“Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood”, by Todd McCarthy

768 pages, Grove Press, ISBN-13: 978-0802137401

Y’all know what an unreliable narrator is? No? Okay: an unreliable narrator is either deliberately deceptive or unintentionally misguided, forcing the reader to question their credibility as a storyteller. Think Baron Munchausen, or Becky Sharp, or any number of literary examples. I bring this up because Todd McCarthy tells us in the introduction to Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood that so many of the tales told by his subject about himself were…bullshit. Not malicious, perhaps, or even harmful, just…bullshit. I guess when you chose to make storytelling your life’s work it’s difficult to know when to stop? Anyway, Howard Winchester Hawks was a giant of Classical Hollywood, writing, directing and producing some of the legendary films of that era, such as *ahem* “The Dawn Patrol” (1930), “Scarface” (1932), “Today We Live” (1933), “The Road to Glory” (1936), “Bringing Up Baby” (1938), “Only Angels Have Wings” (1939), “His Girl Friday” (1940), “Sergeant York” (1941), “The Outlaw” (1943), “To Have and Have Not” (1944), “The Big Sleep” (1946), “Red River” (1948), “I Was a Male War Bride” (1949), “The Thing from Another World” (1951), “The Big Sky” (1952), “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953), “Land of the Pharaohs” (1955), “Rio Bravo” (1959), “Hatari!” (1962), “El Dorado” (1966) and “Rio Lobo” (1970), and those are just the ones I’ve heard of.

McCarthy gives us everything we ever wanted to know about Hawks’ professional and personal lives, his deals with the studios, his treatment of his cast and crew…and then it gives us more than we needed to know. The book is thoroughly researched and decently written, detailing the making of every film Hawks ever directed, the great, the good and the mediocre. And, we get to learn about the dirty underside to the man, the marriages, infidelities and all those damn lies he told about himself. Why should a man, born to wealth with a Mayflower pedigree to boot, feel the need to embellish and exaggerate his own life’s tale? McCarthy, too, seems at a loss to explain this odd personality tick. But the main focus of the book are the films, and it is structured almost like a reference work, with each chapter covering the making of a series of films and the events in their making, from casting, screenplay writing, producing and filming, as well as their box office performances and critical reviews. While informative, this can get rather tedious, as it sometimes descends into a simple “and then he made ‘Only Angels Have Wings’, and then he made ‘His Girl Friday’”, and so on. Not a bad book about one of Tinseltown’s overlooked (for some reason) masters, and a great introduction to the lost Golden Age of Hollywood.