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HAWKS, HOWARD (1896–1977). American director and producer.
The lesser achievement, to be sure, is Monkey Business, a
screwball comedy in the classic mode animated by a science-fictional McGuffin:
chemist Cary Grant, aided by a mischievous chimpanzee, develops and ingests a
formula which restores one's youthful energy, leading to some adolescent
escapades with secretary Marilyn Monroe and more fun when wife Ginger Rogers
drinks her own dose and regresses to childhood. The serious conclusion to all
of this exuberant nonsense, of course, is that people should learn to enjoy
themselves without the assistance of miraculous chemicals.
In sharp
contrast, The Thing (from Another World)—which,
by all accounts, he directed while choosing to credit long-time editor
Christian Nyby—was a riveting horror film, an inspired
simplification of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s novella "Who Goes There?" (1938)
involving soldiers at an isolated Arctic base menaced by a stalking, humanoid
vegetable from outer space. The early scene in which soldiers investigating a
mysterious crash slowly form themselves into a circle, signaling the arrival of
a flying saucer, is deservedly cited as a brilliant touch, and Hawks realized,
as did Ridley SCOTT in directing Alien (1979), that a monster is scarier
when it is observed as infrequently and fleetingly as possible. Yet the film's
overall attitude is disappointing, as the base scientist with the novel idea
that perhaps we should attempt to study this first alien being to visit Earth
is ridiculed and marginalized by worldly-wise tough guys who know that the only
way to deal with such an alien is to hunt it down and kill it, and the film's
unforgettable closing line—"Keep watching the skies!" warns people to keep
their powder dry in case another flying saucer should happen to land. By this
film's logic, then, the soldier who gunned down Klaatu in Robert
WISE's The Day the Earth
Stood Still (1951) was only doing his patriotic duty.
Having
demonstrated his versatility with these and other distinctive films during the
1930s and 1940s, Hawks largely devoted the rest of his career to more
conventional fare, including three elegiac westerns co-written by science
fiction writer Leigh BRACKETT, who might have suggested to Hawks that an
adaptation of one of her own, atmospheric planetary romances would provide an
intriguing alternative to such adventures. But the proposal would probably have
been in vain, since the aging Hawks had very much become a man resistant to
change, and hence a director, whatever his other virtues, who was not really
suited for science fiction films.
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