It's kind of hilarious that the man who learned his craft making silents but became known for fast-talking flicks when sound came in was apparently the type of guy who said very little himself. When he did talk, he spoke slooooowly. His film Twentieth Century is credited with introducing a faster pace and naturalness to dialogue by having actors' lines overlap. Previous attempts to crank the pace of human interaction in film are attributed to fast cutting or the specific style of actors like James Cagney. McCarthy's examination of Hawks' deliberate rethinking of the art of conversation on film is wonderful. "You're liable to interrupt me and I'm liable to interrupt you," Hawks said, "so you write in such a way that you overlap the dialogue but not lose anything. It's just a trick. It's also a trick getting people to do it- it takes them about two or three days to get accustomed to it and then they're off." I would love to take acting tips from Hawks, but then, I'm already pretty good at interrupting most people I talk to!
McCarthy's subject, who kept almost no papers and was prone to tall tales (McCarthy's skepticism of oral history done by folks like Bogdanovich is very interesting), must have been a challenge to pin down yet he draws a very detailed picture of the man. "No one has ever claimed to have seen Howard Hawks lose his composure, his calm demeanor, or his sense of control, even when drunk, angry or under severe pressure," writes McCarthy. "By the same token, no one saw him deliriously happy or celebratory." I questioned, while reading, McCarthy's reluctance to make strong statements on Hawks' political views; for much of the book it appears as though McCarthy found his subject to be completely objective about politics, more engrossed with his passion to tell a good yarn, with only the most subtle right-wing leanings. Is there such a thing as a person without politics? McCarthy leaves it to his sources to let the picture of Hawks' views emerge. In describing an abandoned film idea about the Vietnam war late in Hawks' career, McCarthy writes, "One can only agree ... that, given Hawks' naive refusal to engage the inevitable political implications of such a project and his lack of firsthand knowledge about the war, 'It's good for him that he never made the film'."
Hawks, friends with both William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, ruminated year after year about making The Sun Also Rises into a film. It never came to be, but both the description of the relationships between Hawks and these authors, as well as the discussion of Hawks' approach towards filming written works is fascinating. Unlike some, Hawks played loosely with original works yet transformed these premises into lasting films. Despite his personal failings (McCarthy also makes interesting comments about Hawks' sexuality) Hawks emerges as a man committed above all to the craft of film-making, and one of its indisputable masters.
How unfair is it that some of these films are next to impossible to find. No boxed set of Hawks silents, including the first definitive film of his career A Girl in Every Port? Tiger Shark is not on DVD? What is wrong with whoever owns the rights to these things? How is it that von Sternberg's Underworld (1927) (McCarthy describes it as "one of the most important films to come out of the late silent period" and one of the first gangster pictures), is basically forgotten?
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