrums and in the same breath announces that she hates temperament. Her gloriously phony histrionics are interspersed with spontaneous kinetic inspirations, like the famous kicks she aims at Barrymore’s abdomen or the way she appears in a doorway, eyes blazing, arms akimbo, totally unself-conscious in her underwear. Oscar Jaffe and Lily Garland spend the whole movie accusing each other of being fakes, which of course they both are. After sneaking aboard a train in the guise of a Kentucky colonel, Jaffe laments that he has “stooped so low as to become an actor”—this from a man who cannot describe the trappings of a biblical epic without pausing to mimic a camel. As for Lily, when her boyfriend reacts to her movie-star hysterics by sneering, “Oh, an artist,” she snarls back, “Yer darn tootin’ I am!”

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/passing-the-test-20130904

OK, I'll buy it.

Only Peter O'Toole in My Favorite Year got away with playing a bad actor as well as Barrymore did.

Jack Benny in To Be or Not to Be

Ha, Morbius that's exactly what I was thinking of.

Just watched The TV Set the other night (David Duchovny, directed by Lawrence Kasdan's son). Fran Kranz was a very funny bad actor.

I forgot Benny. That's a tough call.

I haven't seen TC since a PBS viewing in the nineties but I still remember Barrymore's expression as he rehearsed the actresses and went "Ting-a-ling-a-ling."

George Gaynes in Tootsie.

"Does Jeff know?"

the great Molly Haskell writing in 1974 on the sexual dynamics in HH

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which seemed completely immersed in Fifties garishness when it appeared in 1953, looks somewhat more skeptical today—a musical that is as close to satire as Hawks’ films ever get on the nature (and perversions) of sexual relations in America, particularly in the mammary-mad Fifties.... The debate as to whether Russell represents “normal” or excessive sexual drives is answered in the ambiguity with which Hawks perceives Monroe and Russell as filling their roles as sex goddesses. Indicating his awareness of their quintessentially Fifties “front,” Hawks has pointed, in interviews, to the irony of Russell marrying her high school boyfriend and settling into domesticity (a condition she has recently, and perhaps not so illogically, exchanged for religious fanaticism), and of Monroe being a wallflower at a party with no one to drive her home. This sense of incongruity is felt at the heart of the sexual exaggeration and masquerade. In a funny but truly pessimistic ending, Russell finally gives up on finding anything like a normal relationship and joins Monroe as a mock-blonde, opting for gold over diamonds, securing her future against a sexist tradition which will either avoid her, or leave her eventually for a younger version of herself.

It is a tradition to which Hawks himself is not altogether immune, not just in the ethic of his films, but in his choice of actresses, who reflect the sexual taste of the man as much as the professional criteria of the director. Men like Grant and Wayne appeared over and over again, accumulating character lines, gaining resonance with familiarity, being allowed to grow old. But, with the exception of Bacall, his women stars appeared only once, carrying the implication that having once served, a woman had had her day and, like the aftermath of a love affair, was now “used.” Hawks gravitated to a certain kind of woman and coached her to conform to a taste for a woman who would look young but seem older. Thus if Angie Dickinson, sensual and active, womanly and direct, is one of his most exciting heroines, she is also the impossible dream of male fantasy, being at once the blossom and the fruit, ripe and yet virginal, sexually aware and yet somehow newborn for the hero. An active woman, she is suddenly willing to wait as he works things out with the men who occupy first place in his life. She brings her independence only as far as the threshold of a relationship, as a sort of gift, and no further. If Rio Bravo is a movie one loves and returns to like an old friend, isn’t this partly because there is something clubby and reassuring in the male enclosure, where the dimension of risk—the real risk, created by women rather than “bad guys”—has been artificially excluded?

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/masculine-feminine-howard-hawks/

Hawks is the classic auteur who frustrates me the most, mainly because I can never seem to form an opinion on him. I like Bringing Up Baby and To Have and Have Not, am kinda meh on The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo, and my memories are fuzzy on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and His Girl Friday, but I dunno--I'm still looking for whatever it is that puts him on par with Ford, Hitchcock, etc (also, Hawks-worshippers who argue for the superiority of TH&HN over Casablanca baffle me). I was hoping that Only Angels Have Wings--which some seem to regard as, if not his absolute best, than certainly definitive--would be the one to finally snap some things into place for me, but my Hawks-apathy continues. The aerial stuff is decent enough (though this kind of thing rarely interests me, which might be part of the problem in this specific case), and the closing gag is both witty and brilliantly economical in a way that is typical of what I imagine fans love about him so much, but the script meanders too much, to the point that there are large chunks of it where the film seems to forget about Jean Arthur, and I didn't find any of the supporting characters that vivid or interesting. The new Criterion disc looks great, and there's an excellent piece by David Thomson on the film that, in addition to providing a remarkably agile reading of the film's queerness, is the kind of thoughtful and admiring analysis that really makes me wish I liked the film nearly as much as Thomson does.

Hawks-worshippers are probably the worst people from whom to adopt a perspective on him. If you are aware of the reasons why directors, critics and film enthusiasts admire his work, but you still are apathetic, then I'd say you have a legitimate, fully-developed personal perspective on his work, in that you know what he is doing but it fails to move you. Some people who truly love art just can't get into Goya, while others find Rembrandt kind of blah. It is a big world and it takes all kinds.

Perhaps Hawks frustrates you because he would have laughed at the idea that he was a "classic auteur", rather than a hardworking director just trying to put together an entertaining film from a script he'd been given to shoot.

here are large chunks of it where the film seems to forget about Jean Arthur,

doesn't forget her enough imo

I like how the film moves with ease from terror to comedy, like the transition from worrying about the dead pilot to having steak and beer at the club. That's why I like about Hawks film: the good ones are ones you can hang out with.

Alfred's last post is otm but the penultimate one is SB/FB material.

Arthur is miscast.

I usually adore Jean Arthur, but in this film she made no impression on me.

I like Arthur, so I now think that part of my negative reaction towards the film might have something to do with the way in which it is set up, in the first 20 minutes or so, to be her story. Thomson claims that it is through her eyes that the viewer is allowed into the world of these guys, but Hawks is inconsistent in his employment of her character, dropping her whenever his attention drifts elsewhere. I would have liked more clash between her sunny, though perhaps idealistic, worldview and the gritty realm that Grant and co. inhabit, but that seems to be what the movie is about only, like, 20% of the time.

Part of the tension is that any other actress would have revealed the weakness you describe. You think Hepburn, Stanwyck, or Dunne would have allowed themselves to get sidelined?

Feel sorry for Jean Arthur in some of her later films, such as Shane and A Foreign Affair, liked her in Only Angels Have Wings but haven't seen in three decades so need to revisit.

She's good in Easy Living (script by Preston Sturges), The More the Merrier, and a few others. She was never a favorite of mine -- playing for cutes.

rather than a hardworking director just trying to put together an entertaining film from a script he'd been given to shoot.

I don't think this is remotely accurate, btw. From quite early on Hawks was able to choose certain kinds of material and/or shape what he was given into something very personal and idiosyncratic; for a large part of his career he acted as his own producer. By temperament, he was far too lordly, cold, steel-willed etc to be an underling for long. The repetition in Hawks' work, across different genres, with different writers and actors, of certain stock situations and certain ways of ppl relating to each other and expressing (or not) their feelings isn't just some happy accident of the studio system.

Arthur is super in A Foreign Affair

Hawks also rewrote most of his films uncredited.

Arthur is super in /A Foreign Affair/

they are the yin and yang of it

“Word has reached me that you are having fun on the set. This must stop.”
is my alltime favourite. (From Jack Warner to Howard Hawks when making The Big Sleep.)

— Fredrik Gustafsson (@fredrikonfilm) March 20, 2018

ha, love it

Koresky examines the queerness of Blondes

https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/queer-now-1953/

does Rio Bravo benefit from knowledge of Hawks' body of work like Liberty Valance or is it less a valedictory piece since HH worked in so many genres? watched I Was a Male War Bride last night, masterpiece

Not really. It's Hawks presenting his version of how High Noon <should> have gone, so you might want to check that out for reference.

id watch a couple of his earlier westerns, at least Red River

I've seen in order of preference-

I Was a Male War Bride
Red River
Bringing Up Baby
The Big Sleep
Only Angels Have Wings
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Twentieth Century
To Have and Have Not
His Girl Friday

strange. "His Girl Friday" sounds so promising but when friends & I saw it recently, it was unbearable. surprising, counter-intuitive performance by Cary Grant, obviously misdirected in this role. & Rosalind Russell grating. & script ridiculous. (otherwise, a "classic"!) https://t.co/YfmRLnlSom

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) March 13, 2020

Wow, wrong

no wronger film opinion possible.

dave kehr retweeted this and said "blocked"

Think she used to be good, at least back in the days when Martin Skidmore walked the earth, but yeah.

JCO is someone who probably just shouldn't tweet, i've seen so many ppl repost incredibly bad takes from her

I always enjoy His Girl Friday, but I guess that's one of the many reasons I've never opened a Twitter account: blocking someone because they disagree with you about a film makes no sense to me at all. (Even though I agree with Kael's contention that it would be difficult to have a relationship with someone--a real-life relationship--if you disagree about films all the time.)

As when people here announce that they're FP'ing someone for a bad take or failed joke, announcing that you're blocking someone on twitter is a way of making fun of the poster; the system does not autopost the word "blocked" if you use it.

fp'd

His Girl Fp'd

So you are saying maybe I shouldn’t sign up for that Master Class of hers that I keep seeing on YouTube?

final season of bojack horseman has an extended his girl friday parody

Boy, Ball of Fire sucks, eh? Lethargic, almost geriatric. Not one of the seven encyclopedists is funny. Coop looks sexy on occasion but is otherwise out of his element. Stanwyck played this character with a better script and direction in The Lady Eve, where Charles Coburn is as amusing as seven men and Fonda plays a better dork.

I didn’t mind it last time I saw it, I certainly like the part with Gene Krupa - and Roy Eldridge for a few seconds, depending on which print you see- but I remembering before feeling the same way as you describe, and remember Paul Schrader saying something similar.

as far as sexxxx appeal Dana Andrews >>>>> Coop

Can't speak to that, but I'll take your word for it.

Paul Schrader made his statement at this event: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/20/movies/the-auteur-theory-of-film-holy-or-just-full-of-holes.html