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The Howard Hawks Collection was donated to the Harold B. Lee Library by Mr. Hawks in April, 1977 and created by the donor in the course of his 50-year career in motion pictures. A fire in his garage several years earlier and disposal of material over the years by Hawks and his secretaries account for the large gaps in his papers. An inventory in the collection of some of his scripts as of the early 1940s gives some idea of the collection's comprehensive scope prior to the tragic fire. Additional materials were acquired from the Howard Hawks Estate in 1979, relating to unproduced story properties, and is listed in the Container List as Addenda.
Collection is available to public use.
It is the responsibility of the researcher to obtain any necessary copyright clearances.
Permission to publish any of the original manuscripts in the Hawks Collection must be obtained from Mr. Hawks? heirs and correspondents by writing to the Supervisor of Reference Services and/or the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Board of Curators. The scripts in the Hawks Collection may not be photocopied, duplicated or published in part or in full without prior written permission from the copyright holder.
Staunchly independent Howard Hawks began directing Hollywood genre motion pictures in the silent days. When he died in late 1977, he had achieved an international reputation and was widely respected by three generations of film makers and viewers of his films. His impact was particularly pronounced in France, where he influenced the New Wave--as an auteur-directeur, a filmmaker who is in control of every aspect of his productions, including the writing, which he did (or revised) as shooting progressed on the set. Hawks is perhaps best known for his action dramas about rugged men facing danger with camaraderie or individual courage, such as
Howard Winchester Hawks was born in Goshen, Indiana on May 30, 1896 to Frank W. and Helen H. Hawks. His father was a wealthy paper manufacturer, and his younger brother William was involved in both banking and motion picture production. The screen-directing career of another brother, Kenneth, was cut short by a fatal plane crash in 1929, while filming aerial sequences for
Hawks never forgot his debt to Jesse Lasky, who gave him his entree to Hollywood. The future director began his apprenticeship in the movie craft as a prop boy for the Famous Players-Lasky (now Paramount) production of
In 1925, Hawks, who had on occasion assisted in directing at the Lasky studio, signed a term contract as director for the Fox Film Corporation (now Twentieth Century-Fox). "I finally got tired of other people directing and me writing, so I went to see a movie every night for six months," Hawks later reminisced. "And if I thought the movie was worth studying, I saw it twice that same night until I felt that I knew enough to direct. I learned right in the beginning from Jack Ford, and I learned what not to do by watching Cecil Demille." The first silent feature he directed was the not very popular
In his book Howard Hawks (1968), Robin Wood points out that
Hawks's first freelance project--and first talking picture--was the classic, unsentimental World War I air-squadron drama
After directing
It was Hawks who persuaded serious actress Carole Lombard to embark on her highly successful second career as a comedienne, in his fast-paced, transcontinental-Pullman-train comedy
His San Francisco period drama
Bringing Up Baby (1938), a wild comedy about the romantic entanglement of a zoology professor (Cary Grant) with a madcap heiress (Katherine Hepburn), is assessed by Robin Wood as "perhaps the funniest of Hawk's comedies but not the best." Wood writes of Hawks's second airmail drama, Only Angels Have Wings (1939), set in South America: "Hawks gives us a group sealed off from the outside world, forming a self-sufficient hermetic society with its own values. Outside, we are mainly aware of storms, darkness, and towering, seemingly impassable mountains: only in The Thing (From Another World) does Hawks again find a setting as ideal for the expression of his metaphysic."
In remaking The Front Page with His Girl Friday (1940), Hawks transformed the glib Hildy Johnson into a woman reporter (Rosalind Russell) and came up with what R.A.E. Pickard in his Dictionary of 1,000 Best Films called "the last word in American wise-cracking comedies." Hawks was the original director of The Outlaw (1940), a western produced by Howard Hughes to showcase the physical assets of his discovery Jane Russell. Hughes dictated a $1.5 million budget for the film, while Hawks, who had always deplored Hollywood prodigality, insisted that film could be made for half the amount. Hughes discharged him and completed the directing himself. Because of the high threshold of censorship at the time, the distribution of Hughes's relatively tame (by 1978 standards) exercise in eroticism was delayed for three years, until 1943. In the opinion of George Fenin and William K. Everson, The Outlaw "would have been a very good Western but for the obtrusive eroticism."
During Hollywood's golden age, Hawks owned a sixty-five-foot racing sloop, Sea Hawk, and a stable of thoroughbreds; fished with Ernest Hemingway; hunted with Gary Cooper; piloted small planes; led a motorcycle group that included Clark Gable and Barbara Stanwyck; and helped design the racing car that won the Indianapolis 500 in 1936.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Hawks for a best-director Oscar only once, for Sergeant York (1941), the true story of Alvin York (Gary Cooper), a country-bumpkin religious pacifist who, as a World War I conscript, traduced his ideals and became a patriotic hero. Robin Wood points out that Sergeant York went against Hawks's grain, that this most "respectable" of Hawks's films was marred artistically by its explicit treatment of moral issues. "An intuitive artist," Wood observed, "he is ill-equipped to handle the big issues explicitly on any but a superficial level."
Ball of Fire (1942), Hawks's comedy about the interaction of a stripteaser (Barbara Stanwyck) and eight bachelor professors (Gary Cooper among them) working on an encyclopedia is among the less distinguished of Hawks's comedies. Although Hawks himself dismisses Air Force (1943), the story of a World War II bomber crew, as merely a contribution to the war effort, Robin Wood considers it "in feeling perhaps the noblest of all his works. Another World War II movie, about naval action, was the relatively shallow Corvette K-225 (1943), produced by Hawks, directed by Richard Rosson, and introducing to the screen Hawks's discovery Ella Raines.
Another Hawks find, Lauren Bacall, made her movie debut in To Have and Have Not (1944), which critics did not fully appreciate (because of ambivalence of its hero, played by Humphrey Bogart, toward war-time partisanship) until World War II was over. Hawks, who did not like to work with women stars because "it's too damn hard to make them play the kind of girl . . . you can treat as a man," found in Miss Bacall "my type of actress--slow, sardonic, insolent, leaning against something and sizing you up."
Bogart and Bacall were teamed for a second time in The Big Sleep (1946), an oblique, convoluted adaptation (by Hawks and William Faulkner) of Raymond Chandler's amoral private detective novel. It is still popular with many cinema enthusiasts at film retrospectives and on late-night television.
Hawks produced as well as directed Red River (1948), the western about cattle-driving on the Chisholm Trail that introduced Joanne Dru and started John Wayne on his new, current career as an older-role actor. Hawks said that, "When Ford saw Red River, he said, 'I never knew that big fellow could act.' And he put him in about three pictures in the next two years--made a big star out of him. . . whenever I made a picture with Wayne, he would come down and stay a week on location." Joel Greenberg and Charles Higham credit the cowboy classic with "a rhythm, scope, and grandeur that many Westerns aim at but few realize."
A Song is Born (1948), a dismal remake of Ball of Fire, with Danny Kaye as the male lead, was one of the few Hawks films to make no profit. R.A.E. Pickard rates I Was a Male War Bride (1949)--in which Cary Grant as Henri Rochard dons "drag" in order to be near Ann Sheridan, as his WAC spouse--below Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, "but still better than most" comedies. Director Christian Nyby's science-fiction film The Thing (From Another World) (1951)--which had James Arness in his first featured role, as the "intellectual carrot" that arrives at the North Pole by flying saucer--was produced by Hawks, who also lent heavy directorial assistance to Nyby.
The comradery of rugged men in producer-director Hawks's superior western The Big Sky (1952), an adaptation of A. B. Guthrie's novel, is reminiscent of that in A Girl in Every Port. After directing The Ransom of Red Chief episode in the omnibus O. Henry's Full House (1952), Hawks undertook Monkey Business (1952), about an absent-minded professor (Cary Grant) who develops a rejuvenating chemical. Some critics found it perhaps just a little too "screwball," but Robin Wood ranks it as "Hawks's greatest comedy."
Hawks enjoyed making the slick hit musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). He found it ironic that the audience found the film's stars (Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell) sexy when the picture was a "complete caricature, a travesty on sex." The Land of the Pharaohs (1955) a Cinemascope extravaganza directed and co-produced by Hawks, was perhaps his worst failure, both commercially and artistically.
After several years of leisurely sojourn in Europe, Hawks returned to his craft as producer and director of Rio Bravo (1959), starring John Wayne as a sheriff and Dean Martin as his alcoholic deputy. Hawks was moved to make it out of reaction against Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952). With Wayne again starring, Hawks filmed Hatari! (1962) in East Africa's big game country. Critics found it "exciting," "humorous," and "dazzling" in its hefty improvisational techniques, and Hawks, who produced as well as directed it (as he did all of his subsequent works), personally made a reported $2,500,000 on the film.
Man's Favorite Sport? (1963), a fishing farce starring Rock Hudson, is probably the least funny of Hawks's comedies. Critics generally panned Red Line 7000 (1965), but Robin Wood called it "the most underestimated film of the sixties. . . an intensely personal film" about stock car racing.
As Andrew Sarris has observed, Hawks "dared to repeat himself shamelessly" from Rio Bravo in El Dorado (1966), a Wayne western co-starring Robert Mitchum. Hawks was again criticized for self-borrowing in the Wayne picture Rio Lobo (1970), which grossed over $4,250,000 in the United States alone. Hawks has said as quoted in the Washington Post: "I told him (Wayne) twenty years ago to do three scenes in a picture and not annoy the audience in the rest of the picture and you'll stay as a star." Hawks believed that audiences remember scenes, not plots. He disliked the intense drawn-out violence in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and leaned more towards the quick action and general style of John Ford. "I copied him every time I could," Hawks said of Ford in 1970. "One of my favorite pictures of all time is The Quiet Man, which I think was just a beautiful picture. Every time I run into a scene that I think Ford does very well, I stop and think, 'What would he have done here?' And then I go ahead and do it."
Howard Hawks was six feet one inch tall and had a quiet voice, a suave manner, a restless, earnest temperament, and a generally conservative outlook. According to a writer for Newsweek (February 8, 1971), the "bluff diffidence" with which he speaks of his pictures "masks an artist's pride." The Newsweek writer observed that Hawks was still talking about the three-month retrospective of his work held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962. London's National Film Theatre held a retrospective of twenty-seven of his feature films in the same year, and in April 1970, at the Vienna Film Festival, thirty-one of his features were screened. And, in 1975 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave hawks an Honorary Award as "a giant of the American cinema whose pictures taken as a whole represent one of the most consistent, vivid and varied bodies of work in world cinema."
Hawks was married to Athole Shearer from 1928 to 1940, and by her he had a son, David, and a daughter, Barbara. By Nancy Raye Gross, to whom he was married from 1941 to 1945, he had a second daughter, Kitty. From 1953 to 1959, he was married to Dee Hartford and had a son, Gregg. Hawks also adopted a son, Peter. All of the marriages ended in divorce. Hawks died December 26, 1977 from complications arising from a fall weeks earlier at his Palm Springs home.
The Howard Hawks Collection constitutes a valuable primary source for all aspects of motion picture production in the United States. It contains photographs, scripts (many unproduced), contracts, correspondence, scenarios, research on many of Hawks's greatest motion pictures and family and business records, all of which are arranged under five main headings, viz. PERSONAL, BUSINESS, MOTION PICTURES, PHOTOGRAPHS, TEST SCENES. The motion picture material is arranged alphabetically by film title. A given film, for example, will have pertinent correspondence, scripts, newspaper clippings, etc. available on that film together as a unit rather than filed separately by type of record. Films which were produced and/or directed by Hawks himself are identified by an asterisk (*) next to the film title. A complete list of his films is located at the end of the Container List.
Covering the years 1925 through 1970, the strength of the collection is in the number of scripts, both those that Hawks directed himself and those on which he collaborated in the story treatment or dialogue. For example, a script from the early Josef von Sternberg classic
All scripts--produced and unproduced--are arranged under the heading MOTION PICTURES. Where scripts were neither directed nor written by Hawks himself, attempts have been made to indicate where or note the script was made into a complete film. Either a (+) for unproduced scripts or the year the director in parenthesis indicating a completed film, will follow titles of the film's not directed by Hawks. While every attempt has been made to insure the accuracy of such designations, particularly where scripts are concerned, the researcher should be aware that a script which is eventually produced into a film can, in its embryonic stages, undergo a host of alternate or working titles as well as story modifications. Thus, such information as is printed herein is subject to change pending availability of additional documentation.
In addition to the nearly 20 unproduced scripts, there are a number of test scenes or excerpts of scripts used in testing new talent. They come from films such as
Films such as
The large collection of over 450 photographs in the Hawks Collection includes publicity and/or production stills for
The collection is arranged into five main series: PERSONAL, BUSINESS, MOTION PICTURES, PHOTOGRAPHS, TEST SCENES. The motion picture material is arranged alphabetically by film title. A given film, for example, will have pertinent correspondence, scripts, newspaper clippings, etc. available on that film together as a unit rather than filed separately by type of record. Films which were produced and/or directed by Hawks himself are identified by an asterisk (*) next to the film title. A complete list of his films is located at the end of the Container List.
All photographs have been transferred to the Photo Archives where they are arranged by film title and are available for use. Both production and publicity photographs for the specific films are indicated by title in the Container List, and a cumulative list of all photographs in the collection is located at the end of the register. Photocopies of most of the production, publicity and personal photographs have been filed with the manuscripts in place of the originals. Examination of specific original photographs, if needed, is permitted by request.
* means produced and directed by Hawks himself.
+ means unproduced scripts.
(year and director) means completed film not directed by Hawks
All original photographs in photoarchives.
*Photographs are preserved in the Photoarchives under number Mss P27 and consist largely of production shots in-studio or on location.
Includes many previously published articles on Hawks and his films, with, in many cases, new material by authors such as Molly Haskell, Robin Wood, Henry Langlois, Jacques Rivette, Peter John Dyer, John Belton, Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris, William Wellman, Jr., Gerald Peary, Richard Thompson, Peter Bogdanovich and Greg Ford.
Edited transcripts of interviews with Hawks at Directors Guild functions and elsewhere, 1970-1977.
Detailed analysis of Hawks' narrative style manifested in Only Angels Have Wings, Monkey Business, Bringing Up Baby, Twentieth Century, His Girl Friday, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Red River.
Informal appreciations of Hawks' major films.
An analysis of the overall body of Hawks' films in which Wood points out how Hawks' films, while diverse in genre, are nevertheless reflective of a consistent filmmaking style.
An informal interview with Hawks where in a series of anecdotes he comments about his Westerns, particularly
English translation in Sarris, Andrew, ed.
His films and personal style, including a long interview with the director; filmography.
Hawks talks about early years, John Wayne, responds to Broden Chase's remarks regarding
Hawks discusses
Hawks interviewed after completing
Anecdotal review of major films.
With other directors, hawks gives views on various aspects of film making. From edited interviews conducted under the auspices of AFI.
Comedy and drama, genres of American film: Westerns, gangster films, war films.
Skeptical treatment of Hawks' career: "He can in no way be described as an innovator. . .his best films have often been his most unoriginal;" analysis of major films.
Male-female tension in Hawks' plot structures: "we are likely to underestimate the revolution of his (Hawks') work, particularly in his vision of women, and his mellowing attitude toward 'the group' --at first all male, and later marked by a relaxation of the criteria of admission to include freaks and outsiders, cripples and women."
Brief review of Hawks' career and announcement of upcoming film about "two globetrotting oil geologists including a barber who starts a revolution in Saudi Arabia."
Appreciation and filmography. All but filmography was reprinted in an English translation by Russell Campbell in McBridge, Joseph.
An appreciative eulogy and observation on Hawks' style, personal mannerisms, and career.
On Angie Dickinson.
Spirited response to Durgnat's earlier "Hawks Isn't Good Enough" in
Hawks is in Sarris' classification of "Pantheon Directors" in this volume of directional studies from his original effort in
From
Conclusion of analysis of films of Howard Hawks.
An appreciation.
On
An analysis of the thematic development in Hawks' Western trilogy,
Detailed comparison between
Analysis of
An examination of the multiple meanings suggested in the dialogue of
Monaco critically examines authorship of
Discusses
On
*In some cases, citation and annotations were taken from the following sources: McBride, Joseph. ed.