HowardHawks Tagged Articles at Cinematical

By now, you've had your fill of ghosts, goblins, and things that go bump in the night. You've cleaned up pumpkin guts, peeled off your skin along with your spirit gum prosthetics, hoping OxyClean gets fake blood stains out of your carpet. You need a movie with class, wit, and Cary Grant. You need Howard Hawks' classic His Girl Friday, which is playing right now on SlashControl.

There's nothing I can say about this movie that hasn't already been said. Rosalind Russell's Hildegard "Hildy" Johnson remains one of the gutsiest heroines to ever grace the silver screen, and the fact that Cary Grant's Walter Burns loves her for her byline makes him one of the sexiest men of all time. The romance, the scheming, and the race to the presses will still leave you dizzy and laughing. Oh, and let's not forget the clothes. Oh, to spend a day looking as impeccable and sharp as Johnson ... ! I fully intended this to be an anti-Halloween selection, but I imagine it could inspire my fellow females to look for pinstripes and fedoras for next year's festivities.

This movie is especially poignant to watch now in the waning days of the newspaper industry. It's very sad to think of movies like Friday and State of Play being period pieces beyond clothing, hairstyles, and politics. While I have confidence that journalism will find its fast talking feet again, there will always be something romantic about the presses. At least they've been preserved in the background of so many movies as good as His Girl Friday.

Watch His Girl Friday on SlashControl right now!

"Wwwwwwwwait a Second! There's no NORWEGIANS in the CAMPBELL story!!" That's what I thought (and what Scott Weinberg put into words for me) when I clicked through Monika's mention of the planned new version of The Thing and read the article in Variety. Here's why: I hate it when filmmakers are (apparently) unfamiliar with the story they're basing their film on.

The sentence that made my eyes bug out? "New project borrows heavily from the John W. Campbell Jr. short story 'Who Goes There,' the basis of the [John] Carpenter film and 1951 Howard Hawks original The Thing From Another World. It is set in a Norwegian camp and chronicles how the shape-shifting alien was first discovered and overcame the inhabitants of that camp."

WRONG WRONG WRONG! I dug out my copy of the story, originally published in 1938, and read it again, just to make sure. There is no Norwegian camp in the story. It starts with the discovery of the alien -- referred to constantly as "the thing" -- in an Antarctic scientific camp, flashes back to reveal how it was discovered, and then follows the horror of what happens when the creature is thawed after 20 million years frozen in the ice.

The first version in 1951 sent a military unit to the Arctic base (flipping the world upside down), added a reporter plus a woman scientist to the mix as a love interest, and made the nightmarish creature from Campbell's story ("three red eyes, and that blue hair like crawling worms") into a humanoid played by James Arness (the future Marshall Dillon of TV's Gunsmoke). It was a fast-paced, black and white suspenser that worked quite well, thanks, no doubt, to producer Howard Hawks.

Over at The Guardian, blogger Ronald Bergan has written an incredibly snobby article called "Dumb Hollywood is Forever In Debt to Europe." The purpose of the piece seems to be to anger readers -- I assure you it's no accident that he published an article trashing American film on Independence Day. Bergan starts by taking aim at The Guardian's recent list of 1,000 Films to See Before You Die. He says, presumably while wearing a beret and enjoying a snifter of brandy: "A list that includes Dumb and Dumber and not Boudu Saved from Drowning renders itself worthless." He adds, presumably while cleaning his monocle with his ascot: "looking at the American Film Institute's recent list of Top 100 American Films made me think how much richer in masterpieces would be a similar list of non-American films." Please go and read the tremendously one-sided, reductive, dismissive article, which closes: "I suggest that American cinema -- with exceptions that prove the rule -- still lags behind the times. For anyone with an interest in films that explore the cinematic language and who sees film as a radical, contemporary art form on a par with the other arts, American cinema holds little interest."

Does Bergan think any American filmmakers are worthwhile? Yes -- three of them. "The only American-born film directors that truly belong in the Film Pantheon are John Ford, Howard Hawks and Orson Welles." Oh, and according to Bergan, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock don't count, because they're "emigres" who "brought what they had learnt in Europe with them to America." Does he respect any living American directors? Not a one: "By the highest standards of cinema, American films fall short. There are no living American directors who can compete in innovation and depth with the likes of Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, Bela Tarr, Pedro Costa, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, Manoel de Oliveira, Alexander Sokurov, Jia Zhang Ke or Tsai Ming-liang."

Now, I majored in film in college, and I love foreign cinema, but I'm fairly certain he made a couple of those names up. David Lynch? The Coen Brothers? Stanley Kubrick? Spike Lee? Steven Spielberg? None of these guys impress him? Bergan's failure to even mention Martin Scorsese is particularly inexcusable. By the way, there's the author's photograph in the upper right corner. Do you really think that dude's even seen Dumb and Dumber? Going off of that mug shot, I'd imagine Bergan also doesn't enjoy ice cream, sunsets, and the laughter of children.

Ray Pride at Movie City Indie has unearthed this gem from the bowels (no pun intended) of eBay: someone is selling a Medicare ID card once belonging to silent screen legend Louise Brooks.

Brooks started out as a Zeigfeld girl. Exquisitely beautiful, with big, sexy brown eyes and a delicate dancer's frame, she made a small splash in Hollywood in the late Teens, working with hired hands/future auteurs such as Howard Hawks and making 21 now-forgotten silent features. When her five year contract with Paramount expired in 1929, the studio tried to lowball her on the extension, expressing doubts over her ability to transfer into sound. Brooks took one look at the offer on the table and walked out. Soon she was contacted by the great German director G.W. Pabst, with whom Brooks went on to make her two most memorable films: Pandora's Box (in which she plays a "free spirt"/sex kitten who meets her untimely death at the hand of Jack the Ripper) and the abstract Diary of a Lost Girl. though now considered classics, both films flopped, and Lulu (as history remembers her, after the character she played in Pandora) returned to Hollywood, made a few crap b-movies and retired in 1938. She eventually moved to upstate New York, where in her older days she cranked out a stunning volume of memoirs called Lulu in Hollywood before dying alone in the mid-80s. She also is credited with popularizing the black bob, thereby practically inventing hipster couture.

Anyway – the Medicaid and Blue Cross/Blue shield cards on eBay date back to the early 70s. They include Brooks' signature, as well as evidence of her wicked sense of humor – under "next of kin" on the back of one of the cards, Brooks entered, "emphysema". Bid now - the auction ends tomorrow, and the lot is currently going for about $370.

More and more films are falling out of copyright and into the public domain. I'm going to watch them all on the internet, and then I am going to tell you about them.

His Girl Friday has never been my favorite of the five or six masterpiece comedies Cary Grant made from about 1937 to around 1942 - it doesn't have the class-clash dynamics of Bringing up Baby, or the just-barely-repressed post-Code chemical sexiness of The Awful Truth - but still, it's one of those sex-and-pizza things, where even when it's not quite as good as it could be, it's still pretty damn great.