Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood by Todd McCarthy

Author:Todd McCarthy [McCARTHY, TODD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9780802137401
Google: VurpbRg7GRoC
Amazon: 0802137407
Barnesnoble: 0802137407
Goodreads: 790008
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 1997-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Just twenty-eight years old, short, and taken to dressing in the simple, somewhat outdoorsy manner Hawks admired, Brackett had spent much of her childhood in Pasadena, not far from the Hawks home. Hawks was also won over by Brackett’s taste in literature, as her heroes were very close to his own—Hemingway, Kipling, and Steinbeck, in addition to Chandler and Hammett. Having been previously employed in Hollywood only by Republic Pictures on a cheap horror film, she was understandably stunned and a bit bewildered to be summoned by the likes of Hawks to work with the great Faulkner on a story by her god Chandler. “What have I got to offer? as it were,” she quipped. Hawks was willing to risk $125 per week on her, which was more than all right with Brackett: “I’d have done it for nothing.”

Hawks’s directive to his writers was, “Don’t monkey with the book—just make a script out of it. The writing is too good.” This was willfully perverse and, if true, self-deceiving, since never in his career was he content to simply transcribe an existing text on-screen. Unlike John Huston, who always insisted on fidelity to the original text, for Hawks irreverence was more like it, adherence to some preexisting literary standard quite irrelevent to what interested him. Hawks was invariably driven—by his creative urges, his need to put his own stamp on someone else’s creation, his ego, and his entire artistic process—to free himself from the constraints of literature, to spin a tale his own way, to make something organic gel from the combination of talents assembled on a particular picture. To be sure, The Big Sleep ended up resembling its source much more than did To Have and Have Not, but Hawks’s original instructions to hew closely to the novel stand as ironic, in that it was he, more than his writers, who strayed significantly from it.

Hawks rated Chandler, along with Hammett and Hemingway, among his favorite authors. He once remarked, “Chandler’s dialogue is in some ways just as good as Hecht’s and MacArthur’s, though it was more limited. He really wrote only about Marlowe, but it was awfully good.” Hawks also felt that Chandler, who was in his early fifties by the time his novels starting becoming popular, had an advantage in having written most of his important work before he began being taken seriously, so “he didn’t get a chance to be self-conscious about it.”

Due to the august literary names involved, the adaptation of The Big Sleep has been far more intensely scrutinized than that of any other Hawks film except To Have and Have Not; scholars specializing in Chandler, Faulkner, and Hawks have all taken close looks at it. Especially helpful is the work of Roger Shatzkin; the very title of his essay “Who Cares Who Killed Owen Taylor?” frankly addresses the issue no one can avoid when discussing The Big Sleep: that the plot is so complicated that even the original author couldn’t say who murdered one of the characters, but that it didn’t matter because everything else about it is so dazzlingly good.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.