Howard Hawks

Lore & Background

Howard Hawks was born in Goshen, Indiana, the first-born child of Frank Winchester Hawks, a wealthy paper manufacturer, and Helen Brown Howard. His family on his father's side were American pioneers, and by the 1890s was one of the wealthiest families in the Midwest. Hawks' maternal grandfather had made his fortune in paper mills. Hawks attended Phillips Exeter Academy and later Cornell University, where he majored in mechanical engineering. Signal Corps, teaching aviators to fly. He worked on Cecil B. DeMille's The Little American and Marshall Neilan's The Little Princess. Hawks later stated he personally directed 'three or four' one-reel comedies, though no documentation exists to confirm the claim. He soon left to form his own production company.

Reader's Guide

Howard Hawks is regarded as a major figure of classic Hollywood, noted for his versatility across genres including comedies, dramas, gangster films, science fiction, film noir, war films, and Westerns. Critic Leonard Maltin called him 'the greatest American director who is not a household name.' Roger Ebert called Hawks 'one of the greatest American directors of pure movies, and a hero of auteur critics because he found his own laconic values in so many different kinds of genre material.' His work has influenced directors such as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, John Carpenter, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Quentin Tarantino, and Michael Mann. Entertainment Weekly placed Hawks fourth on their list of greatest directors, writing that his hallmarks are more thematic than visual. Jean-Luc Godard called him 'the greatest of all American artists.'

Did You Know?

• Though often repeated, the claim that Hawks won the United States Junior Tennis Championship at age 18 is apocryphal and lacks reliable documentation.
• He served as a lieutenant in the Aviation Section, U.S. Signal Corps during World War I, teaching aviators to fly.

A Chameleon of Genre

Few directors in the classic Hollywood era matched Howard Hawks' range. Across a career spanning the 1920s through the late 1960s, he moved fluidly between gangster pictures, screwball comedies, science fiction, film noir, war epics, and Westerns without ever seeming to repeat himself. His filmography reads like a tour of American popular cinema: the violent ambition of Scarface (1932), the chaotic farce of Bringing Up Baby (1938), the aerial drama of Only Angels Have Wings (1939), the razor-sharp dialogue of His Girl Friday (1940), the wartime romance of To Have and Have Not (1944), the hard-boiled mystery of The Big Sleep (1946), the sprawling frontier saga of Red River (1948), the alien invasion of The Thing from Another World (1951), the glittering musical of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and the lean desert standoff of Rio Bravo (1959). Though he received only one Best Director nomination, for Sergeant York in 1941, and an Honorary Academy Award in 1974, his body of work stands as one of the most varied and accomplished in American cinema.

Roots in Wealth and the Open Sky

Born in Goshen, Indiana, in 1896, Howard Hawks grew up in a family whose wealth traced back to the paper industry. His maternal grandfather, C. W. Howard, had built a fortune in Neenah, Wisconsin, starting from a homestead at seventeen, and the family's Goshen Milling Company made them among the wealthiest in the Midwest. The household eventually relocated to Pasadena, California, partly to ease his mother's poor health, and Hawks spent his adolescence in the sunny California landscape where he discovered coaster racing and later barnstorming as a pilot. At Cornell University, where he studied mechanical engineering, he was more known for playing craps and devouring novels than for academic rigor. When World War I drew him into the Army, he served as a lieutenant in the Aviation Section of the U.S. Signal Corps, teaching other aviators to fly. Those wartime skies left a permanent imprint on his imagination, surfacing years later in aviation dramas like The Dawn Patrol (1930). His first brush with Hollywood came even before the war, during a 1916 summer vacation, when a chance encounter with cinematographer Victor Fleming on a dirt racing track led to a prop-boy job on a Douglas Fairbanks picture.

The Hawksian Woman and a Code of Wit

Hawks' films are united less by visual style than by a set of thematic commitments that critics have long identified as his signature. His men tend to follow an understated, almost stoic code of manhood, while the women around them delight in pulling the rug out from under that composure. This dynamic gave rise to what is often called the "Hawksian woman": a strong, tough-talking figure who matches or outwits the male leads she encounters. Entertainment Weekly, placing Hawks fourth on their list of greatest directors, noted that his hallmarks are more thematic than visual, citing his deep mistrust of pomposity and his love of sly, leg-pulling wit. Roger Ebert praised him as a hero of auteur criticism precisely because he found his own laconic values inside so many different genre materials. The French critics adored him for what one summary called his "casual profundity," a quality that made his Westerns, dramas, musicals, detective films, and supremely confident comedies feel like the studio system at its most self-assured and least pretentious.

An Afterlife Among the Greats

Though Leonard Maltin called Hawks "the greatest American director who is not a household name," his influence on subsequent filmmakers is enormous. Directors as diverse as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, John Carpenter, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Quentin Tarantino, and Michael Mann have all acknowledged his impact on their work. Jean-Luc Godard went further, naming him "the greatest of all American artists," a superlative that speaks to how Hawks transcended the boundaries of any single genre or national tradition. His career as director, producer, and screenwriter during the classic Hollywood era gave him an unusual breadth of control over his material, and the ease with which he navigated between a gangster epic, a screwball comedy, and a science-fiction thriller set a standard that later auteurs have tried to match. That he was recognized with an Honorary Academy Award in 1974, three years before his death in December of that year, felt to many like a long-overdue acknowledgment of a career that had quietly reshaped the grammar of American popular film.