China Seas (Tay Garnett, 1935)

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in China Seas

Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Rosalind Russell, Lewis Stone, C. Aubrey Smith, Dudley Digges, Robert Benchley, William Henry, Hattie McDaniel, Liev De Maigret, Lilian Bond, Edward Brophy, Soo Yong, Akim Tamiroff, Ivan Lebedeff. Screenplay: Jules Furthman, James Kevin McGuinness, based on a novel by Crosbie Garstin. Cinematography: Ray June. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: William LeVanway. Music: Herbert Stothart.

China Seas is a pretty good romantic adventure that seems to have been pieced together from better movies. Its romantic triangle of Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Rosalind Russell mimics that of Gable, Harlow, and Mary Astor in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932). Harlow and Wallace Beery have a relationship that echoes the one their characters had in Dinner at Eight (George Cukor, 1933). And the byplay between Harlow's character and her maid (Hattie McDaniel, of course) is a lot like the banter between Mae West and her maids in She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933) and I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933). China Seas has a few standout moments of its own: There's a terrific typhoon sequence involving a runaway steamroller on the deck of the tramp steamer captained by Gable's Alan Gaskell, and Robert Benchley has some funny bits as an alcoholic writer who's usually too drunk to know where he is or to respond to other people with anything more than non sequiturs. There's a kind of uptightness to the movie that reminds us that the Production Code censors were breathing down people's necks, whereas all of those better movies mentioned above were pre-Code. But Gable and Harlow are in fine form. She's Dolly Portland, aka "China Doll," the shady lady (sometimes introduced as "an entertainer") who used to be involved with Capt. Gaskell and has now booked passage on his steamer from Hong Kong to Singapore in an effort to win him back. Russell plays Sybil Barclay, a high-class English lady who also has a past with the captain and nearly does succeed in recapturing him. Russell seems to be trying too hard at the role, slipping into stiff-upper-lip mannerisms and becoming rather arch, so there's no real heat between her character and Gable's. Another old flame of Dolly's, Jamesy McArdle (Beery), is also on board, and he's in cahoots with Malaysian pirates to board the ship and steal the gold it's carrying. Rejected by the captain, who decides to marry Sybil, Dolly joins forces with McArdle, though she doesn't really mean to. You've seen this sort of thing before, so there are no surprises, but relax and be entertained.

The Outlaw (Howard Hughes, 1943)

The Outlaw (Howard Hughes, 1943)

Cast: Jack Buetel, Jane Russell, Thomas Mitchell, Walter Huston, Mimi Aguglia, Joe Sawyer, Gene Rizzi. Screenplay: Jules Furthman. Cinematography: Gregg Toland. Art direction: Perry Ferguson. Film editing: Wallace Grissell. Music: Victor Young.

Any list of great bad movies that doesn't include The Outlaw is not to be trusted. Because it is certainly bad, with a callow performance by Jack Buetel as Billy the Kid, a one-note (sultry pouting) performance by Jane Russell as Rio, and disappointing ones from old pros Thomas Mitchell and Walter Huston. It's ineptly directed by Howard Hughes, with awkward blocking and an abundance of scenes that don't go much of anywhere. It was weakened by Hughes's battles with the censors over Russell's cleavage and over the sexual innuendos -- an inept explanation that Rio and Billy were married while he was in a coma serves to legitimate the fact that they are sleeping together after he revives. It also implies that Billy rapes Rio, but she falls in love with him anyway. It's laden with a gay subtext, suggesting that Pat Garrett and Doc Holliday are in love with Billy -- and with each other. It's full of Western clichés and one of the corniest music tracks ever provided by a major film composer: Victor Young shamelessly borrows a theme from Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 as a love motif for Rio and Billy, falls back on "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie" at dramatic moments, and "mickey mouses" a lot of the action, including bassoons and "wah-wah" sounds from the trumpets to punch up comic moments. And yet, it's kind of a great bad movie for all of these reasons, and because it reflects its producer-director's megalomania, resulting in countless stories about his behind-the-scenes manipulation, his hyped-up "talent search" for stars that produced Russell (who became one) and Buetel (who didn't), and most famously, his use of his engineering talents to construct a brassiere for Russell that would perk up her breasts the way he wanted. (Russell apparently found it so uncomfortable that she secretly ditched it and adjusted her own bra to his specifications.)

Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)

Cary Grant and Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus 

Helen Faraday: Marlene Dietrich
Ned Faraday: Herbert Marshall
Nick Townsend: Cary Grant
Johnny Faraday: Dickie Moore
Ben Smith: Gene Morgan
Taxi Belle Hooper: Rita La Roy
Dan O'Connor: Robert Emmett O'Connor
Detective Wilson: Sidney Toler
Dr. Pierce: Morgan Wallace
Joe, a Hiker: Sterling Holloway
Cora: Hattie McDaniel

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Jules Furthman, S.K. Lauren, Josef von Sternberg
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Art direction: Wiard Ihnen
Film editing: Josef von Sternberg
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: W. Franke Harling, John Leipold, Paul Marquardt, Oscar Potoker

At once fascinating and perfectly ridiculous, Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus is a domestic melodrama with music and a bit of road movie thrown in. For most viewers it's chiefly of interest as an opportunity to see Cary Grant before the familiar "Cary Grant" persona had fully developed. He's a little rough around the edges still, slipping from an attempt at a fully American accent back into whatever his particular blend of British and American accent is, and his gift for looking faintly amused at absurd or difficult situations -- with which he's often confronted in Blond Venus -- hasn't quite emerged yet. At this stage of his career, he was little more than a useful leading man -- or second lead, in this film -- on the order of a John Lodge or a John Boles, there to show off the real star of the film, like Mae West in I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933) or Loretta Young in Born to Be Bad (Lowell Sherman, 1934) or Jean Harlow in Suzy (George Fitzmaurice, 1936). Or, of course, Marlene Dietrich, who is the reason Blonde Venus was made at all. Sternberg's obsession with Dietrich is on full display here as he crafts another story about a man willing to sacrifice his own love to make a woman in love with another man happy -- the role played by Adolphe Menjou in Morocco (1930) and here played by Grant, whose Nick Townsend, a rich playboy (he's identified as a "politician" in the screenplay, but we never see him either run for office or perform the duties of one), who gives up Dietrich's Helen Faraday twice: both times to let her return to her husband, played a little stodgily by Herbert Marshall. Of course, the real man in Helen's life is her son, Johnny, played by the terminally cute Dickie Moore. I like the way Sternberg both exploits and undercuts Moore's cuteness, as in the scene in which Johnny wears a hideous Halloween mask on the side of his head that's usually facing the camera. But then the whole film is full of Sternbergian tricks, such as the two amazing narrative jump cuts. The film opens with the meeting of Helen and Ned as he and some other hikers come upon her as she's swimming nude in a pond with her fellow chorus girls. She sends him away, though he discovers where she's performing before he goes. Cut from the girls splashing in the pond to Johnny splashing in a tub as Helen bathes him. Sternberg and his screenwriters omit what might have been a movie in itself: the second encounter of Helen and Ned, their courtship and marriage. Similarly, after much ado has reduced Helen to poverty and implied prostitution, there's a scene in which she gives a fellow derelict the $1500 Ned has paid her off with and goes off to, we assume, commit suicide -- or "make a hole in the water," as she has put it. Cut to a shot of an expanse of water, but then to a montage which tells us that Helen has resumed her career as a cabaret performer and has become the toast of Paris. Again, stuff that might have been almost an entire movie on its own has been (fortunately) elided. If Sternberg's tricks had been applied to a story that made more sense to start with, Blonde Venus might have been something of a classic. Instead, it's an extraordinary but often entertaining mess.

Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in Morocco

Tom Brown: Gary Cooper
Amy Jolly: Marlene Dietrich
La Bessiere: Adolphe Menjou
Caesar: Ullrich Haupt
Mme. Caesar: Eve Southern
Sgt. Tatoche: Francis McDonald
Lo Tinto: Paul Porcasi

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Jules Furthman
Based on a play by Benno Vigny
Cinematography: Lee Garmes
Film editing: Sam Winston
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: Karl Hajos

At one point in Josef von Sternberg's Morocco, Tom Brown literally sweeps Amy Jolly off her feet and then tries to guess her weight. She scoffs at his estimate of 120 pounds and says his low estimate must be because he's so strong. In fact, Marlene Dietrich had slimmed down noticeably since she made The Blue Angel for Sternberg only a few months earlier in Germany, though she's still not quite as svelte as she would become after his transformation of her into a Hollywood icon was complete. The pounds are gone in her first American film, as are the realistically tawdry cabaret costumes Lola Lola wears in the German film, replaced by a wardrobe designed by Travis Banton. She is also filmed lovingly by Lee Garmes, who helped her locate the key light whenever the camera is on, a lesson she never forgot long after Sternberg's star-making was over. Morocco was a sensation, earning Dietrich her only Oscar nomination, though it's hardly her best performance or even a very good film. Sternberg still maintains the slightly halting pace of a director making a transition from silent films to talkies, chopping up Jules Furthman's dialogue by pausing too long between lines, losing the snap that would be present when Sternberg and Furthman worked together two years later on Shanghai Express. What action there is in the story, such as the attack by thugs outside Amy's apartment or the taking out of the machine gun nest, is tossed off casually, all in service of romance. And even the celebrated ending, with Amy kicking off her shoes to join the camp-followers into the desert, is more likely to elicit laughs today. As handsome as Gary Cooper's legionnaire is, it doesn't seem likely that a tough cookie like Amy, once capable of tearing up La Bessiere's card into small pieces while he's watching, would be such a careless lovesick sap. Still, Morocco is worth sitting through for its legendary moments, including the celebrated appearance of Dietrich's Amy in men's evening wear, taking a flower from a woman whom she kisses on the mouth and then tossing it to Cooper's wryly amused Tom, who tucks it behind his ear. It's an entertaining flirtation with what the Production Code would, in just a few years, and for several dreary decades, egregiously label "sex perversion."

Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)

Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express

Shanghai Lily: Marlene Dietrich
Capt. Donald Harvey: Clive Brook
Hui Fei: Anna May Wong
Henry Chang: Warner Oland
Sam Salt: Eugene Pallette
Carmichael: Lawrence Grant
Mrs. Haggerty: Louise Closser Hale
Eric Baum: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Maj. Lenard: Emile Chautard

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Jules Furthman
Based on a story by Harry Hervey
Cinematography: Lee Garmes
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Film editing: Frank Sullivan
Music: W. Franke Harling

There's something claustrophobic about Shanghai Express: Its characters are always enclosed -- in train cabins, in interrogation rooms, even in crowds of other people. Even the titular train gets itself into a tight spot, navigating the narrow passage through the streets of what the film calls "Peking." Which makes it all the better for Lee Garmes's camera, tasked as it is with making the most of Marlene Dietrich's face. Garmes (with director Josef von Sternberg looking over his shoulder) always finds ways to frame that face with veils and feathers and furs, with the actress's own hands, with misted windows, and when nothing else will do, a simple shaft of light caressing those eyelids, cheekbones, and lips. Fortunately, the movie is more than glamorous poses: There's a good deal of snappy dialogue and some wily character acting from the likes of Eugene Pallette, Louise Closser Hale, and -- in a role that seems to have been a kind of audition for his most famous one, Charlie Chan -- Warner Oland. I only wish that a leading man more attractive, or less plummily British, than Clive Brook had been provided for Dietrich. The story is nonsense, of course, and it verges dangerously on colonialist poppycock in its treatment of the Chinese, though even there it pulls back somewhat by turning Anna May Wong's Hui Fei from a stereotypical dragon lady into a genuinely heroic figure. It must also be said that Shanghai Express was made at the right time: A couple of years later, the sexual adventurism of its women would have been taboo under the Production Code and Hui Fei would have been made to pay for murdering her rapist.

Come and Get It (Howard Hawks, William Wyler, 1936)

Frances Farmer and Walter Brennan in Come and Get It

Barney Glasgow: Edward Arnold
Lotta Morgan / Lotta Bostrom: Frances Farmer
Swan Bostrom: Walter Brennan
Richard Glasgow: Joel McCrea
Karie: Mady Christians
Emma Louise Glasgow: Mary Nash
Evvie Glasgow: Andrea Leeds
Tony Schwerke: Frank Shields
Josie: Cecil Cunningham

Director: Howard Hawks, William Wyler
Screenplay: Jane Murfin, Jules Furthman
Based on a novel by Edna Ferber
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté, Gregg Toland
Art direction: Richard Day
Film editing: Edward Curtiss
Music: Alfred Newman

William Wyler had just finished Dodsworth (1936) when the producer to whom he was under contract, Samuel Goldwyn, called on him to finish Come and Get It, which had been started under the direction of Howard Hawks. Goldwyn was unhappy with the way Hawks had treated Edna Ferber's novel Come and Get It, so he fired him. Goldwyn, a man of little education, was impressed with writers of big reputations, and liked to think of his movies as prestige items. Ferber was a big bestselling author of the day, best-known for multigenerational historical novels with colorful settings like the Mississippi riverboats of Show Boat and the Oklahoma land rush of Cimarron. The former had become a celebrated musical that had been filmed twice, first as a part-talkie by Harry A. Pollard in 1929 and then by James Whale in 1935, though it was not released until 1936. Cimarron had been made into a best-picture Oscar winner by Wesley Ruggles in 1931, so Goldwyn had been eager to cash in on the novelist's celebrity. He hired Hawks as director because the raucous frontier section of Ferber's novel reminded him of the director's Barbary Coast (1935), but when Goldwyn was sidelined by illness, Hawks jettisoned much of Jane Murfin's Ferber-approved screenplay and brought in one of his frequent collaborators, Jules Furthman, to rewrite and to build up the part of Walter Brennan's Swan Bostrom. Hawks shifted the focus away from Ferber's novel, much of which was about the exploitation of the land by timber interests, and built up the relationship between Bostrom and the protagonist, the ambitious lumberman Barney Glasgow. He also replaced Goldwyn's original choice for Lotta, Miriam Hopkins, with an actress he had discovered, Frances Farmer. Wyler was reluctant to take over from Hawks, and not only resisted Goldwyn's plan to give him sole billing as director but also insisted that Hawks receive top billing as co-director. In any case, Come and Get It turned into a rather curious mess, not least because Hawks was a notoriously freewheeling director with an intensely personal style whereas Wyler was a consummate perfectionist who seldom let his personality show through his work. Although there's some Hawksian energy to the film, it feels like it has been held in check. Moreover, the central character, Barney Glasgow, has been miscast. Goldwyn wanted Spencer Tracy for the part, knowing that Tracy could play both the romantic lead and the driven businessman that the part called for. But when Tracy couldn't get out of his contract with MGM, Goldwyn settled for one of his own contract players, Edward Arnold, a rather squat, rotund character actor with none of Tracy's sex appeal. The best thing about the film is that it gives us a chance to see Farmer before her career was derailed by mental illness. She sharply delineates the two Lottas, mother and daughter, playing the former with a kind of masculine toughness and the latter with a defensive sweetness. As the mother, she growls out the song "Aura Lee" in a Marlene Dietrich baritone, but later as the daughter she sings it in a light soprano. She also sometimes looks strikingly like the actress who played her in the biopic Frances (Graeme Clifford, 1982), Jessica Lange. The other impressive moments in the film are provided by the logging sequences directed by Richard Rosson and filmed by Rudolph Maté. Brennan won the first of his three Oscars for his "yumpin' Yiminy" Swedish-accented character.

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.

Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)

I could never countenance plagiarism, but as they say, if you're going to steal, steal from the best. Even if you're Howard Hawks stealing from Howard Hawks, which happens almost shamelessly in Rio Bravo. No one who loves Hawks's Red River (1948) as much as I do could fail to miss how much of Rio Bravo is, let us say, borrowed from that film. There's the byplay between Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) and Stumpy (Walter Brennan), which echoes that of Dunson (Wayne) and Groot (Brennan) in Red River. Ricky Nelson's young gun Colorado Ryan is a reworking of Montgomery Clift's Matthew Garth. And Angie Dickinson's Feathers could almost be a parody of Joanne Dru's motormouth Tess Millay. But the Hawksian borrowings don't stop with Red River. When Feathers kisses Chance for the first time and then goes in for a second kiss in which he participates more enthusiastically, she comments, "It's better when two people do it," which is a direct steal from a similar scene in To Have and Have Not (Hawks, 1944) when "Slim" (Lauren Bacall) tells "Steve" (Humphrey Bogart), "It's even better when you help." The two movies share not only a director but also a screenwriter, Jules Furthman, who is joined in Rio Bravo by Leigh Brackett, who earlier worked together on another Bogart-Bacall-Hawks movie, The Big Sleep (1946). Even the composer of the score for Rio Bravo, Dimitri Tiomkin, gets into the borrowing game, taking a theme from his score for Red River and handing it over to lyricist Paul Francis Webster for the song, "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me," sung by Dean Martin's Dude and Nelson's Colorado. Rio Bravo isn't as great a movie as Red River by a long shot, and it probably signals some creative exhaustion on Hawks's part that he not only borrowed so heavily from his earlier work but also felt it necessary to remake Rio Bravo in two thinly disguised versions also starring Wayne, as El Dorado (1966) and Rio Lobo (1970). But is there a more entertaining self-plagiarism, and a surer demonstration of what made Hawks one of the great filmmakers?

To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944)

Beatrice and Benedick. Rosalind and Orlando. Viola and Orsino. "Slim" and "Steve"? Is it just the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death that made me think of To Have and Have Not in terms of Shakespearean romance? Or is it that this most enjoyable of movies has a lot in common with those grand predecessors? Actually, it's all Howard Hawks's doing, with a little bit of help from screenwriters Jules Furthman and William Faulkner. Hawks had done this sort of romance before, in his comic masterpieces Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), but leave it to Hawks to see World War II (and Ernest Hemingway's "grace under pressure" fiction) through the lens of screwball comedy. And to do it with the movies' most famous tough guy, Humphrey Bogart, and an unknown 19-year-old actress who had her name changed from Betty Perske to Lauren Bacall. And to treat it all as a semi-musical, with Hoagy Carmichael at the piano. Blood is shed and causes are espoused, but nobody takes it terribly seriously. Instead, Bogart and Bacall surf through the film on some of the best dialogue ever written, working out their fine romance as deftly as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers ever did on the dance floor. Walter Brennan adds another memorable figure to his impressive gallery of old coots, and Marcel Dalio brings the kind of charm that might threaten to upstage lesser performers than these stars. It's certainly not a perfect film: Dolores Moran (clambering from shore to ship in heels) and Walter Szurovy are rather tediously noble as the de Bursacs. (Watch the bit when Mme. de Bursac faints and spills the chloroform and Bacall's Slim, sensing a rival for her Steve's affections, casts a stinkeye on the fallen form and intentionally fans some of the fumes in her direction.) As the Vichy police captain, Dan Seymour seems to be trying to do a Sydney Greenstreet impersonation with the worst of all French accents. And does anybody really believe that the odd company that sails off at the end to rescue a Resistance fighter from Devil's Island is going to succeed? But no matter. It's all the stuff of which legends are made.

Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings

Geoff Carter: Cary Grant
Bonnie Lee: Jean Arthur
Bat McPherson: Richard Barthelmess
Judy McPherson: Rita Hayworth
Kid Dabb: Thomas Mitchell
Lee Peters: Allyn Joslyn
Dutchy: Sig Ruman

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Jules Furthman
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Lionel Banks
Film editing: Viola Lawrence
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Thomas Mitchell had begun his acting career on stage, making his Broadway debut in 1916. It would be 20 years before he decided to leave the stage for Hollywood, and three years after settling there he found himself performing in no fewer than five of 1939's top movies: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle), Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra), Stagecoach (John Ford), and Only Angels Have Wings. He won an Oscar for Stagecoach, and four of the five films in which he appeared were nominated for the best picture Oscar. As it happens, the one film that didn't get nominated, Only Angels Have Wings, is my favorite of the bunch. That it wasn't nominated may have had something to do with its director, Howard Hawks, who refused to be tied down to any one of the major studios, feeling that he had been burned by a dispute with production head Irving Thalberg at MGM. For the rest of his career he made the rounds of the studios, producing and directing (and often writing without credit) some of the most enjoyable movies ever made. But he was nominated for the best director Oscar only once, for Sergeant York (1941), which has its Hawksian touches -- fast-paced dialogue and deft use of character players like Walter Brennan, Margaret Wycherly, Ward Bond, and Noah Beery Jr. -- but is more sentimental than typical Hawks films. In fact, Hawks must hold some kind of record for classic films that received no Oscar nominations at all, including the great gangster film Scarface (1930) and the dizziest of screwball comedies -- Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and His Girl Friday (1940) -- as well as the definitive Marilyn Monroe vehicle, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and the films that stand as landmarks in the careers of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). He finally got an honorary Oscar in 1975, after having been discovered by the French critics of Cahiers du Cinéma and American auteurist critics like Andrew Sarris. Only Angels is prime Hawks, with a sterling cast that includes not only Mitchell, as the aging pilot known as "Kid," but also Cary Grant and Jean Arthur. They bring a touch of the screwball comedy at which they excelled to what is essentially a serious story about the grace under pressure shown by fliers in a small South American port town who have to battle the weather to fly the mail across the Andes. Hawks and screenwriter Jules Furthman take the familiar "you can't send the kid up in a crate like that" premise and turn into something both funny and moving. The key is that that they refuse, like the pilots in their movie, to take anything really seriously, so the light touch keeps the peril and loss from bogging the film down. There is a startling moment near the end when we see tears in Grant's eyes, but the movie swiftly moves to a lighter-hearted conclusion. There is some corny artifice in the settings and flying sequences, and perhaps a little too much about the relationship between the characters played by Rita Hayworth (pushed on Hawks by Columbia studio head Harry Cohn) and Richard Barthelmess. Some see Only Angels as a kind of rough draft for To Have and Have Not, and Jean Arthur, who clashed with Hawks about her character, said she didn't understand what he wanted until he saw that later film. But Only Angels Have Wings stands on its own.

Bombshell (Victor Fleming, 1933)

This giddy screwball comedy is one of the earliest examples of the genre, with a screenplay by John Lee Mahin and Jules Furthman that's wall-to-wall wisecracks and frantic antics. It also has more sexual innuendo than later examples of the genre, since it was released a year before the Production Code began to be enforced by the notoriously blue-nosed Joseph Breen. There's even a joke about the censors in the script, in which the movie star played by Jean Harlow is being called on for retakes on Red Dust (1932), because of objections from the Hays Office, the code's precursors. (Mahin wrote the screenplay for Red Dust and Fleming directed it.) The cast is peerless: Harlow plays Lola Burns, a star said to be modeled on Clara Bow, and Lee Tracy is her hyperactive press agent "Space" Hanlon. Tracy has a way of exploding into rooms that reminds me of Kramer on Seinfeld. Fleming was probably not the ideal director for this fast-paced nonsense, which deserves a looser, lighter touch like that of Ernst Lubitsch or Howard Hawks, but he gives his cast freedom and they're equal to the challenge. Watch the ensemble, for example, demonstrate perfect comic timing in some of the scenes that Fleming films in long takes. Even Franchot Tone, one of the more forgettable leading men of the 1930s, demonstrates unexpected comic skill in the scene in which, as the phony Boston socialite Gifford Middleton, he woos Lola with lines like "I'd like to run barefoot through your hair." Also on hand is Louise Beavers, playing a maid of course, in an exchange that wouldn't get by Breen a year later: When Harlow asks what happened to the negligee she gave her, Beavers replies that "it got all tore up night before last." Harlow observes, "Your day off is sure brutal on your lingerie."