MoMA | Tag: Richard Barthelmess

Posts tagged ‘Richard Barthelmess’

July 20, 2010 | An Auteurist History of Film

Howard Hawks’s The Dawn Patrol

Posted by Charles Silver, Curator, Department of Film

The Dawn Patrol. 1930. USA. Directed by Howard Hawks

These notes accompany screenings of Howard Hawks’s </i>The Dawn Patrol, July 21, 22, and 23 in Theater 1.</p>

Like his friendly rival John Ford, Howard Hawks (1896–1977) began work as a Hollywood property man (in Hawks’s case, while still attending school). He received a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell, and his films reflect both the precision this implies and the erudition of a college boy. (Ford, by contrast, spent about two minutes in college.) After a stint in the Army Air Corps and a job designing airplanes, Hawks wound up directing his first film at the Fox studio—where Ford was also under contract—in 1926.

D. W. Griffith on a Smaller Canvas

Posted by Charles Silver, Curator, Department of Film

<i>True Heart Susie.</i> 1919. USA. Directed by D. W. Griffith

True Heart Susie. 1919. USA. Directed by D. W. Griffith

These notes accompany the program D. W. Griffith on a Smaller Canvas, which screens on January 6, 7, and 8 in Theater 3.

Although D. W. Griffith’s racism was unforgivable, nothing can ever take away the fact that he was the most gifted and creative director in the cinema’s first thirty years. In John McWhorter’s December 14, 2009 New Yorker review of Pops, Terry Teachout’s biography of Louis Armstrong, McWhorter says Armstrong’s early 78-rpm recordings “were as crucial in creating our modern musical sensibility as D. W. Griffith’s films were in creating the grammar of cinematic narrative.” McWhorter goes on to say of Armstrong that, “While performers around him assimilated his innovations, he never really grew.” One might also argue that this was true of Griffith, and not simply because he lost his independence for the final decade of his career due to his inept business sense and changing public tastes. However, his greatest gift never really failed him—his skill with actors.