Howard Hawks Quotes

Does a falcon seek company with a swan amidst the lilies of a pond, or sing duets with a nightingale? Or does he soar through the storm alongside his equal, the hawk? Walking the same rocky path. Swimming the same choppy currents. Sharing courage enough to face a thicket of briars with nothing to gain but pain and flame. That’s the true measure of a companion’s worth.

Teori tentang sinema tidak terletak di dalam sinema, melainkan pada konsep-konsep tentang sinema (outside), namun teori sinema ini sepraktis dan seefektif sinema itu sendiri. Para sutradara itu seperti pelukis atau musisi: mereka menguasai dengan baik tentang apa yang mereka kerjakan. Tapi, ketika mengerjakannya, mereka menjadi sesuatu yang lain, mereka menjadi filsuf atau teoritikus – bahkan Howard Hawks yang menyatakan tak butuh teori untuk berkarya, atau Godard yang dalam berkarya seolah-olah menyangkal teori. C2:280

He wasn’t exactly hideous, but his face looked like two hawks had crashed into each other in midair.

When Chief Black Hawk was defeated and captured in 1832, he made a surrender speech: I fought hard. But your guns were well aimed. The bullets flew like birds in the air, and whizzed by our ears like the wind through the trees in the winter. My warriors fell around me. . . The sun rose dim on us in the morning, and at night it sunk in a dark cloud, and looked like a ball of fire. That was the last sun that shone on Black Hawk. . . He is now a prisoner to the white men. . . He has done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed. He has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and papooses, against white men, who came year after year, to cheat them and take away their lands. You know the cause of out making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. Indians are not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian and look at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies. Indians do not steal.

the Sac and Fox Indians of Illinois were removed, after the Black Hawk War (in which Abraham Lincoln was an officer, although he was not in combat). When Chief Black Hawk was defeated and captured in 1832, he made a surrender speech: I fought hard. But your guns were well aimed. The bullets flew like birds in the air, and whizzed by our ears like the wind through the trees in the winter. My warriors fell around me. . . . The sun rose dim on us in the morning, and at night it sunk in a dark cloud, and looked like a ball of fire. That was the last sun that shone on Black Hawk. . . . He is now a prisoner to the white men. . . . He has done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed. He has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and papooses, against white men, who came year after year, to cheat them and take away their lands. You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. Indians are not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian and look at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies. Indians do not steal. An Indian who is as bad as the white men could not live in our nation; he would be put to death, and eaten up by the wolves. The white men are bad schoolmasters; they carry false books, and deal in false actions; they smile in the face of the poor Indian to cheat him; they shake them by the hand to gain their confidence, to make them drunk, to deceive them, and ruin our wives. We told them to leave us alone, and keep away from us; they followed on, and beset our paths, and they coiled themselves among us, like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe. We lived in danger. We were becoming like them, hypocrites and liars, adulterous lazy drones, all talkers and no workers. . . . The white men do not scalp the head; but they do worse—they poison the heart. . . . Farewell, my nation! . . . Farewell to Black Hawk.

As Titanic began production, there was an immediate chemistry between Barbara and myself—a lot of looks across the room. At this point Barbara Stanwyck was a legendary actress, universally respected for her level of craft and integrity. She also had the most valuable thing a performer can have: good taste. Besides a long list of successful bread-and-butter pictures, Barbara had made genuine classics for great directors: The Bitter Tea of General Yen and Meet John Doe for Frank Capra, Stella Dallas for King Vidor, The Lady Eve for Preston Sturges, Ball of Fire for Howard Hawks, and Double Indemnity for Billy Wilder. Barbara carried her success lightly; her attitude was one of utter professionalism and no noticeable temperament. As far as she was concerned, she was simply one of a hundred or so people gathered to make a movie—no more, no less.

In the development of its love story, Singin’ in the Rain follows a particular plotline that came to have a great deal of currency in Hollywood films, especially in “buddy” films (and most especially those directed by Howard Hawks), involving a kind of “love triangle” in which the long-standing friendship of two men (often a hero and his sidekick) is threatened by the attraction of one of them to a woman introduced early on (the ingénue, although often not exactly an innocent).26 Generally, this plot situation may be taken to carry homosexual overtones, so that the story becomes a parable about embracing heterosexual love. This interpretation is, of course, quite easily avoided, since most sidekicks have next to no discernible sex drive, at least during the film’s story,27 but it is surely significant that, in more recent times, the asexual sidekick is often replaced by a homosexual friend. And even the latter development may be explained away, given the utility of the sidekick plot situation and recent shifts in what audiences might accept as either “natural” or interesting wrinkles on the device. Nevertheless, the homoerotic tension in some of these relationships is significant enough to lay the entire tradition open to this interpretive avenue.

In this moving and absorbing book, Howard Mansfield tries to understand his father’s steadfast, lifelong refusal to discuss his service as a 19-year-old B-24 machine gunner during World War 2. There was guilt, of both the survivor and the killer … but mostly there was the shadow of a terror so intense and sustained that not even a long life was enough to escape. To speak of it was to re-enter it. It was … an experience so overwhelming that words diminished it, as if trying to draw a frame around the infinite.” — Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

What miffed Brennan about working with Ford was the director’s lack of respect for fellow professionals. Unlike Howard Hawks, Ford was not much of a collaborator. He never gave Brennan the feeling that they were in a project together. Hawks, on the other hand, treated Brennan as a crucial part of a film’s success. In Red River (September 17, 1948), Brennan gets nearly as much screen time as John Wayne and co-star Montgomery Clift, in the epic story of a cattle drive from Texas to Missouri that is diverted to Abilene during the lawless days following the Civil War. In one version of the film, Brennan actually narrates the story, making it his own by trading on what was now a character that transcended individual films and seemed, in effect, the voice of the West. In another less powerful version of the film, narration is delivered through the rather clumsy device of turning pages in a book. For the Lux Radio Theatre one-hour adaptation (March 7, 1949), not only was Brennan restored as narrator, he also becomes a dominant voice mediating between Dunson and the other characters.

In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson argues that Brennan should have won awards for even better performances in To Have and Have Not (1944), My Darling Clementine (1946), Red River (1948), The Far Country (1955), and Rio Bravo (1959). Thomson counts no less than twenty-eight high caliber Brennan performances in still more films, including These Three (1936), Fury (1936), Meet John Doe (1941), and Bad Day At Black Rock (1955). Brennan worked with Hollywood’s greatest directors—John Ford, Howard Hawks, William Wyler, King Vidor, and Fritz Lang—while also starring in Jean Renoir’s Hollywood directorial debut, Swamp Water (1941). To discuss Brennan’s greatest performances is also to comment on the work of Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Linda Darnell, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, and many other stars.

I think Walter Brennan was the greatest example of a personality that I’ve ever used. . . . When I was in trouble, I called on Brennan. He always came through. —HOWARD HAWKS IN CONVERSATION WITH JOSEPH MCBRIDE

Barbary Coast was rather a mess when Howard Hawks took over direction of a film initially assigned by Sam Goldwyn to William Wyler. Hawks was famous—and sometimes notorious—for rewriting scripts on the set, inviting his actors to contribute lines. At the same time, he was loath to cede his authority, or to allow actors to take over a production. Meta Carpenter, Hawks’s secretary and sometime script supervisor, vividly recalled how curt—even insulting—the director could be. “Shut up, Walter,” Hawks barked after Brennan apparently offered one too many suggestions. Carpenter never forgot the sight of the deflated actor, who took a day to recover from this rebuff. But Walter was resilient and adaptable. He later told his granddaughter Claudia that he survived the exhausting work of filmmaking by taking catnaps during breaks. He could sleep anywhere on anything—even a coil of rope.

Howard Hawks took the credit for goading Brennan into a great performance: [H]e amazed me with the first scene he did. I said, “What the hell is going on here? Are you going to play that goddam television show that you’ve been doing, for me. Do you think I’m gonna make a Real McCoy out of it? This is supposed to be a crabby, evil, nasty old man.” “Oh God,” he said. I said to Wayne, “Come on, Duke, let’s go over and play a game of checkers and let this dumbbell think up what he’s got to do.” So for fifteen minutes we stayed away, and he just sat there. Then he came in and he was really a bastard. It was easy the rest of the time.

February 26: Marilyn begins work on Monkey Business with director Howard Hawks. As usual, she is late to the set, but Ginger Rogers, in a starring role, said Marilyn always knew her lines. Billy Travilla, her dress designer, admitted she hated the beige jersey wool dress with pleated full skirt that is her ensemble in the picture’s opening scenes. She writes a check to the Carlton Hotel for $150.

March 1: Marilyn makes an appointment at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, complaining of appendicitis, but director Howard Hawks insists that she return to the set of Monkey Business, and her operation is delayed until the end of production.

Rio Bravo is an answer to the lionization of the lone town marshal, portrayed so powerfully by Gary Cooper in High Noon, but Rio Bravo is also a deft remake of Red River, one that highlights Brennan’s role as a moral authority and a witness to history central to the ethos of Howard Hawks’s Westerns. But heretofore the Brennan persona rarely displaced that of the stars he supported. That would happen when, in the television age, the actor became, like Ward Bond in Wagon Train (1957–61), the locus of the action, the center around which the family and the nation revolved.

When Hawks saw the teenage model Betty Joan Perske on a magazine cover, he wanted to do a screen test with her and Brennan, who explained what happened: I said, “Why don’t you get one of these guys to take it?” He says, “Well, you’d make her feel at ease.” I said, “Gee, Howard, I don’t know whether Goldwyn will let me do this.” And Bob McIntyre [Goldwyn’s casting director] called me up, and he had this deep voice, he said, “You can’t do that. We got to pay you.” I said, “Well, I’m going to do it for nothing. I’ll do it for Howard Hawks.” And so I did it. She really shook. If you ever get to talk to her, she’ll tell you how she shook.

One doesn’t expect history from a Jew. From a Greek, yes—and a Roman. But a Jew.” “What does one expect from a Jew?” “Business, you know. You are a nation of merchants. The hand out all the time, you know. That’s why you are all so improbably rich. Go anywhere—anywhere in the world, and you find your rich Jew.” “We are merchants,” Joseph nodded. “I can’t deny that. Your emperors wear the purple because Jews crush the shell and extract the dye, and because Jewish ships bring the dye to Thrace to dye the cotton there, and other Jews buy the cotton cloth in Egypt. By virtue of the same, your silk tunic exists because Jewish caravans trade between here and Cathay, and the beautiful bronze clasp you wear, with the hawk emblazoned on it, exists because a Jewish trading station and synagogue has flourished in Cornwall for a hundred years before ever a Roman set foot in Britain, and because Jewish supercargoes directed Phoenician shipping into the tin trade before certain other peoples ever learned that bronze was an alloy of copper and tin. We create wealth, my dear procurator; we don’t steal it.

Under the sway of the French, Jaglom, like many of his contemporaries, wanted to do it all: not just act or write, but edit, direct, and produce as well. They didn’t want to be directors for hire by some baboon in the front office with a big, fat cigar; they wanted to be filmmakers or, as the French would have it, auteurs, a term popularized in America by Andrew Sarris in the sixties. Simply put, an auteur was to a film what a poet was to poetry or a painter was to painting. Sarris argued, controversially, that even studio directors such as Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock, or bottom-of-the-bill toilers like Sam Fuller, displayed personal styles, were the sole authors of their pictures, and were therefore authentic artists. Welles, of course, was the very avatar of an auteur.

They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. . . . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features. . . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane. . . . They would make fine servants. . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing.

She saw a great hall, whose lofty ceiling was upheld by stone columns marching in even rows along the massive walls. Among these pillars fluttered great green and scarlet parrots, and the hall was thronged with black-skinned, hawk-faced warriors. They were not negroes. Neither they nor their garments nor weapons resembled anything of the world the dreamer knew. They were pressing about one bound to a pillar: a slender white-skinned youth, with a cluster of golden curls about his alabaster brow. His beauty was not altogether human—like the dream of a god, chiseled out of living marble.

Since inflation results from economic strength, the efforts of central bankers to control it amount to trying to take some of the steam out of the economy. They can include reducing the money supply, raising interest rates and selling securities. When the private sector purchases securities from the central bank, money is taken out of circulation; this tends to reduce the demand for goods and thus discourages inflation. Central bankers who are strongly dedicated to keeping inflation under control are called “hawks.” They tend to do the things listed above sooner and to a greater extent. The problem, of course, is that actions of this kind are anti-stimulative. They can accomplish the goal of keeping inflation under control, but they also restrain the growth of the economy, with effects that can be less than beneficial. The issue is complicated by the fact that in the last few decades, many central banks have been given a second responsibility. In addition to controlling inflation, they are expected to support employment, and, of course, employment does better when the economy is stronger. So central banks encourage this through stimulative actions such as increasing the money supply, decreasing interest rates, and injecting liquidity into the economy by buying securities—as in the recent program of “quantitative easing.” Central bankers who focus strongly on encouraging employment and lean toward these actions are called “doves.

They were statues, apparently of iron, black and shining as if continually polished. They were life-size, depicting tall, lithely powerful men, with cruel hawk-like faces. They were naked, and every swell, depression and contour of joint and sinew was represented with incredible realism. But the most life-like feature was their proud, intolerant faces. These features were not cast in the same mold. Each face possessed its own individual characteristics, though there was a tribal likeness between them all. There was none of the monotonous uniformity of decorative art, in the faces at least.