When I was a seventeen-year-old college freshman and newly in thrall to movies, I read the book “Godard on Godard,” a collection of Jean-Luc Godard’s criticism and interviews, and stumbled upon his reference to “the greatest American artist”—someone I’d never heard of, Howard Hawks. Soon thereafter, I noticed that “Bringing Up Baby” (which I’d also never heard of), a film directed by Hawks, was playing at a revival house; I saw it and felt, at once, as if I’d gotten it—essentially and immediately—and it made me a devotee both of Hawks and of all things classic-Hollywood. What I felt I’d gotten was symbolism: the sense that the core of the movie wasn’t in the details of the story but in emblematic gestures, antics, and winks, which leapt out of the film’s dramatic fabric. I’d been, until then, put off by the extreme unreality, the obvious distortions of experience, that Hollywood embodied; now, I was free both from that revulsion and from any craving for a compensating realism. The viewing of Hollywood movies suddenly struck me as an aesthetic world apart, an entirely new mode of expression—and, ever since, Hawks’s films held a special place for me in it.
I was deeply excited to learn recently that one of my favorites of his films—and, indeed, one of my favorite movies of all—has finally become available to stream, on Amazon Prime: his boisterous melodrama “Come and Get It,” from 1936. (The story is loosely adapted from a novel by Edna Ferber, who was among the most popular writers of the time.) It’s a mysterious outpost of Hawks’s distinctive and original cinematic universe, a tale that seethes with perversity beneath its robust surfaces; it’s a Möbius strip of erotic obsession that anticipates, by more than two decades, Alfred Hitchcock’s ultimate sexual doppelgänger drama, “Vertigo.”
“Come and Get It,” set in the world of big-time commercial logging, begins in northern Wisconsin, in 1884. An ambitious logging foreman named Barney Glasgow (Edward Arnold) and a saloon singer, Lotta Morgan (Frances Farmer), fall in love, but he has to marry his boss’s daughter in order to become a partner in the firm. Lotta instead marries Barney’s best friend, Swan Bostrom (Walter Brennan). The friends lose touch, Barney gets rich, Lotta dies—and, in 1907, Barney and Swan meet again, and Barney falls in love with his friend’s daughter, also named Lotta (and also played by Farmer), who looks just like her late mother.
In Hawks’s adaptation of the novel (he worked, uncredited, with the credited screenwriters, Jane Murfin and Jules Furthman), much of the movie plays like raucously antic action comedy. Barney, as played by the hearty and blustery Arnold, swaggers in motion and in repose, projecting purpose and power along with insinuating bonhomie and crude challenges. He’s introduced at a lumberjacks’ mess table, punching out a pair of workers who are threatening him; as he’s dragging them toward the door, Swan comes through it—and takes a flying leap into Barney’s arms and clamps his legs around Barney’s waist as they greet each other loudly and laughingly. (Moments later, they repeat the gesture, when Swan delivers news of Barney’s big promotion.)
The elder Lotta, in Farmer’s kaleidoscopic interpretation, comes off as a forerunner of Lauren Bacall’s character in “To Have and Have Not,” with a husky voice, a feline prowl, and a reckoning gaze blending wariness and design. She and Barney meet at the saloon, where he is playing a rigged shell game while scheming to outsmart the house and she is an interested observer cannily working the floor for her boss’s interest and her own. Farmer lends Lotta a distinctive repertory of gestures: cracking a sardonic half-grin, waving her hand in an exaggerated folksiness, parking her chewing gum under the bar before singing. She seals her bond with Barney by means of a gesture of violence, which, in a brilliant touch, has the effect of a loud public declaration of love. The result is an uproariously destructive bar fight, giving rise to another of her grandly violent and inspired gestures, this one mightily comedic: hurling large round metal serving trays, like giant frisbees.
As Swan, Brennan practically leaps out of his skin with the energy of his comedic imagination. The character is Swedish, and Brennan gleefully chews the accent to a language-garbling nub. He bounces angularly through each scene, knocking at a door with a stomping dance and hoisting himself up on the transom to peer in on Lotta and Barney. Yet his rambunctious comedy gives rise to the movie’s mightiest moment of bitter pathos: when Barney, heading off to marry the boss’s daughter, delegates Swan to inform Lotta that it’s over between them. It’s a long scene, done in a mere handful of shots, that emphasizes, in a wry set of pretenses, Swan’s dread of the mission and, especially, of the pain that he himself will inflict in delivering the news. Hawks dispels the scene’s potentially maudlin mood, foregrounding antics that imply a tragic depth of darkness—which is all the greater for being merely hinted at.
By 1907, Barney is the sole owner of what is no longer just a logging concern, the mighty Glasgow Pulp, Paper, & Power Co., and the benignly gruff tyrant at home, in his mansion, with his devoted, formal, and fretful wife, Emma Louise (Mary Nash), whom he doesn’t love. Their son, Richard (Joel McCrea), a modern, educated, statistically minded and socially progressive industrial engineer, works at the firm and is being groomed to inherit it. Their daughter, Evvie (Andrea Leeds), has a brusquely affectionate complicity with Barney, calling him by his first name (when out of her mother’s earshot) and engaging him, and only him, in bracingly frank discussion of her love life. These later scenes also bounce with resonant gestures and touches: a door sill on which Barney habitually stumbles, a pool of syrup in which Richard gets stuck, a batch of taffy that he and young Lotta twist and shred, even a paper cup—the little invention with which Richard and a young factory worker are planning to make their mark.
Yet the tone of some of these later scenes is different, and there’s a practical reason for it: the direction of the film is credited both to Hawks and to William Wyler, a cultured and literary filmmaker, born in Alsace-Lorraine, whose earnest expressivity is rarely pierced by humor or mixed emotions. Hawks had been hired to make the film by the producer Samuel Goldwyn, and he took advantage of Goldwyn’s hospitalization, during production, to depart drastically from the novel. When Goldwyn returned to the studio, he reacted with outrage at what Hawks had done. It’s not clear whether Hawks then quit or was fired, but he was in any case replaced, and many of the film’s later scenes (though they generally followed the script that Hawks had overseen) lack the first half’s richness of gesture, ambivalence of expression, and instability of mood, replaced instead by straightforward dramatic declamations. (The scenes are also briefer, more illustrative, and rendered in Wyler’s habitually more ornate style.)
Nonetheless, “Come and Get It” is very much a Hawks film; the framework that he set and developed carries through to the end of the movie.. Farmer’s performance, especially as the elder Lotta, incarnates a central Hawkian trope—the independent woman brazenly confronting trouble with daring decisions—that she realizes with an apt spirit of creative freedom. (In “Hawks on Hawks,” Joseph McBride’s book of interviews with the director from the nineteen-seventies, the director said, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that Frances Farmer was the best actress I ever worked with.”) So is the crude, swaggering portrayal of Barney and his close, homoerotically tinged relationship with Swan. (Hawks had already made a batch of films about rugged men who made asses of themselves in love, as in “A Girl in Every Port” and “Tiger Shark.”) Hawks was a great director of actors—Brennan won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in “Come and Get It”—because he was, in effect, a great coach of actors, creating provocative ideas and situations that sparked performers’ inventiveness. His process overleaps both his own era and the later age of method acting and psychological identification, foreshadowing the modern cinema of reflexivity and improvisation. Hawks’s films have a modernity that was lacking from those of many of his peers, because he invented not just a world of experience but a process for creating it.
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