Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932)

Howard Hawks is a director I’m starting to find more and more fascinating. Compared to many other Hollywood directors or films from the times, Hawks seem almost like a minimalist. He doesn’t use too much music, uses a lot of long and wide shots, and few cuts, especially avoiding close-ups and shot-reverse-shots. I watched the remake of Scarface featuring Al Pacino, and liked it at the time, but in retro perspective hasn’t remained much with me. So I was quite excited about watching this one.

Also compared to most Hollywood films I’ve seen from this period, Scarface is quite brutal and violent. The film throughout escalates into violence, shooting and killing. It is refreshing to see this kind of film from the early days of cinema. It is also quite astounding that the film had such great quality in cinematography and sound despite the fact that it was made all the way back in 1932. After silent movies disappeared in Hollywood, the quality of the films dropped, due to the limits of the sound recording equipment at the time. Scarface though shows that the technology has started to manage to improve the quality to allow good filmmaking not worrying about the sound recording. Hawks manages to create a strange relationship between the audience and the main character, while he is a murderer, beats his sister and is generally a bastard; one still is swayed to empathise with him, and his struggle to rise above his superiors. The ending is also quite astounding, mixing many different emotions, and the lead character’s insanity rose to a manic height.

But, Hawk’s great directing also distances the audience from the action on screen. The long takes, the wide shots and few close-ups leaves us at a distance, not allowing the audience to become too close to the characters. But there is still a feeling of sadness throughout the film, and coldness to the business of the gangsters. In the beginning of the film there is a title card which is talking about how horrible the gangsters are and that it is up the people and the government to clean the streets of criminals. This gives the film a bit of a political context, which is something I usually don’t enjoy; however, this doesn’t become too apparent throughout the rest of the film. Also there should be given some credit to the star of the film Paul Muni, who plays the lead character, Tony. He portrays the coldness of the gangster, never flinching nor being scared of the thought of killing, did often almost seeming excited about it. This adds greatly upon Hawks cold and detached directing.

I really liked Scarface; it’s a great exploration of the gangster environment, as well as Hawks great directing and the performance of Paul Muni. I think this is the best film I’ve seen by Howard Hawk, and I am really enjoying exploring these old black & white Hollywood films, and Hawks is a director I am certainly going to explore further. I still prefer John Huston slightly, but Hawks is impressing me more and more through the films I see by him.

To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944)

My Bogart ranting will go on. As I mentioned earlier, the combination of Howard Hawks and Humphrey Bogart is a great mix indeed. I loved The Big Sleep, and was equally looking forward to seeing this, which was the first to feature the legendary relationship of Bogart and Bacall. I’m now not sure which I like better, this or The Big Sleep, because they are both great, but have very different qualities that makes them classics.

To Have and Have Not in many ways remind me of Casablanca. It’s a love story in a foreign country. But while I still think Casablanca is a better film, the romance itself is better here. The chemistry between Bogart and Bacall sparks, and they have a wonderful, teasing and a little hostile relationship. Bacall was at the time of filming 19 years old, which is almost unbelievable. She is truly a natural, and seemed bound for the screen. Particularly the gaze she gives Bogart, with her head tilted and staring at him, is literally imprinted in my head. Across the film there is also a good cast of characters that give the two stars something to bounce off, and it works. Still, while The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was very different from most Hollywood, this was more formulaic. This is saved however by Hawks’ compelling and unique directing, which IS different from most other film directors at the time. He has a fairly detached style, using little overdramatic music, refraining from using too much editing and close-ups. Coupled with wonderful lighting this creates some scenes that individually are some of the best of the director’s work, and it stands quite close to his other great work The Big Sleep.

Some of the parts of the film that works less well are the suspense parts. This is in part due to the fact that the romance itself takes a front seat, with a lot of the main story just working as a backdrop for the scenes between Bogart and Bacall. That is in a way fine, but I wished the film didn’t contain this and just focused on creating a drama between Bogart and Bacall, which could have been fantastic. The story elements aren’t really that interesting compared to this, and as such the film feels a bit unnecessarily fractured. We don’t really care if someone else survives, as long as the romance does. But this is compelling enough to keep the rest of the film going, and the fracture never ruins the film. In fact, as a whole the film is still very good, but doesn’t hold up to its similar Casablanca. Actually I should re-watch Casablanca soon. Anyway, the film as a whole was very pleasing, and in many ways I’m just nit-picking. But there is a fairly good reason why this didn’t receive the same legendary status as many of the other Bogart films, because it lacks that little extra quality, but it still stands as a classic from the Hollywood golden age.

I was maybe a tad disappointed with this, but then again, the more you dig through films the lower the quality is going to get, although the pay-off is that once in a while you’ll stumble across something unique and fantastic. To Have and Have Not is not this, however, it does stand on its own, firstly because it is a genuinely interesting love story, second because of Hawks’ wonderful directing, and thirdly as it was the first film that introduced the Bogart – Bacall dynamic.

The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)

Though talking gangsters, beautiful women, a lot of cigarettes and alcohol, twists and turns. The noir genre of the classical Hollywood period created some of the best films around. While noir has many common denominators, there is a surprising amount of variety in the genre. It is hard to specifically pin down what makes a noir film, but when you see one, you know it is a noir. There hasn’t been many good noirs since the fall of the Golden era of Hollywood, but a couple, such as Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) and the interesting mix of noir and sci-fi Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). One of the things that signified the noir genre for me was the moody and atmospheric black and white cinematography. I love black and white cinematography, and much of this in Hollywood reached its peak in the noir genre.

When watching these old Humphrey Bogart films I get more and more sympathetic to the character in A Bout de Souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959). He mimics and idealizes the old screen legend, but ends up very differently to his hero. There is always a great presence when Bogart is on screen. He was fantastic in In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950), where he manages to create some indefinable menace behind his eyes. While many today think that Bogart for the most part was typecast and didn’t have much width in his work, they are wrong. But it is easy to see why he often was cast as a tough talking detective, because he does it so incredibly well. At the same time, he captures something truthful and weaker behind his character, which almost always gives the films he play in extra depth. Before I got to know Bogart’s acting well, when I had just seen Casablanca, he was this sort of caricature character who was somehow not relatable and unreachable. However, with the years and the more films I’ve seen with him, it becomes more apparent why he holds the status as one of the greatest actors in Hollywood. But again, In a Lonely Place was the film that made me realize what a great actor he was. It is actually quite an underrated and fairly unknown film, but it is fantastic, and I absolutely recommend it to anyone who likes Bogart or classic Hollywood films.

The Big Sleep plays on mood, like a lot of other noir films. It is quite gritty, often shot at night. The cinematography isn’t conventionally beautiful, but works superbly, enhancing the feeling of decadence in the society that it portrays. Bogart is a private detective who gets a job to find out a blackmailer. However, from the first 10 minutes of the film the plot becomes almost hazardously complicated. It is okay though, because if you can to some moderate degree follow the plot then you will probably enjoy it. The power of the film is rather in the craft, the wonderful dialogue, and great chemistry between Bogart and Bacall. Much to my own surprise, I’ve never seen a Howard Hawks film before, but this was a great introduction. I was sure that I had seen a film by him, but as it turned out I haven’t. The film is properly dark and contains a lot of sexual sub-text, which make it all the more interesting. I do believe also that this probably was quite racy for its time, although by today’s standards it is not. But the darkness and grittiness still remains. Bogart is also not some superman, and does get beaten up quite a lot. But he uses mostly his intelligence instead of a gun. The dialogue is one of the best elements of the film though. It is witty but manages to put a lot of sub-text in there. It is proper stylized Hollywood type of dialogue, but I love it. It is much better crafted than screenplays which pretend to emulate “reality”. What’s the point of replicating reality when it is right out your window?

I loved The Big Sleep. It’s well executed on many different levels, Bogart is fantastic, the plot is way too crazy but it all fits in, and although you at the end might have some unanswered questions, you won’t really care anyway, because it doesn’t matter. Howard Hawk’s directing is precise and to the point. He doesn’t dwell and leaves little to be desired. I think I’ll watch the original Scarface sometime.