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Only Angels Have Wings, 1939. Directed by
Howard Hawks. Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Thomas Mitchell, Sig Ruman, Richard
Barthelmes, Rita Hayworth.
His Girl Friday, 1940. Directed by Howard
Hawks. Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy, Helen Mack, John Qualen,
Gene Lockhart.
The more I see it, the more I'm convinced that Only
Angels Have Wings (1939) is the pivotal movie that turned Howard
Hawks into an auteur in the theoretical sense and turned Cary Grant into
a star for all occasions. Grant here is dramatically different than the
Grant in, say, Bringing Up Baby. He's an action hero here, with
no whinnying and no ridiculous situations. There's a brooding, intense
edge underneath the facade of polished movie star that points the way
to the darkness teased out of the Grant persona by Hawks a year later
in His Girl Friday. Nothing Grant had done prior to this movie
gave any hint that he was anything more than a handsome light comedian.
But it's Hawks who, perhaps, makes the more startling transformation.
Hawks made some great films prior to this one, but here all the trends
percolating through his earlier films come to the fore. This is the template
for what we can now recognize as Hawks's directorial signatures. Principal
among the auteurial markers is the compositions of groups in the frame
and how they form communities. Not only that, but these compositions frame
specific types of communities that recur in Hawks's movies time and again,
communities centered around professionals doing their jobs. The Jean Arthur
character in Only Angels Have Wings starts on the outside of one
such community--a tight-knit group of pilots--and her ignorance of the
mores of this group isolate her. Consider the following pieces of this
shot:
In this shot, Jean Arthur's character has gone to pieces
after her new friend has died horribly in a plane crash. Her reaction
is antithetical to the professional mores of all the pilots in the community
and Hawks's screen composition slowly strips the community away from the
un-professional Arthur, one character at a time. This is a stark contrast
from the way her character is shot once she demonstrates her professional
bona fides:
In the first of these two captures, Jean Arthur is at
the center of the composition, but is not yet at the center of the community.
Note the eyelines of the characters throughout the frame. They point in
a number of directions, but generally don't point at Jean Arthur. Shortly
after, her character demonstrates her professional specialty, and in the
second capture, she's both at the center of the composition AND the attention
of the community. As if to sign off on her acceptance into the community,
Cary Grant's character greets her at the end of the shot with the line,
"Hello, professional."
A sense of duty and professionalism offers a means of
redemption in Hawks's worldview, too. The new flyer, Macpherson (played
by Richard Barthelmess), has been disgraced by his past unprofessionalism.
Most of Grant's flyers won't work with him, but Grant needs the pilot,
so Macpherson gets all the dangerous work. By the end of the film, his
grace under pressure has redeemed him to himself and to his co-workers.
The irony of this is that the outcome of his actions isn't any different
than the outcome of his past indiscretion, it's the manner in which he
comports himself that makes the difference.
In general, the accumulation of auteurial tics transforms
Only Angels Have Wings from a collection of odd plot contrivances
into a superb movie. Hawks is already using pulp-fiction plot construction
where the scene outranks the plot. Hawks would later formulate the theory
that a good movie consists of at least three good scenes and no bad ones.
This movie fulfills this requirement and then some. The movie even points
the way to Hawks's signature work in the forties when Jean Arthur's character
tells Cary Grant, "I'm not hard to get. All you have to do is ask," a
line repeated verbatim in To Have and Have Not, a film that bears
no small amount of resemblance to this one.
Hawks's examination of the professional as center of the
community reaches its apotheosis in His Girl Friday (1940),
but in spite of its central place in the director's work, it's more of
a collaboration than one might expect. The movie simply wouldn't work
without Cary Grant and his ceaseless tinkering with the Grant persona.
For Hawks's part, the movie puts Rosalind Russell at the center of the
community as the consumate professional who wants to chuck it all. The
problem is, her job is central to who she is. Although it puts the thought
into the mouth of her rat bastard editor, Walter Burns, the movie has
a knowing insinuation that she'll be miserable as a housewife in Albany
with milquetoast Bruce Baldwin for a husband ("He looks like that fella
from the movies. Y'know, Ralph Bellamy"). Burns knows and we know that
she'll be diminished if she abandons her job. In addition to all of this,
Hawks also throws in one of his occasional examinations of gender roles.
This is more than turning Hildy Johnson into a "Hawksian" woman (as opposed
to the character one finds in The Front Page) to add romantic interest--though
there is surely some of that in the relationship between Johnson and Burns--it
represents a minor auteurial liet motif that runs through some of Hawks's
other pictures (notably I Was a Male War Bride). One could surmise
that Hawks's point of view is that gender roles are ridiculous on the
surface--certainly, Hildy Johnson as a wifey in the sticks is ridiculous--and
that one's professional demeanor is more central to defining one's personality
and place in the community.
For Grant's part, well...there's no dancing around it.
The Front Page flat out doesn't work without Grant. Walter Burns
is such a colossal prick that unless he has the charisma and charm of
Grant, there is no way Hildy Johnson succumbs to his ruses. None of the
other actors who have played him on film have lent him the almost demonic
glee that Grant plays, and none of them put the audience on the side of
the profession of journalism in the way His Girl Friday does. Grant
is well nigh irresistable. This is an interesting test of the Cary Grant
persona, too, because it demonstrates that regardless of how evil the
character is, it is sublimated by his charm. This is no small element
of the persona, because it allows grant to be credible in Suspicion,
Notorious, and even Charade.
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