These notes accompany the screenings of Howard Hawks’s </i>Air Force</a> on June 22, 23, and 24 in Theater 3.</p>
Howard Hawks’s Air Force and John Ford’s They Were Expendable are the cream of a very abundant crop of Hollywood World War II films.

Posts tagged ‘Howard Hawks’
Howard Hawks’s Air Force
Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby
These notes accompany the screenings of Howard Hawks’s </i>Bringing Up Baby</a> on March 2, 3, and 4 in Theater 3.</p>
Today’s posting is on Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby, but more on that in a moment. Last week, in praising George Cukor’s Holiday as a product of the Hollywood studio system, I got off onto a bit of a rant about how bad American commercial films have become since the demise of that system. I was completely unaware that Mark Harris covered a lot of the same ground in the February issue of Esquire, in a piece called “The Day the Movies Died.” Harris had much more space, and he knows a great deal more about contemporary Hollywood than I would ever want to know. Although he holds Inception in much higher esteem than I do, the points he makes about the replacement of storytelling skills and character development by technological gimmickry are essentially the same. I promise you I did not know of Harris’s article before I wrote mine. Honest Injun! Cross my heart!
Howard Hawks’s Scarface: The Shame of a Nation
These notes accompany screenings of Howard Hawks’s </i>Scarface: The Shame of a Nation, September 22, 23, and 24 in Theater 3.</p>
Howard Hawks (1896–1977), in his forty-four year career, was arguably the most consistently successful of all directors in satisfying the commercial demands of the Hollywood studio system while simultaneously maintaining a high level of personal expression in his films. One might say he was the “auteur’s auteur.” It helped a great deal that he was proficient in so many different genres.
Howard Hawks’s The Dawn Patrol
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.
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