His Girl Friday (1940)

USA, 92 minutes

Director: Howard Hawks

Writers: Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Morrie Ryskind

Photography: Joseph Walker

Music: Sidney Cutner, Felix Mills

Editor: Gene Havlick

Cast: Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy, Gene Lockhart, John Qualen, Helen Mack, Alma Kruger, Billy Gilbert, Abner Biberman

His Girl Friday is an older picture, like Casablanca or The Wizard of Oz, that remains worth seeing for everyone at least once. It pulls off a killer stunt in the impossible pace alone, and you also can't miss director Howard Hawks's evident ability to translate a party atmosphere on his shooting sets into his movies. Everyone appears to be having a ball. Hawks's version of the stage play The Front Page (which has been made into movies three or four times) is still unique as it sprints on a tempo that defies all speed limits, along with some interesting and innovative technique like overlapping dialogue. Admittedly His Girl Friday may look primitive to a lot of contemporary viewers, but it's still impressive and likely to surprise. Not even Billy Wilder could come close when he took it on in a 1974 version with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.

The play's original story and dialogue carry it some way, doubtless the reason it has been made into a movie so many times. Cary Grant by himself puts on a clinic in screwball timing and fast talking and Rosalind Russell keeps up admirably. Grant is Walter Burns, a newspaper editor and political kingmaker in the cynical mode of the time (slower and possibly more corrupt versions would appear in Citizen Kane and Meet John Doe). Russell is Hildy Johnson, Burns's best reporter and ex-wife. Now she is about to remarry and move to Albany but Burns has one more last-minute assignment for her, which she can't resist. The blood of a newspaperman plainly courses her veins.

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

USA, 102 minutes
Director: Howard Hawks
Writers: Dudley Nichols, Hagar Wilde
Photography: Russell Metty
Music: Roy Webb
Editor: George Hively
Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Charles Ruggles, Walter Catlett, Barry Fitzgerald, May Robson, Fritz Feld, Ward Bond

I have never adored this movie the way I think I should, the way people do. Watching it recently I noted all the impressive points again: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, director Howard Hawks, a leopard (make that two leopards), the Tin Pan Alley standard "I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby," and screwball comedy itself for crying out loud, that early contribution of sound, a fast-talking freewheeling way to indulge slapstick and improv while letting studio stars play loose and wild as they can. Screwball comedy usually depends on the charisma of its principles. Fortunately for Bringing Up Baby Hepburn and Grant have a considerable amount of that.

Grant always tended to be generally better at comedy, his affable sophisticated persona a little clownish yet somehow more everyman and vulnerable, uniquely suited to baffling sinister problems, such as he encounters here or in North by Northwest or in another screwball comedy by Hawks, the 1952 Monkey Business. Hepburn by contrast was more suited to the intensities of big theatrical drama and sometimes seems overwhelmed by—but always game for—the nonsense unspooling here. Among other things, almost all of Mary Tyler Moore (both 20something and 30something Mary) can be seen in her performance here. The result is often high-spirited, spurred by a joyful feel to the production (the Hawks brand, let's call it, as it's also a main feature of The Big Sleep). But Bringing Up Baby also lapses into flat aimless patches where it becomes merely a 1930s picture. It's a star vehicle first and mainly, and Hawks keeps those stars in front of the cameras as much as possible. It obviously doesn't matter what they do or don't do once there.

The Big Sleep (1946)

USA, 114 minutes
Director: Howard Hawks
Writers: William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, Raymond Chandler
Photography: Sidney Hickox
Music: Max Steiner
Editor: Christian Nyby
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, John Ridgely, Dorothy Malone, Regis Toomey, Charles Waldron, Charles D. Brown, Elisha Cook Jr., Louis Jean Heydt, Bob Steele, Peggy Knudsen, Sonia Darrin, Joy Barlow, Tommy Rafferty

In my period of infatuation with Humphrey Bogart, late teens or so, The Big Sleep always gave me a bad case of cognitive dissonance. I could see that Bogart's turn at the Philip Marlowe private detective created by Raymond Chandler belongs with his best, his best being Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, probably The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, probably High Sierra, and maybe The African Queen (still too young for In a Lonely Place, which was not even in my sights). The Big Sleep also benefits from palpable chemistry between Bogart and Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Rutledge, the quasi-femme fatale and romantic interest. Bogart and Bacall were single when the picture started shooting but married to each other for the rest of their lives by the time it came out. They had been good in director Howard Hawks's 1944 cover of Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, which was Bacall's first picture. They were even better here.

But The Big Sleep so completely confounds clarity that I resented it, even if Bogart was in every damn scene. The fact that no one, including Chandler, could say who committed one of its murders outraged me. Not that I was noticing specific plot holes—I wasn't even sure I was tracking basic through-lines half the time, especially with new characters still arriving even into the last third. Also, it never helped that anyone discussing the picture always cheerfully mentioned its incomprehensibility. The point of the mystery genre is to create narratives that are not a mystery any longer at the end, I insisted. The Big Sleep was breaking these rules and what was worse everyone seemed to admire that as much as anything else about it.

Rio Bravo (1959)

USA, 141 minutes
Director: Howard Hawks
Writers: Jules Furthman, Leigh Brackett, B.H. McCampbell
Photography: Russell Harlan
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin
Editor: Folmar Blangsted
Cast: John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, John Russell, Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez, Claude Akins, Harry Carey Jr., Bob Steele

Perhaps the most obvious point to make about Rio Bravo is that it's not much more (and certainly no less) than a big fat Hollywood production, engineered to precision points of glamour and entertainment. If there are serious themes to it they are drowned mercifully in the glitz. It's a Western more as a matter of convenience than conviction. It has nothing to say about individualism, family, pioneering, rugged nature, Indians, mining, the railroad, or any of the other things Westerns tie themselves in knots about when they reach for the gravitas. Yes, it's a small West Texas town under siege by outlaws presumably in the 19th century. Yes, there's a certain amount of frontier justice. Yes, John Wayne is here (and yes, even the famous shot from The Searchers of him walking away from an open door, shot from behind in dark interior, is mimicked). But it's John Wayne the venerable movie star who could woulda shoulda a Oscar, not John Wayne the blank screen creation of John Ford onto which every projection known to man (and women too!) is thrown. Though he is that too inevitably as always.

The intentions of Rio Bravo are made obvious with the casting of Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, and Angie Dickinson, who have nothing to say about Westerns in or out of this movie, except at some point in their lives they all probably (Martin almost certainly) got a kick out of sneaking away to catch matinees of them. I'm not exactly complaining. Rio Bravo is a grand blustering entertainment and there's nothing else quite like it. "After we finished we found we could have done it a lot better," director Howard Hawks has reportedly said, "and that's why we went ahead and made El Dorado." That's a good quote, and it might even be true, but El Dorado is never going to be celebrated the way Rio Bravo probably always will be.

Monkey Business (1952)

USA, 97 minutes
Director: Howard Hawks
Writers: Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, I.A.L. Diamond, Harry Segall, Howard Hawks
Photography: Milton R. Krasner
Music: Leigh Harline
Editor: William B. Murphy
Cast: Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Marlowe, George Winslow

This exercise in foolishness, directed by Howard Hawks, is constructed well enough to make itself likeable, even charming. The star-studded cast doesn't hurt anything either—Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Charles Coburn all get their chances to jump around and use juvenile voices, doing their variously silly impressions of youthful teens, while Marilyn Monroe, on the very cusp of becoming an icon, gets by fine with her fallback little dumb-blonde lost shtick, cooing and swishing around and showing off body parts (I'm always a little taken aback by her voluptuousness, forever expecting that her reputation for beauty will mean the usual quasi-anorexia of today).

It's the kind of movie I used to love finding on after-school matinees on TV, a confection built out of broad concept, even broader humor, and star turns artfully deployed, which I'm pretty sure adds up simply to testament of Hawks's ability to make a picture. Cary Grant plays Dr. Barnaby Fulton, a genius—the term is bandied about so casually it's drained of the typical pretensions and becomes a kind of equivalent of "dentist"—and an affable chemist who works for a big corporation on "formulas," which in turn produce products like nylons that won't run and popcorn bags that won't crackle. In this case he is working on a fountain-of-youth drug. Well, that's kind of like a popcorn bag that won't crackle.