HOWARD HAWKS: AMERICAN ARTIST (1997) 55m dir: Kevin Macdonald

From American Movie Classics Magazine: "The Big Sleep, Bringing Up Baby, Rio Bravo, His Girl Friday: The director of these great films is profiled. Includes interviews with Lauren Bacall, James Caan and Hawks himself."

This documentary that examines Hawks' career was produced for television by the British Film Institute to complement a retrospective of his films that was mounted in London at the National Film Theatre in 1997. Also interviewed are Angie Dickinson, Todd McCarthy, Walter Hill, and William Friedkin.

Also from AMC Magazine:

"Hawks Eye: The Singular Vision of a Great Director" by Joseph McBride, author of Hawks on Hawks:

"For many years, director Howard Hawks was a shamefully neglected figure. Partly it was because the Goshen, Indiana, native rarely courted or received publicity. And partly it was because, in the latter part of his career, Hawks was better known as a producer than as a director. This, despite helming such stellar films as Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Big Sleep (1946), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Rio Bravo (1959).

"Today, though, a new generation of critics and directors have revived Hawks's reputation. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which had failed to honor Hawks, even gave him a special Oscar in 1975 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.' Such is the legacy covered in Kevin Macdonald's Howard Hawks: American Artist. ...

"'He's the only director I know to have made a great movie in every genre,' praises director John Carpenter [whose ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 reworks RIO BRAVO and who taught a "Howard Hawks Masterclass" during the BFI retrospective mentioned above]. With almost effortless panache, Hawks did romantic and screwball comedy, the gangster movie, Westerns, film noir, even musicals. And in each, Hawks' work shows a remarkable consistency of style and theme. He concentrated his idiosyncratic vision on those who live by their own moral code, akin to what Ernest Hemingway called 'grace under pressure.'

"Hawks himself wore such grace lightly. He once said: 'I try to tell my story as simply as possible, with the camera at eye level. ... All I'm doing is telling a story. I don't analyze or do a lot of thinking about it. I work on the fact that if I like somebody and think they're attractive, I can make them attractive. If I think a thing's funny, then people laugh at it. If I think a thing's dramatic, the audience does. ... I think our job is to make entertainment.'

"Spoken like a true popular artist. But Hawks should not be mistaken for an unconscious artist or an unsophisticated man. To the contrary, part of what makes his work seem so fresh to today's audiences is his shrewdness and honesty about sexual and romantic relations, his sardonic wit, and his existential leanings. This former pro car racer and engineering student seduced audiences by combining his bleak vision with a droll appreciation of human absurdity and a sensual enjoyment of the physical universe. No wonder the French critics loved him.

"Still, Hawks's worldview has some whopping limitations. His characters tend to be overgrown adolescents and snobbish elitists. The 'Hawksian woman' may be empowered, but she's never a mother and rarely past youth. And minorities all but go missing from Hawks's universe. Critic Manny Farber noted that Hawks films aren't 'dated so much as removed from reality, like the land of Tolkien's Hobbits.'

"Nonetheless, for all his opacity, we know full well who Howard Hawks was: an enterprising auteur who boldly --- and often brilliantly --- bent the Hollywood system to his own ends. This was a quintessentially American artist."