Howard Hawks

Again, he was an average student and his family's wealth may have influenced his acceptance to the elite private school. While in New England, Hawks often attended theatrical shows in nearby Boston. Read Less

The World War I film was based on a short story by author William Faulkner, who Hawks got to know personally during the shooting of the film and remained friends with for over twenty years.

Hawks's next two films at MGM were the boxing drama The Prizefighter and the Lady and the bio-pic Viva Villa!, starring Wallace Beery as Mexican Revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. But because of studio interference on both films, Hawks walked out on his MGM contract without completing either film himself. Read Less

The film was an adaptation of the hit Broadway play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, which had already been made into a film in 1931. Read Less

The film was Hawks's final collaboration with longtime friend William Faulkner before the author's death. Read Less

Hawks was versatile as a director, filming comedies, dramas, gangster films, science fiction, film noir, and Westerns. Hawks's own functional definition of what constitutes a "good movie" is revealing of his no-nonsense style: "Three great scenes, no bad ones." Hawks also defined a good director as "someone who doesn't annoy you".

While Hawks was not sympathetic to feminism, he popularized the Hawksian woman archetype, which has been cited as a prototype of the post-feminist movement.

Orson Welles in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich said of Howard Hawks in comparison to John Ford "Hawks is great prose; Ford is poetry".

Despite Hawks work in a variety of Hollywood genres he still retained an independent sensibility. Film critic David Thomson wrote of Hawks in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film "Far from the the meek purveyor of Hollywood forms, he always chose to turn them upside down, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, ostensibly an adventure and a thriller, are really love stories. Rio Bravo, apparently a Western - everyone wears a cowboy hat - is a comedy conversation piece. The ostensible comedies are shot through with exposed emotions, with the subtlest views of the sex war, and with a wry acknowledgment of the incompatibility of men and women." As David Boxwell states "It’s a body of work that has been accused of ahistorical and adolescent escapism, but Hawks’ fans rejoice in his oeuvre‘s remarkable avoidance of Hollywood’s religiosity, bathos, flag-waving, and sentimentality. Read Less