Howard Hawks

Only Angels Have Wings … is one of Howard Hawks’ finest films, arguably his quintessential work.

In just two collaborations, the German director Georg Wilhelm Pabst and the Kansas-born Louise Brooks created a screen personality that left a permanent mark on the history of film.

If It Happened One Night endures, and is continually regarded as the Hollywood classic that it is, it’s due to the romance and the comedy, both dependent on the screen chemistry of Colbert and Gable and on Ruskin’s fantastic screenplay.

Ford himself was not a fan of ‘My Darling Clementine,’ though through the years, many critics have understandably held it up as one of his finest achievements

If it were only for Wayne’s performance, which is excellent, Red River would be a vital entry into the Western genre. But there is more to this extraordinary picture. That’s why it’s not only one of the greatest Westerns ever made, it’s an American classic.

Though not one of their greatest efforts (together or otherwise), “Hatari!” has much of what one would want in a John Wayne/Howard Hawks film. It’s casual, friendly, and sincerely straightforward. And it does all come across as having been extremely fun to make.

“El Dorado” is a refreshing genre classic, at once suggesting topical concerns while conserving an enduring arena for its Hollywood icons to do what they do best. It incorporates much of what distinguished Howard Hawks’ cinema: his uniform themes, style, and tone.

Assault on Precinct 13 Written and directed by John Carpenter USA, 1976 With his filmmaking career beginning in the midst of the new Hollywood and its touchstones in American film history, it’s perhaps easy to see why the work of John Carpenter has been somewhat overshadowed by more celebrated filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Steven …

Fictional private detective icon Philip Marlowe, a creation from the mind of famed author Raymond Chandler, was one such character who always succeeded in putting millions of puzzle pieces together. 1944 saw the release of a great film adaptation of a Marlowe story, Murder, My Sweet, with Dick Powell playing the aforementioned private dick. 1946 was the year a Philip Marlowe adventure with a lot more star power behind it was bought to the silver screen, The Big Sleep, directed by legend Howard Hawks and starring none other than Humphrey Bogart.

Westerns may appear as diverse and unruly as the characters they contain, but beneath the ten gallon hats and spurs lie a handful of basic mythologies. This guide selects one movie which epitomizes each legend plus another four outstanding examples, each one given a capsule review and illustrated with a classic movie poster. Click on …

High Noon and Rio Bravo share a fascinating and perhaps singular position in the annals of American cinema as companion pieces of social commentary that also managed to succeed as two of the greatest and most influential Westerns, and indeed films, of their time. Created seven years apart, with Rio Bravo intended as a direct …

Rio Bravo Directed by Howard Hawks Written by Jules Furthman, Leigh Brackett and U.S.A., 1959 Being a writer, producer, director or actor during the era when westerns were all the craze, a period which lasted an impressive amount of time, could not always have been very easy. With so many of such films flooding the …

The “adult” Western – as it would come to be called –  was a long time coming.  A Hollywood staple since the days of The Great Train Robbery (1903), the Western offered spectacle and action set against the uniquely American milieu of the Old West – a historical period which, at the dawn of the motion picture …

The Western was a movie staple for decades. It seemed the genre that would never die, feeding the fantasies of one generation after another of young boys who galloped around their backyards, playgrounds, and brick streets on broomsticks, banging away with their Mattel cap pistols. Something about a man on a horse set against the …

Inspired by the recent Sound on Sight radio show on Preston Sturges, I have decided to supplement the work of one of the great comic directors by providing a list of under seen and generally under appreciated comedies from Preston Sturges’ era. Whereas most connoisseurs will be familiar with his work, as well as films …

Taken out of context, it seems like Bringing Up Baby should have been a blockbuster in its day. It had all of the necessary elements: big name stars playing unique characters, a wacky plot, hilarious dialogue and a large handful of plot twists – but when the movie premiered in 1938, it bombed. Director Howard …