Style
Hawks was versatile as a director, filming comedies, dramas, gangster films, science fiction, film noir, and Westerns. Hawks's own functional definition of what constitutes a "good movie" is revealing of his no-nonsense style: "Three great scenes, no bad ones." Hawks also defined a good director as "someone who doesn't annoy you".
While Hawks was not sympathetic to feminism, he popularized the Hawksian woman archetype, which has been cited as a prototype of the post-feminist movement.
Orson Welles in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich said of Howard Hawks in comparison to John Ford "Hawks is great prose; Ford is poetry".
Despite Hawks work in a variety of Hollywood genres he still retained an independent sensibility. Film critic David Thomson wrote of Hawks in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film "Far from being the meek purveyor of Hollywood forms, he always chose to turn them upside down, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, ostensibly an adventure and a thriller, are really love stories. Rio Bravo, apparently a Western - everyone wears a cowboy hat - is a comedy conversation piece. The ostensible comedies are shot through with exposed emotions, with the subtlest views of the sex war, and with a wry acknowledgment of the incompatibility of men and women." As David Boxwell states "It’s a body of work that has been accused of ahistorical and adolescent escapism, but Hawks’ fans rejoice in his oeuvre‘s remarkable avoidance of Hollywood’s religiosity, bathos, flag-waving, and sentimentality.
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Famous quotes containing the word style:
“I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the calibre of a bullet, teething beads.... One’s style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)