Product Description

Howard Hawks is the first major biography of one of Hollywood's greatest directors, a filmmaker of incomparable versatility whose body of work includes the landmark gangster film Scarface, screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, the Bogart-Bacall classics To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and aviation classics and Westerns like The Dawn Patrol and Rio Bravo. Sometime partner of the eccentric Howard Hughes, drinking buddy of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, an inveterate gambler and a notorious liar, Hawks was the most modern of the great masters and one of the first directors to declare his independence from the major studios. He played Svengali to Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift, and others, but Hawks's greatest creation may have been himself. As The Atlantic Monthly noted, "Todd McCarthy . . . has gone further than anyone else in sorting out the truths and lies of the life, the skills and the insight and the self-deceptions of the work." "A fluent biography of the great director, a frequently rotten guy but one whose artistic independence and standards of film morality never failed." -- The New York Times Book Review; "Hawks's life, until now rather an enigma, has been put into focus and made one with his art in Todd McCarthy's wise and funny Howard Hawks." -- The Wall Street Journal; "Excellent . . . a respectful, exhaustive, and appropriately smartass look at Hollywood's most versatile director." -- Newsweek.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #487797 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 2.34 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 768 pages

From Library Journal
As producer and director, Howard Hawks mastered such diverse genres as screwball comedy, Western, science fiction, musical, and hard-boiled gangster film. He possessed a natural gift for storytelling and a keen eye for talent. He constantly bucked the studios and censorship boards, yet he made no "personal" films and considered any film a failure if it did not reach an audience. Despite the success of his films, Hawks was always scrambling for work thanks to gambling habits, free spending, and IRS claims for back taxes. On the centenary of the complex man's birth, the chief film critic at Variety has produced the first comprehensive biography of Hawks, detailing his privileged early life and his numerous relationships with "dames." McCarthy also discusses Hawks's aloof behavior both on the set and at home, as well as his working methods with such varied figures as Howard Hughes, John Wayne, Cary Grant, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. This exhaustively researched warts-and-all biography is a major contribution to film literature and should lead to a renewed appreciation of Hawks. Highly recommended.
-?Stephen Rees, Levittown Regional Lib., Pa.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Howard Hawks (1896^-1977) was one of the leading directors of Hollywood's golden age, worked with its biggest stars (Bogart, Hepburn, Grant), and--pilot, notorious womanizer, Hemingway's drinking buddy--lived a colorful life straight out of one of his action movies yet has never been the subject of a full-scale biography. McCarthy obliges him, tracing Hawks' career from the silent era through his 1970 valedictory, Rio Lobo. Chief film critic for the show-biz trade paper Variety, McCarthy is an ideal chronicler of the life of this most commercial of great filmmakers. He uncovers the truth behind the oft-told anecdotes of the notoriously self-aggrandizing Hawks and reveals the secret of Hawks' success: the films he wanted to make--straightforward entertainments featuring big stars--were the same ones that the studios wanted to make and that, in most cases, the public wanted to see. So Hawks boasted an unmatched, unbroken string of 11 hits between 1938 and 1951, and while his contemporaries faltered after World War II, continued his career successfully into the 1970s. Gordon Flagg

From Kirkus Reviews
A pleasingly thorough, if not critically groundbreaking, retrospective of the works and life of Hollywood's most versatile (and, to some cineasts, best) director. Hawks was born into a successful midwestern mercantile family. Detailing the level and range of their business successes, film critic McCarthy (King of the B's, 1975) suggests how the confidence bred in Hawks by his family's position strengthened his determination when he came to Hollywood: He wanted to work in a number of different genres, and he wanted to remain independent of the big studios. Despite the odds, he did. McCarthy focuses with great and admirable detail on Hawks's films. His life was rowdy and colorful (he was a womanizer and a gambler), and McCarthy communicates the essentials without ever losing focus on the director's artistry. Especially fascinating is the chapter on Red River, a blend of the requisite quotes on the previously untapped acting ability of John Wayne (e.g., Ford's ``I didn't know the sonofabitch could act!''), tales of sparring between Wayne and costar Montgomery Clift and Hawks's dissatisfaction with Joanne Dru, a concise analysis of the movie's importance to Hawks's artistic freedom, and not too much about the film's already much- discussed homoerotic intonations. Highlights from other chapters include fresh discussions of overlapping dialogue in the romantic comedies, recaps of the sometimes surprising public response to his films (too-cynical Twentieth Century was a box office dud), and end-of-chapter roundups of critical views of each film, notable for including not only reviews of the time but the opinions of film historians like Jeanine Basinger and little-known critics like Jean-Pierre Coursodon. Though the most enjoyable book on Hawks remains Joseph McBride's Hawks on Hawks, this is an essential complement to it and to studies by Wood, Wollen, and others. It portrays in wide-screen format a life until now presented only in sketches. (16 pages photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.