The Big Sky (Howard Hawks, 1952)

Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin in The Big Sky

Jim Deakins: Kirk Douglas
Boone Caudill: Dewey Martin
Teal Eye: Elizabeth Threatt
Zeb Calloway: Arthur Hunnicutt
Romaine: Buddy Baer
"Frenchy" Jourdonnais: Steven Geray
La Badie: Henri Letondal
Poordevil: Hank Worden
Streak: Jim Davis

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Dudley Nichols, Ray Buffum, DeVallon Scott
Based on a novel by A.B. Guthrie Jr.
Cinematography: Russell Harlan
Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Perry Ferguson
Film editing: Christian Nyby
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

The Big Sky is a good Henry Hathaway or Budd Boetticher movie, except that it was made by Howard Hawks, from whom we have come to expect more. Hawks had just passed through one of the peak periods of his long career, with the sterling achievement of To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), and Red River (1948), and he was to return to form in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Rio Bravo (1959). But The Big Sky looks like a routine Western adventure in that company, even though it has some old Hawksian hands on board in screenwriter Dudley Nichols, cinematographer Russell Harlan, and composer Dimitri Tiomkin. It has the director's characteristic touches in places: overlapping dialogue and the usual male-bonding moments. Some of the latter, especially between Kirk Douglas's Jim Deakins and Dewey Martin's Boone Caudill, verge on the homoerotic, since Boone is given to wearing tight leather pants and both go around with their shirts flared open, making one scene look like it's taking place in a West Hollywood bar and not a St. Louis saloon. The absence of the usual "Hawksian woman," able to return wisecrack for wisecrack, is particularly noticeable. The only woman in the large cast is Elizabeth Threatt, playing an Indian woman named Teal Eye, who doesn't speak English. This was the only film appearance for Threatt, a model Hawks had spotted in a photograph. Her chief function in the film is to provide sexual tension among the members of a crew of fur traders making their way up the Missouri River and to spark a bit of rivalry between Jim and Boone. Teal Eye has been brought along on the expedition by Zeb Calloway to act as a go-between with the Blackfoot tribe, to which she belongs. Also along for the journey is a somewhat addled Blackfoot known as Poordevil, played by Hank Worden, a regular member of John Ford's stock company who sometimes moonlighted for Hawks. The journey is interrupted by Indian attacks, river rapids, and the threats from a rival trading company, in scenes that are staged and shot well but never provide more than the routine excitement of the genre. Hunnicutt and Harlan received Oscar nominations for their work.

Two From Hawks

The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951)

James Arness in The Thing From Another World

Capt. Patrick Hendry: Kenneth Tobey
Nikki Nicholson: Margaret Sheridan
Dr. Arthur Carrington: Robert Cornthwaite
Ned Scott: Douglas Spencer
Lt. Eddie Dykes: James Young
Crew Chief, Bob: Dewey Martin
Lt. Ken Erickson: Robert Nichols
Cpl. Barnes: William Self
Dr. Stern: Eduard Franz
The Thing: James Arness

Director: Christian Nyby
Screenplay: Charles Lederer, Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht
Based on a story by John W. Campbell Jr.
Cinematography: Russell Harlan
Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, John Hughes
Film editing: Roland Gross
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, 1952)

Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, and Marilyn Monroe in Monkey Business

Barnaby Fulton: Cary Grant
Edwina Fulton: Ginger Rogers
Oliver Oxley: Charles Coburn
Lois Laurel: Marilyn Monroe
Hank Entwhistle: Hugh Marlowe
Jerome Kitzel: Henri Letondal
Dr. Zoldeck: Robert Cornthwaite
G.J. Culverly: Larry Keating
Dr. Brunner: Douglas Spencer
Mrs. Rhinelander: Esther Dale
Little Indian: George Winslow

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, I.A.L. Diamond, Harry Segall
Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner
Art direction: George Patrick, Lyle R. Wheeler
Film editing: William B. Murphy
Music: Leigh Harline

Oddly, the most "Hawksian" of these two early 1950s Howard Hawks movies is the one for which he is credited as producer and not as director. The fact that The Thing From Another World displays Hawks's typical fast-paced, overlapping dialogue and has a heroine who can hold her own around men has led many to suggest that Hawks really directed it. The rumor is that Hawks gave Christian Nyby the director's credit so that Nyby could join the Directors Guild. It was the first directing credit for Nyby, who had worked as film editor for Hawks on several films, including Red River (Hawks, 1948), for which Nyby received an Oscar nomination. He went on to a long career as director, mostly on TV series like Bonanza and Mayberry R.F.D., but the controversy over whether he or Hawks directed The Thing has never really quieted down. In any case, The Thing is a landmark sci-fi/horror film, with plenty of wit and some engaging performances, particularly by Margaret Sheridan as the no-nonsense Nikki, secretary to a scientist at a research outpost near the North Pole where a flying saucer has crashed with a mysterious inhabitant. Nikki's old flame, Capt. Hendry, arrives with an Air Force crew to investigate, and Sheridan and Tobey have a little of the bantering chemistry of earlier Hawksían couples like Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944) or Montgomery Clift and Joanne Dru in Red River. Though it's a low-budget cast, everyone performs with wit and conviction. The film has dated less than other invaders-from-outer-space movies of the '50s, partly because of its lightness of touch and a few genuine scares, though its concluding admonition, "Watch the skies," is pure Cold War paranoia at its peak. That's James Arness, pre-Gunsmoke, as the Thing. The screenplay is by Charles Lederer, with some uncredited contributions from Ben Hecht, both of them frequent collaborators with Hawks. Both of them also worked on Monkey Business, a very different kind of movie, whose writers also include Billy Wilder's future collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond. The film evokes Hawks's great Bringing Up Baby (1938) by featuring Cary Grant as a rather addled scientist, Dr. Barnaby Fulton, who becomes involved in some comic mishaps brought about by an animal -- a leopard in the earlier film, a chimpanzee in this one. But the giddiness of Bringing Up Baby never quite emerges, partly because of a lack of chemistry between Grant and Ginger Rogers, who plays his wife, Edwina. The script involves Fulton's work on a rejuvenating drug that the chimpanzee manages to empty into a water cooler, thereby turning anyone who drinks it into an irresponsible 20-year-old. Grant is an old master at this kind of nonsense, but Rogers looks stiff and starchy and ill-at-ease trying to match him -- except, of course, when she is called on to dance, which she still did splendidly. Fortunately, there's some engaging support from Charles Coburn as Fulton's boss, who has a "secretary" played by Marilyn Monroe. ("Find someone to type this," he tells her.) Her role is the air-headed blonde stereotype that she found so difficult to escape -- "Mr. Oxley's been complaining about my punctuation, so I'm careful to get here before nine," she tells Fulton -- but no one has ever been better at playing it. Where The Thing From Another World succeeds despite a less-than-stellar cast, Monkey Business depends heavily on star power, for it gives off a feeling that its genre, screwball comedy, had played out by the time it was made.

The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)

Humphrey Bogart and Martha Vickers in The Big Sleep

Philip Marlowe: Humphrey Bogart
Vivian Rutledge: Lauren Bacall
Eddie Mars: John Ridgely
Carmen Sternwood: Martha Vickers
Book Shop Owner: Dorothy Malone
Mona Mars: Peggy Knudsen
Bernie Ohls: Regis Toomey
Gen. Sternwood: Charles Waldron
Norris: Charles D. Brown
Lash Canino: Bob Steele
Harry Jones: Elisha Cook Jr.
Joe Brody: Louis Jean Heydt

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman
Based on a story by Raymond Chandler
Cinematography: Sidney Hickox
Art direction: Carl Jules Weyl
Film editing: Christian Nyby
Music: Max Steiner

I've cited Keats's "negative capability" before in warning about getting too involved with the literal details of a movie at the expense of missing the total effect, and it still seems appropriate here when it comes to figuring out exactly who did what to whom in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep. Screenwriters William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman are said to have consulted Raymond Chandler, the author of the novel they were adapting, about certain obscurities of the plot, and Chandler admitted that he didn't know either, which is as fine an example of being "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" as even Keats could come up with. So ask not who killed the Sternwoods' chauffeur, or even who really killed Shawn Regan -- if, in fact, Regan is dead. This is one of the most enjoyable of films noir, if a movie that has so many sheerly pleasurable moments can really be called noir. It's also one of the most deliciously absurd -- or maybe absurdist -- movies ever made, including its persistent presentation of Humphrey Bogart's Philip Marlowe as an irresistible hunk, who has bookstore clerks, hat check girls, waitresses, and female taxi drivers swooning at his presence. The only thing that makes this remotely credible is that Lauren Bacall, and not just Vivian Sternwood Rutledge, actually did. In his review for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther, one of the most obtuse critics who ever took up space in a newspaper, called it a "poisonous picture" and commented that Bacall "still hasn't learned to act" -- an incredible remark to anyone who has just watched her exchange with Bogart ostensibly about horse racing. This is, of course, one of Howard Hawks's greatest movies, and of course it received not a single Oscar nomination -- not even for Martha Vickers's delirious Carmen Sternwood. Vickers was so good in her role that her part had to be trimmed to put more focus on Bacall, who was being groomed for stardom. Sadly, Vickers never found another role as good as Carmen. Dorothy Malone, who did go on to stardom and an Oscar, steals her scene as the bookstore owner amused and aroused by Marlowe's charisma. And then there's Elisha Cook Jr. as a small-time hapless hood not far removed from the Wilmer who stirred Sam Spade's homophobia in The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1946). Except this time his demise elicits something Marlowe would seem otherwise incapable of: pity.

Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948)

Another essential movie. There's a post going the rounds on Facebook that asks you to name the movies you've watched more than five times that you would still watch again. I haven't responded to it because there are too many movies that fit the category for me, but this would certainly be on my list. Each time I watch Red River, I have a little different reaction to it. Sometimes, for example, I'm glad when the character of Tess Millay (Joanne Dru) shows up, because it's kind of a relief from all that male bonding of the cattle drive. But this time I found that she annoyed me. I know she's meant to be the "Hawksian woman" of the movie, the character embodied so well by Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940), and especially Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). The Hawksian woman talks back to men, asserting her place in the world they dominate. But Tess Millay just talks, and even talks about how much she talks. Moreover, she's obviously there primarily to serve as a reincarnation of Fen (Colleen Gray), the woman whom Tom Dunson (John Wayne) loved and lost when he left the wagon train at the beginning of the movie. Still, even this bit of unnecessary narrative linkage is forgivable in a movie that offers so much. There is, of course, what I think of as Wayne's best performance as Dunson -- some prefer his work in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), which I find too artfully staged by Ford. Here he shows he can do everything from Hawks's characteristic swiftly overlapping dialogue to the paranoid trail-boss martinet to the tough guy hiding his tender side. And there's Montgomery Clift's remarkable movie debut as Matthew Garth -- Red River was filmed before The Search (Fred Zinnemann, 1948), though the latter was released first. Clift, who was stage-trained, somehow learned that movie acting is done in large part with the face, and he uses his eyes particularly expressively -- he reminds me of the great silent film actors in that regard. The scene in which Garth and Cherry Valance (John Ireland) handle each other's guns is one of the great homoerotic moments in movies, but it's prepared for by the way Clift and Ireland look at each other when they first meet. And then there's one of the great supporting casts in movies, including Walter Brennan, Noah Beery Jr.,  and a whole lot of cattle. (Hawks, who also produced the film, graciously gave Arthur Rosson, the second unit director in charge of the cattle drive scenes, a co-director credit.) Dimitri Tiomkin's music added immeasurably to the film, but surprisingly went unnominated by the Academy, which took notice only of Christian Nyby for editing and Borden Chase for the film's story. (It was based on his story in the Saturday Evening Post, and was turned into a screenplay by Charles Schnee -- though a lot of the dialogue is so Hawksian that I suspect the director deserved a screenplay credit, too.) Naturally, like most Hawks films, it won no Oscars.