Twentieth Century (Patreon)

A primary dynamic in the films of Howard Hawks is the idea of two people who 'deserve each other', in that they are essentially compatible partners and often lovers, sometimes knowing this, often not, and the course of the picture is the growing recognition of camaraderie and compatibility.

Lily Garland and Oscar Jaffe in Hawks' Twentieth Century (played with exquisite hysteria by Lombard and Barrymore) are early examples of this phenomenon, two self-obsessed dramatists, one an impresario and the other a 'going Hollywood' actress, deeply dependent on one another but caught in a dynamic that feeds off of negative energy, loud declarations and argumentation -- they're made for each other, both of them know that, and they somewhat hate that this is the case.

What is 'made for' in this relationship can be compared to the machinations of fate, but Hawks almost never places his films within that larger context in the way that Fritz Lang's films are 'determined' by social relations, architecture, or even metaphysical powers. In fact, the milieu doesn't make a difference for Hawks: he repeats himself and this 'made for' theme inside New York academia, Los Angeles crime, the Wild West, Ancient Egypt, and among 1960s stock-car racers. He is an odd sort of atheistic perennialist who over and over returns to the idea that people say what they don't feel to those who hear what isn't said, that the world is a sort of manic-depressive game where human beings busy themselves with speed, patter, information, they build entire civilizations in a frenzy of activity created by the attachment of two persons whose erotic tension is an equal force to that of Tesla's electric coils or the stream engine, that cinema itself is a mechanistic outpouring of an organic vitalism that takes many forms throughout history while never altering its nature.

Howard Hawks was offered to direct the suicide-drama Fourteen Hours in the early 1950s, but turned it down because he wanted to take this subject matter and turn it into a comedy with Cary Grant as the lead: I think this is indicative of a larger tendency in the Hawksian universe. Many times in Twentieth Century, characters threaten suicide or make reference to it, but it is always posited in a theatrical way, the point of it being that no sensible person would actually do this, that Oscar Jaffe only pretends to want to jump out a window as a trick to win back the affections of Lily Garland. But then we think of how many Hawks characters put themselves in very close proximity to death -- the drivers in The Crowd Roars and Red Line 7000, the fliers in The Dawn Patrol and Only Angels Have Wings, the dynasty of Land of The Pharaohs, the ranchers of Red River, the animal wranglers of Hatari!, the Hawksian hero is defined by their derring-do, and even the well-off East Coasters of Twentieth Century and Bringing Up Baby have a casual disregard for their life and limb, even if just to prove a point.

Hawks can turn topics like suicide and death into comedic fodder because he doesn't take them that seriously -- I think of the scene in His Girl Friday where Mollie jumps out the window of the newspaper men's room, and the film barely stops to remark upon it except as basically a gag. My mind is drawn to this idea that his characters are 'made for each other' less because of any outside force, which barely exists in Hawks, he is close to Thatcher in positing that there is no such thing as society in a meaningful way, that it is noise. Rather, the 'made for' element exists outside of time but can occupy the bodies of whatever the topic at hand is, and that seemingly opposite people can somehow, despite themselves, come to recognize this fact after the due course of comedy and danger. But without an outside context to this relationship, Hawks' characters frequently feel as if they are divorced from the rest of reality and only share in the delusion they both perpetuate -- I think about how the byzantine plot of The Big Sleep falls away until it is just Bogart and Bacall alone in a room, preparing themselves against the world. This isolating move in Hawks stands in stark contrast to directors like Cukor, Ford, Vidor, whose heroes and heroines have to mingle with and find their place in a wider social order, and you can see the legacy of this Hawksian-libertarianism in someone like John Carpenter, who so often sets his stories in places which don't abide by the same rules as wider society, Antarctica, New York and L.A. prison colonies, Precinct 13, Little China, these are pocket-realities created by the conscious activity of their inhabitants, who are not only 'made for each other', but make each other and their environments.

I think we must place Hawks closer to Josef Von Sternberg, and maybe even Ernst Lubitsch, who are masters of depicting how relationship is not only inhabiting a unique emotional space, but how that emotional space seems to bleed past physical boundaries and color things beyond the personal and interpersonal. Hawks is not as overtly stylish as Sternberg, but his pocket-realities resemble the Exotica locales typical to a Sternberg film, as well as both of them working often with screenwriter Ben Hecht, and as for Lubitsch, while Hawks doesn't venture far from American shores to see anything close to the continental sophistication of Lubitsch, they are partnered in their emphasis on how discourse so often functions as an elaborate game between people shading their real intentions or simply being unconscious of them.

To watch a Howard Hawks film is to bask in a work of art that takes on the appearance of commonplace realism, but scarcely functions like that mask, and instead teaches you a unique coded language, a key to a tiny iron doorway into a world that laughs at death and takes seriously the where and when someone lights their cigarette, where nicknames and stagnames replace who you were before -- Hawks is more of a fantasist than he is given credit for.