Category: Directed by Howard Hawks
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Ball of Fire is a rare delight. It’s got an enormous cast of scene-stealers who all work in unison, thanks to Hawks’s direction but also Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder’s screenplay being so well-balanced. For most of the picture. The third act has two choices, and it chooses poorly but still successfully; I’ll get to…
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Bogart meets Bacall in the 1940 Caribbean; he’s an old ex-pat fishing boat captaining and trying to keep his head down in Vichy-controlled territory, she’s a young ex-pat more concerned with getting out of where she’s been than where she’s going. The star wattage on Bacall–everyone just sits and watches her, Bogart grinning by the…
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Magnificent comedy about successful Broadway producer John Barrymore finding his muse in untrained lingerie model Carole Lombard. The film charts the rise and fall of their partnership, which gets romantic, in the first half, spends the second half giving them a chance to reunite (in a train-set screwball comedy). Awesome performance from Barrymore, great one…
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The first forty-five minutes of Only Angels Have Wings is mostly continual present action. Jean Arthur arrives in a South American port town, looking around–followed by two possible ne’er-do-wells (Allyn Joslyn and Noah Beery Jr.)–and the film tracks her experience. Great direction from Hawks, beautiful cinematography from Joseph Walker. Pretty soon she discovers they’re not…
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A lot goes unspoken in The Big Sleep. It’s very much set in a wartime Los Angeles, but there’s never much said about wartime conditions or Los Angeles. When private detective Humphrey Bogart goes around the city, investigating, he’s only ever encountering women (beautiful women at that, because director Hawks’s Los Angeles is solely populated…
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I’m hard pressed to think of a better comedy than Bringing Up Baby. Between Hawks’s direction, Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde’s script, the acting (particularly from Katharine Hepburn, who’s so funny, one just starts laughing when she starts talking to save the trouble of having to laugh after her line), it’s probably not possible to…
The Stop Button 