Getting into Howard Hawks

Howard Hawks remains a neglected director. He worked with (and in several cases arguably discovered) some of the greatest Hollywood stars, and has been called one of the greatest directors by critics from some of the French Cahiers-influenced film students of the sixties to respected film historian David Thomson, who has written that his ten “Desert Island” picks would all be Hawks movies. On the other hand, among most viewers of classic films today, Hawks never seems to have escaped his reputation as a workmanlike director of popular genre pictures, but nothing more. For instance, checking over three or four randomly...