> I am curious what Dan and other Hawks people here think of my take on
> Hawks -- which indirectly addresses the problems of Red River.
>
> Vidor, Hawks, Ford ("American Tryptych"): http://www.filmint.nu/eng.html

It's a very good article, with a lot of insights. I'm especially
interested in your idea (via Zanuck) that Ford's shots somehow suggest a
comprehensive picture of the world, and that the collision between these
shots can be jolting. Partly this is a result of Ford liking to work
with archetypes, but there is of course more to it - it will be
interesting to think about when I resee the films. One of my favorite
moments in all of cinema is the sequence in FORT APACHE where Wayne says
goodbye to the doomed troops before the climax - there's something
amazing about the way each of those shots interacts with the next, as if
we were being ripped again and again into a different instance of the
universe.

I'm also impressed with your short paragraph that shows the
complications in Chaplin's self-presentation.

I do wonder whether you overstate the case in making Ford sound like a
critic of society. The ending of FORT APACHE is very striking, for
instance, but I don't register it as a statement about nice people
becoming killers. There is absolutely a kick to Ford holding the full
shot as Wayne puts on Fonda's headdress: a conventional film would cut
to medium-close-up at this moment. The matter-of-factness of the full
shot is certainly disorienting and leaves us in an unresolved state.
But I don't think the long shot qualifies as a judgment on Wayne's
transformation, or on the cavalry's mission. The moment is still
suspended somewhere between expose and endorsement, I'd say. Which is
enough for me.

The Hawks section is quite good also. I have a way of looking at Hawks
which I've become accustomed to, and so I tend to filter everything
through it: namely, that Hawks sets up a familiar level of movie realism
keyed to conventions, and then plays the action out at a different,
faster and more detailed level of realism that releases some of the
energy stored in the dramatic conventions.

Therefore, instead of observing that Hawks doesn't add a lot to genre or
use it very interestingly, I'd say that he has a stylistic interest in
reproducing genre elements in a familiar form, as they are the backdrop
that makes his style work. Hawks without genre is hard to imagine, even
if he doesn't transform genre from the inside - he is constantly working
against genre expectations, making actors talk a little more casually
and move a little faster, making action unfurl without the abstraction
of dramatic buildup.

Similarly, instead of saying that there's "no world" in Hawks' films,
I'd say that there's a movie world, movie sets.

And, in addition to emphasizing the importance of gesture, I'd observe
that what's really striking in a Hawks film is the *scale* of the
gesture, and that this microcosmic scale is part of Hawks' attempt to
contrast the action with our expectation of what the action would
normally be.

Your point about the destabilizing effect of women on Hawks' men is of
course accurate, but I think the male and female forces in his world are
a bit more balanced than that account suggests. Bogart, Wayne, Grant
are disoriented by the women in the films, but Hawks also gets pleasure
from watching them maintain equilibrium, and in some cases assert dominance.

Hawks' comedies tend to put a comic, devastating, larger-than-life id
figure next to a representative of normality who registers the
outlandish nature of the comic character, expresses exasperation as the
comic figure leads the film away from sanity, devotes energy to
reestablishing sanity in the face of this challenge. (In other words, a
character from a more abstract movie is confronted with a character from
a less abstract one.) This dynamic accounts for at least part of the
disorienting nature of the woman in the Hawks universe. Note, for
instance, that the male has the disorienting role in HIS GIRL FRIDAY,
and the female has the stabilizing role - and things play out much the
same as they do in other Hawks comedies.

- Dan