Howard Hawks

Bringing Up Baby is a movie I had heard a lot about, but never seen. It sits firmly within the class of films that motivated me to start this project, movies that I thought were required viewing for a self taught film school curriculum. This is partially because it stars…

Lee Child’s series of Jack Reacher novels have consistently become best sellers. Two of the books have been adapted for cinema with Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise taking the lead and we now have in the UK an eight-part series, Reacher, on Amazon Prime. …

Alright, here we go. We’re hitting the old west, yet again, and, yet again, our shepherd is that old grizzled curmudgeon who we know and love and, apparently, just can’t get enough of, John Wayne. Red River, released in 1948, is one of four Howard Hawks directed films on this…

Rio Bravo: the one where they are friends Rio Bravo is regarded by many as the best Western ever made. Even if you don’t agree, it is up there with the greats. The idea for the plotcame from Fred Zimmerman’s High Noon. In that film, starring Gary Cooper and Grace…

The Howard Hawks Method, also known as a “Talking Draft,” is the fastest way for screenwriters to create scenes. A writer records themselves performing all the dialog, then the audio is transcribed, then the text is reformatted into a script. Now it is possible to do all that automatically. www.TalkingDraft.com …

Here we go. Another Western. Rio Bravo is a 1959 Howard Hawks production starring legendary curmudgeon, John Wayne. I’ll be honest, now that we’re into the meat of the list, it’s beginning to feel like an endless slog through mid-century Westerns. At first, I was excited about the Westerns. I…

Finally this comedy classic receives Criterion treatment It’s more than a little surprising that one of the greatest screwball comedies ever is only this month receiving the Criterion treatment, but it’s worth celebrating nevertheless. Bringing Up Baby matches Katherine Hepburn’s klutzy heiress Susan with Cary Grant’s nerdy scientist David, both…

Howard Hawke’s His Girl Friday is a beacon of a certain type of movie from a very specific time period. It is the gold standard of screwball comedy and a quintessential “talkie”. It seems the creators of the film wanted to celebrate a decade of synchronized sound on film by…