Hawks on Hawks

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences belatedly recognized Howard Hawks' six decades in films with an Oscar for career achievement in 1975, it cited him as 'a giant of the American cinema whose pictures, taken as a whole, represent one of the most consistent, vivid, and varied bodies of work in world cinema'. Hawks worked with equal ease in screwball comedies, Westerns, gangster movies, musicals, private-eye melodramas and adventure films, producing such masterworks of cinema as Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Red River, Rio Bravo and The Big Sleep, to name but a few. This book sheds new light on the personal concerns which Hawks brought to his films, and which enabled him to stamp his distinctive signature on what once appeared to be a random assortment of genre pieces. Hawks' relaxed comic perspective keeps his films as fresh today as when they were made, and it also enlivens this candid and frequently irreverent book.