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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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)