Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (18 page)

Hawks considered the book “one of the great detective stories of all time” and enthusiastically embarked upon what was meant to be his first all-talking picture, with the shooting title of
Murder Will Out
. Set in an imposing English mansion, the story tells of a disagreeable, clubfooted
man, Sigsbee Manderson, who resolves to commit suicide through circumstances that will make it look as though he were murdered by his male secretary, who is in love with his wife. After the authorities have bungled the case, the amateur criminologist Philip Trent enters the scene to sort things out in typical murder-mystery fashion, with the butler and maid both having their moments, only to retire
after his deductions prove inaccurate.

Fox originally bought the novel with the expectation of producing it as a silent, but with the advent of sound, a dialogued script was quickly prepared by Scott Darling and adapted by Beulah Marie Dix. It was a moment for which Hawks was well prepared. Late in 1928, rightly concerned that his lack of stage experience might endanger his livelihood, he conducted
extensive tests to figure out how much dialogue a sound feature would accommodate. From a standard-sized book Hawks took five pages consisting of dialogue passages, which he had actors read at a relatively fast
pace. The reading took a bit more than six minutes and ran 560 feet of film. He could thereby calculate that fifty pages of straight dialogue from a book would occupy about an hour of screen
time, without allowing for any action or pauses. In the test, Hawks’s crew had trouble keeping the microphone at a consistent distance from the actors while they moved around and out of view of the camera. The test was viewed as helpful for Fox in determining how much dialogue could safely be included in a picture, and it taught Hawks that picture dialogue could be delivered quickly, despite
early conventional wisdom to the contrary.

However, no sooner had Hawks shot the first couple of scenes of
Murder Will Out
than he was told to stop and go back to filming it as a silent. Starring as Trent was a good friend of Hawks’s, silent star Raymond Griffith, whose vocal chords had been severely damaged by poison gas in World War I and who couldn’t speak above a hoarse whisper. Later on,
Hawks unconvincingly blamed the change on Fox’s belief that Griffith’s muted voice was unsuitable for sound pictures (he said, “I thought he ought to be great in talking pictures
because
of that voice,” but the coming of sound did bring Griffith’s career to an end). Had this been the case, with the film just starting, Griffith’s part could easily have been recast. The truth, in fact, was much
more damning of Fox: in purchasing the property, the studio’s legal department had bungled by only securing silent-picture rights; sound rights would have to be separately negotiated, at considerable further expense.

This effectively sabotaged the picture, since the market for purely silent pictures was rapidly vanishing. One can only wonder why the studio went ahead with the project at all at
this point, since it was obvious that the film would be a commercial lame duck. “By that time we knew nobody was going to look at it,” said Hawks. “We just kidded the thing … we just had fun with it. I don’t know anyone who ever saw it, because talking pictures took over right then and there.” In response to the dramatic rug having been pulled out from under him, and always tickled by Griffith’s
droll, very particular sense of humor, Hawks pushed the Edwardian-era material toward comedy whenever possible—even while cinematographer Hal Rosson retained a moody, melodramatic look spiked by some elegant camera moves, low angles, and macabre special lighting effects, notably in a shot of the evil Manderson silhouetted in black in the foreground and the maid screaming when she sees him. Still,
the tone is wildly uneven, with broad, arched-eyebrow acting (especially from a very hammy Donald Crisp as Manderson) conflicting with the very upper-class setting and a campy
tone prevailing in the midst of ostensibly serious doings. Griffith plays Trent as a conceited dandy, and the film is riddled with disruptive flashbacks from different characters’ points of view. It could well be that the
desultory result here is what set Hawks so resolutely against flashbacks, for he never again used them—and he spoke out against them—during the remainder of his career.

Perhaps not even Hawks could have predicted how few people would end up seeing
Trent’s Last Case
, since it was never released at all in the United States and was not even shown to the trade press. Having finished its monthlong
shoot on February 15, 1929, the ill-fated picture opened for brief runs in Great Britain on September 23, with one critic rightly stating, “It is a thousand pities that Fox has altered this classic detective novel by reducing it to the level of farce and melodrama. If I were E. C. Bentley, I should not feel flattered.”

The film understandably vanished from sight and for decades was considered
lost, until in the early 1970s a print was found among a large cache of early Fox films in Alaska (among the other titles found at the same time were Hawks’s
The Cradle Snatchers
and
Paid to Love
). Therefore, the film apparently had its American premiere on April 24, 1974, as part of a Hawks retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive. Hawks went up to Berkeley for a few days in connection with
the event, but when the archive director, Tom Luddy, excitedly told him about the
Trent
screening, Hawks was dismayed. “You’re not going to show that, are you?” Hawks asked disdainfully. Unable to thwart the screening, Hawks sat in to see this runt of his cinematic litter for the first time, but midway through he couldn’t take it any longer and charged up to the projection booth, where he demanded
that the projectionist destroy this one and only copy immediately after the screening. Naturally, his wish was not granted, but the experience was enough to reaffirm to Hawks that
Trent’s Last Case
was his worst film, an opinion with which it is impossible to argue.

With
Trent
a total loss and Winnie Sheehan still offended by the director’s uppity attitude, Hawks’s position at Fox was extremely
tenuous by the spring of 1929. Still, he balked at being reassigned to the
Life’s a Gamble
project that he had resisted directing the year before. Putting Hawks back on the film may have been Sheehan’s way of forcing Hawks’s hand, and for two and a half months, despite having been paid more than $23,000 for the time he was supposed to have put in on the film, Hawks did little or no work on it.
Then, for a short time, he was in line to direct
Big Time
, a vaudeville romance cowritten by the future Astaire-Rogers director Sidney
Lanfield. Although snappy and funny in a way that anticipated the kind of lightning direction Hawks would supply for his later comedies, the script was too sentimental for his taste, and he deflected this project as well.

Finally, on May 14, Hawks was fired, for
having “willfully neglected to perform his services in the manner agreed upon.” Hawks later turned the story around, claiming that his contract kept him at Fox, but inactive, for a year and a half. In 1932, he sued Fox for wrongful dismissal, whereupon the studio countersued over Hawks’s failure to fulfill the terms of his contract. Hawks later bragged to Peter Bogdanovich that Fox’s ploy backfired
and that the studio was forced to pay him $120,000. But court records indicate that the suits were dismissed with prejudice, with each side required to pay its own legal fees. (Hawks also told Bogdanovich that he never again signed a contract with any studio, a claim that can be disproved time and again by the records of the subsequent years of Hawks’s career.)

Four days after his ouster from
Fox after more than four and a half years on the lot, an unsettled Hawks hired a new agent, Ruth Collier, who later testified to Hawks’s troubled position during that summer: “During the months of June, July, August and September, I made every possible and reasonable effort to secure employment for Howard Hawks as a motion picture director, and in particular, I negotiated with First National Pictures
Corporation, Universal Pictures, Pathé, Warner Brothers, United Artists, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Columbia Pictures Corporation and R.K.O.; … during all of this time, and in each of the instances above set forth, I was unable to place Howard Hawks with any or either of the aforesaid companies, and was unable to secure any employment for him.”

By contrast, Kenneth’s career was very much on the upswing.
After having supervised several films at Fox and worked as an editor and story writer as well, Kenneth was promoted to director early in 1929. When David Butler, the original director of
Masked Emotions
, was needed on another picture, Kenneth was asked to finish the film. A silent George O’Brien melodrama about the apprehension of Chinese smugglers along the California coast, it opened to decent
response that July. Then, with his brother having bowed out, Kenneth was given
Big Time
as his solo directorial debut, to shoot in June, and he did a fine job with it. Lee Tracy and Mae Clarke played young New York vaudevillians looking for their break. The talented pair are on their way up to headliner status when she becomes pregnant, which leads the otherwise thoughtful husband to introduce
another woman into the act. Clarke dutifully instructs the newcomer, portrayed by Daphne Pollard, in the required routines, and before long Pollard begins trying to
seduce Tracy. The fateful moment arrives in the form of an invitation to play the Palace: Pollard manages to convince Tracy to squeeze his wife out of the act in order to take the coveted gig. But Tracy is soon sorry, as Clarke walks
out on him, leaving him desolate despite having, ever so briefly, made the big time. Soon reduced to working as a waiter in a slophouse, Tracy learns from faithful vaudeville janitor Stepin Fetchit that Clarke has gone to Hollywood. So Tracy rides the rails out west and manages to land a job as an extra in a film in which both Clarke and their precocious kid are starring. He collapses from hunger
after they meet on the set, but she finally says, “Come back to me” and sings “Nobody Loves You like I Do” to bring things to a happy close.

It is easy to see that Howard would have considered the story too sappy for him, but Kenneth made breezy, generally heartwarming fun out of it, thanks in no small measure to the crackling performances of Clarke and, especially, Tracy. Some pretty decent
vaudeville routines are presented at length, and although some of the acting is on the theatrical side, it can certainly be said that Howard Hawks did not invent fast dialogue direction, as his brother proved quite accomplished at it here, several months before Howard had ever directed a talking picture.

There are some distinctive, even memorable humorous scenes: Tracy squealing, spinning, and
crowing, “Am I a man!” when his wife informs him she’s pregnant; a lovely camera move in on Clarke’s disturbed face as she teaches Pollard some dance steps; the weird collision of comic styles in a scene between Tracy, who may have been the fastest talker in movies, and Fetchit, who was probably the slowest; a cameo by John Ford as himself; and Tracy’s resourcefulness upon facing his toughest audience,
a farmer in a mule-filled freight car who says, “Make me laugh.” Although the film may not be particularly strong on visual style, it boasts a pleasing feel for backstage life and stands as a very creditable thematic precursor to
A Star Is Born
. It is a fine example of early sound filmmaking not overtly hampered by technical constraints or lack of know-how, and it is solid proof that Kenneth Hawks
had talent. Upon its successful release at the Roxy in New York on September 7, Kenneth began preparing his next project, a melodrama called
Such Men Are Dangerous
, which would go into production toward year’s end.

One cup to the dead already—Hurrah for the next that dies!

—
Bartholomew Dowling

With producers and the studios convinced that legitimate stage directors were far more qualified to direct sound pictures than most silent filmmakers, Hawks realized over the summer of 1929 that extraordinary measures might be needed to put himself over in this new era of film production. Not that
he had any doubts about his ability; it was almost immediately apparent that his natural inclination to underplay, to cut across obvious and conventional effects, and to allow the natural personalities of his performers full reign would serve Hawks even better in sound than they had in silents. Nonetheless, he had to get his shot, and by August he was arranging to do this through a bit of subterfuge.

At the time, John Monk Saunders was one of the most respected, sought-after writers in the business. A World War I flying instructor who, like Hawks, hadn’t gone overseas, he had heard a lot of war stories from British, Canadian, and French fliers while at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in 1919–20, as well as from Yanks when he lodged at the American Flying Club in New York upon his return. After
taking up newspaper and magazine work, he wrote a story in 1923 that became
Wings
, the first Hollywood picture to depict the war in the air and an enormous commercial success that, in 1927, became the first picture to win the Academy Award. Married in 1928 to the actress Fay Wray, Saunders was a full-fledged member of the Lost Generation, a glamorous, good-looking young man of refined breeding
and excellent education who drank a lot and had a strong self-destructive streak. In the summer of 1929, when he was thirty-one, he was just finishing a novel called
Single Lady
, inspired by a decadent affair he had had that spring with a young heiress named Nikki he met at the Ritz Bar in Paris. In 1931 the novel was produced on Broadway as a musical,
Nikki
, with Wray as the heiress. Saunders
later wrote a screen adaptation of the same material,
The Last Flight
. This film, directed by William Dieterle in 1931, represents a fascinating treatment of former World War I fliers living in dissolute
glamour in 1920s Paris, and its story, spirit, and tone make it the closest cinematic equivalent to
The Sun Also Rises
, Saunders’s favorite novel. It also made Saunders an obvious choice for Hawks’s
next project.