A Girl in Every Port. 1928. USA. Directed by Howard Hawks. Screenplay by Hawks, James Kevin McGuiness, Seton I. Miller, Sidney Lanfield, Reggie Morris, Malcolm Stuart Boyland. With Victor McLaglaen, Louise Brooks, Robert Amrstrong, Maria Albra, Leila Hyams, Eileen Sedgwick, Natalie Kingston, Myrna Loy. 35mm print from the collection of the George Eastman Museum. 78 min.
The first of Howard Hawks’s “love stories between two men,” this boisterous buddy comedy stars Victor McLaglan (fresh from Walsh’s What Price Glory) and Robert Armstrong (of future King Kong fame) as a pair of sailors who travel the world, competing for the attentions of an entire United Nations of attractive ladies (quite a collection of silent beauties, including Maria Alba, Leila Hyams, Natalie Joyce, Sally Rand, Eileen Sedgwick, and Myrna Loy, in her “oriental” period). But the prime mover is Louise Brooks, in her best American film and as the first of many feisty, independent Hawksian women. As the high diver Mam’selle Godiva, she conquers both of our heroes “like Grant took Richmond,” in the words of a contemporary reviewer. For a generation of French critics, Hawks’s film was the first to break with Weimar shadow aesthetics and present something new, hard, and streamlined—in the words of novelist Blaise Cendrars, “the first appearance of contemporary cinema.” Presented in a 35mm archival print from the George Eastman Museum.