Howard Hawks is a great example of a director who was rescued by film critics.
SARRIS: Well, by the French!
Could you talk about how that happened? Hawks was successful as a director in Hollywood, but not really known.
SARRIS: He was successful, but he wasn’t prestigious.
HASKELL: Wasn’t taken seriously.
SARRIS: I think he was only nominated for one Oscar, for Sergeant York. And he never won an Oscar, of course. The first time I heard about him was when my friend Eugene Archer, went to Paris in the 1950s on a Fulbright. He wrote me a letter and said, “Who the hell is Howard Hawks?” He had signed a contract for a book that he was going to do about six directors: Elia Kazan, John Ford, George Stevens, and so on. The Cahiers people said, “Ugh! What about Howard Hawks and Hitchcock?”
And so he wrote me this letter; it’s the first time I heard anybody being so high on Hawks. I had seen a lot of Hawks’s movies in revival houses, so I was really up on him. But I couldn’t quite get him, because he had so many different genres. And that’s what the French loved about him, precisely. Because for instance, Hitchcock would never do a western or a musical. And then Dan Talbot ran a Hawks festival at the New Yorker Theater, and I wrote something about it. And I was writing for little publications.
And you were reading the French critics on Hawks?
SARRIS: Yeah, in Cahiers. Truffaut and Godard were just crazy about Hawks. And especially at that time, Rio Bravo had just come out, and that was, to them, huge. And here, people just thought it was another western.
And another thing, it was sort of an accident of film history. Robert Warshow wrote “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” and he wrote about Little Caesar and The Public Enemy but he didn’t write about Scarface, because Scarface was not in general circulation for many years. It was a Howard Hawks picture, and the French had been on Scarface’s trail since ’32. So it was not just the Cahiers people. Even before Cahiers, Hawks was admired for Scarface. And all the other 1930s adventure films. But here in America, even Warshow didn’t know about Scarface. In fact, I hadn’t seen it when I was writing all these Hawks articles; it still wasn’t available. I only saw it very much later.
