Howard Hawks

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Howard Hawks (May 30, 1896 – December 26, 1977) was an American film director, producer and writer of the classic Hollywood era. He died in Palm Springs, California, after a fall.

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[edit] Biography

He was born Howard Winchester Hawks in Goshen, Indiana but he moved to Southern California early in his life. Hawks graduated from Cornell University in 1918. At Cornell he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and he worked on some early movies during the summer of 1916 and 1917. After graduation he joined the United States Army Air Service during World War I. After the war ended he worked at a number of jobs: racecar driver, aviator, designer in an aircraft factory, but by 1924 he had moved back to the Hollywood and joined the movie industry. Hawks wrote his first screenplay, "Tiger Love", in 1924 and he directed his first film, "The Road to Glory", in 1925. Hawks re-worked the scripts of most of the films he directed but without taking official credit for his writing.

Howard Hawks directed a total of eight silent films (including "Fazil" from 1928), however, unlike some of his fellow silent-film directors, he was able to make the transition to sound without difficulty. His most important films were all done with the spoken word. A partial list would be:

Hawks was known for his versatility as a director, filming comedies, dramas, gangster films, sci-fi, pulp noir, and Westerns with equal ease and skill. Hawks' own functional definition of what constitutes a "good movie" is revealing of his no-nonsense style: "Three great scenes, no bad ones."

Hawks was in many ways ahead of his time. While not politically feminist or sympathetic to their goals, he popularized the Hawksian woman archetype, which could be considered a prototype of the modern post-feminist movement.

Critic Leonard Maltin has labelled Hawks "the greatest American director who is not a household name," noting that, while his work may not be as well known as Ford, Welles, or Hitchcock, he is no less a talented filmmaker.

For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Howard Hawks has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1708 Vine Street.

Hawks was notorious for fabricating stories about the movie business, usually in a way which inflated his already considerable contributions to it. One such story has it that Hawks told Ernest Hemingway that he could make a good movie out of the worst thing that Hemingway had ever written, at which point Hemingway challenged him to make a movie out of To Have and Have Not.

Hawks' unpretentious and straightforward directorial style and the use of natural, conversational dialogue in his films have subsequently been a major influence on many noted filmmakers, including John Carpenter and Quentin Tarantino. Hawks once defined a good director as "someone who doesn't annoy you". He was nominated for Best Director in 1942 for Sergeant York but he won his only Oscar in 1974, it was an honorary award from the Academy.

Although originally dismissed by the more intellectual critics in the English-speaking world (especially in the United Kingdom, where his work was virtually ignored by Sight and Sound), Hawks was idolised and taken very seriously indeed by the French critics associated with Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s, and this spread to the United Kingdom where Hawks became an icon for Ian Cameron, Robin Wood and the other critics associated with Movie.

Hawks was married three times, to Athole Shearer (a sister of movie actress Norma Shearer), Nancy Gross (later and better known as Slim Keith, she was the mother of his daughter, Kitty Hawks, a noted interior designer), and Dee Hartford (an actress whose real name was Donna Higgins). His brothers were director/writer Kenneth Neil Hawks and film producer William Bettingger Hawks.

[edit] Filmography (director)

[edit] Books

  • Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, Todd MacCarthy (Grove Press, 1997)
  • Howard Hawks: American Artist, Jim Hillier, Peter Wollen (British Film Institute, 1997)
  • Hawks on Hawks, Joseph McBride (University of California Press, 1982)
  • Focus on Howard Hawks, Joseph McBride (ed), Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1972
  • Howard Hawks, Robin Wood, Secker & Warburg, 1968
  • Howard Hawks, Robin Wood, British Film Institute, 1981, revised with addition of chapter "Retrospect".
  • Howard Hawks, A Jungian Study, Clark Branson, Garland-Clarke Editions, 1987
  • Red River, Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues, bfi Publishing, 2000
  • Rio Bravo, Robin Wood, bfi Publishing, 2003

[edit] External links

[edit] See also

Persondata
NAME Hawks, Howard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Film director
DATE OF BIRTH May 30, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Goshen, Indiana
DATE OF DEATH December 26, 1977
PLACE OF DEATH Palm Springs, California
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