Showing posts with label Howard Hawks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Howard Hawks. Show all posts

Best Director, 1948

Awards presented March 24, 1949

And the nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

This was, remarkably, Huston's first nomination and only win as director, though he also won for his screenplay. He had previously been nominated for the screenplays of Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, The Maltese Falcon, and Sergeant York, and would receive double nominations as writer-director for The Asphalt Jungle and The African Queen, a double nomination as director and producer of the 1952 Moulin Rouge, two more writing nominations for Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison and The Man Who Would Be King, a supporting actor nomination for The Cardinal, and a final directing nomination for Prizzi's Honor. He would direct fifteen performances that received acting nominations, and four that won, including his father and his daughter. (The other two are Claire Trevor in Key Largo and Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen.) Is there a more impressive film career? 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Joanne Dru and Hawks take a smoke break

Have I ranted enough about the Academy's neglect of Hawks? This seems to me the greatest of all Hollywood Westerns, with the finest performance John Wayne ever gave (with the possible exception of the one he gave in The Searchers). It has a fresh, vital, sexy performance from an actor who declined into neurosis, Montgomery Clift. And is there a greater dick-measuring scene in movies than the one in which Clift and John Ireland compare guns? It has Walter Brennan hamming it up, and a gallery of great Western supporting performers: Harry Carey Sr. and Jr., Noah Beery Jr., Hank Worden, Chief Yowlatchie, and even Richard Farnsworth in an uncredited role as one of Dunston's men. Joanne Dru is the Hawksian woman in the mix, and even if Pauline Kael has a point when she calls her "frantic" and says she "acts as if the Old West were Greenwich Village," she's still fun to watch. The cattle drive is exciting and Dimitri Tiomkin's score is stirring. What's not to like? 
John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River 

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Best Director, 1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

While today's critics find Ford's Oscar-winning work on big studio projects like Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley less interesting than on the films, particularly the Westerns, on which he exercised more individual control, this one is interesting because of the way Ford's humanistic vision transforms Steinbeck's novel, in which the characters are symbolic vehicles for his ideas about social justice. Ford gives them greater depth, and while this may rob the film of its political edge, it also takes the story out of the context of the Great Depression and gives it universality.

... when it should have gone to ... 

Howard Hawks, Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell
 on the set of His Girl Friday 
So much has been written about the long neglect of Hawks that there's not much point going into it again here. There are those who think that His Girl Friday is his greatest film, but they are the kind of people who spend their time making lists when they should be watching movies. One reason may be that it became Hawks's most widely seen film because Columbia failed to renew its copyright in 1968, which put it in the public domain, available for multiple transfers to video once the VCR became commercially available. It was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1993. It is, for sure, the greatest version of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's Broadway hit The Front Page, which was first filmed in 1931, and was remade by Billy Wilder in 1974 with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. But the Hawks version, which turned Hildy Johnson into a woman, shows signs of transcending the original. It was adapted, though not very successfully, into Switching Channels in 1988, with Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner in the Grant and Russell roles, with changed names and the action moved to a television studio. Then in 2003 playwright John Guare adapted both The Front Page and His Girl Friday into a stage version, keeping elements of both (including the sex change). It premiered in London and has subsequently crossed the Atlantic for several American productions.  
Rosalind Russell and the gentlemen of the press in His Girl Friday



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Best Director, 1931-32

Awards presented November 18, 1932
(Films released from August 1, 1931 through July 31, 1932 were eligible.)
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
Frank Borzage, Bad Girl. Borzage's career peaked with his second Oscar, and his films are not much sought-out today. Of his subsequent movies, the best-known are the 1932 A Farewell to Arms, the interesting teaming of Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur in History Is Made at Night, and two movies with Margaret Sullavan, Three Comrades and The Mortal Storm, the latter with an anti-Nazi message that was unusually powerful coming from a pre-war Hollywood nervous about losing the European market.  

... when it should have gone to ...   
Howard Hawks 
 Scarface:
Paul Muni in Scarface
George Raft in Scarface 

Boris Karloff in Scarface
Howard Hawks's "moment" came about a decade before his death, when critic Andrew Sarris put him in the pantheon of auteurs in his highly influential book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. He was already a favorite in France, of course, among the Cahiers du Cinéma set, and his movies with Humphrey Bogart, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, were essentials for the 1960s Bogart cult that had its epicenter at the Brattle Theater near Harvard and spread to college campuses across the country. But in a career that spanned forty-four years and about as many films, he was nominated for best director only once, for Sergeant York. It's astonishing to run down the list of Hawks films that received no nominations at all, starting with Scarface and including the dizziest of screwball comedies, Twentieth Century and Bringing Up Baby; the greatest newspaper movie (or at least the best remake of The Front Page), His Girl Friday; the quintessential Bogart and Bacall movies mentioned above; and the star-making Marilyn Monroe musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. At the 1974 ceremony, responding to the urging of the younger generation of filmmakers who had rediscovered his works, the Academy gave Hawks an honorary Oscar, recognizing him as "a master American filmmaker whose creative efforts hold a distinguished place in world cinema." 
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