Howard Hawks

Music as Communication in Film

Gregory Camp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429560767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Known for creating classic films including His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, Bringing Up Baby, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Howard Hawks is one of the best-known Hollywood 'auteurs', but the important role that music plays in his films has been generally neglected by film critics and scholars. In this concise study, Gregory Camp demonstrates how Hawks' use of music and musical treatment of dialogue articulate the group communication that is central to his films. In five chapters, Camp explores how the notion of 'music' in Hawks' films can be expanded beyond the film score, and the techniques by which Hawks and his collaborators (including actors, screenwriters, composers, and editors) achieve this heightened musicality.

1 Arranging an Ensemble

The auteurist critics discussed in the Introduction find that Hawks’s most defining narrative preoccupation is staging group activity directed toward a common goal. Some of his films feature already established groups, others are about newly forming groups, and others, to be discussed in this chapter, center on an outsider who is incorporated into a group. Hawks often uses music as a symbol of that incorporation, and such is the case in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Hatari! (1962), and Ball of Fire (1942). In all three films, a female protagonist uses music to work her way into an established ensemble, and the newcomer changes that group’s identity.

Ensembles in the Andes: Only Angels Have Wings

Only Angels Have Wings is the story of a group of American aviators who run a mail courier service in the fictional South American port of Barranca. They are led by Geoff Carter (Cary Grant), the most intrepid of them all, who only flies when it is too dangerous for anyone else to go aloft. His sidekick and best friend is Kid Dabb (Thomas Mitchell), and the group uses a bar managed by Dutchy (Sig Ruman) as their headquarters. Importantly, the bar (like so many of the bars in Hawks’s films) has a piano and a house band. Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), an American fresh off the boat in Barranca, meets two pilots at the dock and accompanies them to Dutchy’s bar for a steak dinner. As soon as they arrive, one of the pilots, Joe (Noah Beery Jr.), is called on a job through bad weather and is killed in a crash during his attempted return. Bonnie is confused and horrified by the other men’s easy acceptance of Joe’s death, and especially by Geoff who sits down to eat Joe’s unfinished steak. The men are seemingly cruel in their initiation of Bonnie into their way of thinking, asking her, “Who’s Joe?” when she wants to talk about the dead pilot. The men sing the Spanish–American War song “Break the News to Mother” (composed by Charles K. Harris in 1897) to mock what they perceive as Bonnie’s naivety and sentimentality, flaunting their ability to look death in the face and laugh at soft-heartedness. Outraged at their flippancy, Bonnie storms out of the bar in tears. She quickly realizes, however, that she reacted inappropriately to the men’s actions, feeling embarrassed by her sentimentality (a traditionally “female” quality in the macho context of 1939 Hollywood, and one that Hawks was fond of questioning). As she speaks to the other airmen about Geoff, Bonnie very quickly takes on the mantle of a quintessential Hawksian woman, deciding to “toughen up” and join the men on their own terms.¹ When Bonnie reenters the bar, Geoff is attempting to lead the group in Shelton Brooks’ 1910 hit “Some of These Days,” but he keeps playing an incorrect chord on the piano, E-flat major where it should be E minor. Bonnie goes to the instrument to correct the chord and then sits down to lead the group herself. She impresses the assembled crowd of airmen and local musicians and their girlfriends, going on to suggest that they play Moisés Simons’ 1928 hit “The Peanut Vendor.” By the time the scene fades out our impression is that Bonnie is now ingrained into the group and their way of thinking.

Bonnie’s newfound centrality in the group is emphasized by Hawks’s mise-en-scène throughout this sequence: first, the camera follows Bonnie as she reenters the bar (Figure 1.1), says a friendly “hello” to some of the customers, and walks over to the piano, at which Geoff is already seated. By having the camera travel with her, keeping her centered in the frame, Hawks makes it clear that Bonnie has a newfound control over the space. The only previous substantial tracking shot in this section of the film followed Geoff (who, like Bonnie, moved from the right side of the room to the left) as he joined his colleagues and Bonnie at their table. That shot crowned Jeff as the dominant character in the bar, and this following one allows Bonnie to take an analogous position. Next, Bonnie gives the other musicians instructions and sits at the piano in the center of the shot, closely surrounded by the fliers and their friends, who form a protective halo around her. The shot is very crowded at the beginning of the scene, and becomes more so as other denizens of the bar gather around Bonnie as she continues playing (Figure 1.2). By presenting such a crowded shot Hawks emphasizes the self-sufficiency of the microcosm represented by this South American bar: nothing outside of the shot matters in this moment of musical performance. Because all of the sounds we hear find their source in the shot itself, it forms an autonomous audiovisual world (pace Michel Chion, there is a soundtrack, at least in this shot).² Geoff is clearly surprised, impressed, and aroused by Bonnie’s skill – “hello, professional,” he says. Unlike Geoff, the audience already has a feeling for Bonnie’s musicality, as at the very beginning of the film she sang along with a group of street singers, to the delight of the natives. Although Jean Arthur as Bonnie is the “star” in this scene, Cary Grant’s performance is also notable in its subtlety as he supports his co-star.

Figure 1.1 Bonnie confidently enters the bar.

Source: Only Angels Have Wings.

Figure 1.2 Bonnie shows off her pianistic skills.

Source: Only Angels Have Wings.

Hawks breaks up this sequence with a brief medium shot of Bonnie playing, reminding the audience that the scene is about Bonnie, cueing us to focus on her realization of how she can fit into the group (Figure 1.3). This happens when Geoff gives her a drink, which she sips while continuing to play. She is lit frontally so that our gaze gravitates toward her. When the song finishes, Bonnie begins absent-mindedly to play “Break the News to Mother,” a momentary lapse in her newfound ability to ignore death, the music seeming to speak from her subconscious, but when she and Geoff simultaneously notice what she is playing she breaks off (Geoff: “Who’s Joe?” Bonnie: “Never heard of him.”). It also allows the two a more intimate moment as they share this shot equally, foreshadowing the fact (in case we didn’t already know it) that they will fall in love. Bonnie immediately breaks the awkward mood by asking if anyone knows “The Peanut Vendor,” which all eagerly strike up, Bonnie playing the piano and Geoff singing (Figure 1.4). Although very similar to the previous group shot, the angle of this new shot is subtly different, placing both Bonnie and Geoff in the middle of the frame (compare Figures 1.2 and 1.4) and allowing us to see them both more clearly. In “Some of these Days” Bonnie was the musician and Geoff was part of the audience, but in “The Peanut Vendor” they both participate as equal partners in the musical group. Could they do anything next but fall in love?

Figure 1.3 Bonnie settles in with a drink.

Source: Only Angels Have Wings.

The music-making continues into the next scene, still set in the bar but after an ellipsis of time is indicated by a fade-out and a shot of the bar’s clock. There is a dissolve from the clock to a medium shot of Bonnie alone at the piano playing Liszt’s “Liebestraum.” She is clearly very much at home now, having made the piano her own, as she provides a melancholic diegetic accompaniment for the subsequent scene in which Geoff and the others discuss what to do with the dead Joe’s belongings. Aside from one further scene in the bar in which music is playing, no other music is heard until the final sequence of the film, where nondiegetic strings accompany Kid’s death scene (Kid having been injured in a dramatic flight through a storm over the Andes). Using underscore in this scene feels like a miscalculation, especially since there has been no other underscoring since the film’s opening credits. Although Dimitri Tiomkin’s music here is unobtrusive, it adds a veneer of sentimentality that the scene does not need: everything in the film prior to this point has told us that this is one of the most unsentimental groups of men ever to grace the screen. Hawks has set us up to feel like Geoff did when Bonnie started to play “Break the News to Mother:” we have been conditioned by the foregoing not to accept that the group would go in for this sort of sentimental affect. The equivalent scene (the death of another airman) in Hawks’s 1943 film Air Force is more effective because Franz Waxman’s music is dissonant and eerie rather than sentimental, and more underscore is used throughout the film so it does not come so unexpectedly. In Only Angels Have Wings, the group has been established as musically self-sufficient: they do not need sentimental underscoring to function as a cohesive group, and the music for Geoff’s farewell to Kid strikes a note of sentimentality that Bonnie has already learned is not appropriate for these men.

Figure 1.4 Geoff sings “The Peanut Vendor.”

Source: Only Angels Have Wings.

The final music in Only Angels Have Wings is heard shortly thereafter: the popular 1925 Marcos Jiménez song “Adiós Mariquita Linda,” sung by Manuel Álvarez Maciste accompanying himself on his guitar. Bonnie sits at the piano at the center of the shot but does not play (Figure 1.5). This shot is visually the opposite of the earlier one, filmed from the other side of the piano, creating a balanced form between these two music scenes. Rather than everyone participating, they all listen to the singer with a sense of melancholy about Kid’s death. Bonnie is now one of the group of listeners; having proven herself to be a capable performer, she has been accepted by the group and has no need to show off. Importantly, this is music as performance instead of music as participation: listening to someone else give voice to their grief seems to help the airmen to process it. Unlike in Kid’s death scene, the music here is still part of the world of the bar: it shows the complexity of this bar as a place for “musicking,” a place for both participatory and listening-based modes of performance.³ Maciste’s performance is melancholic yet void of the overdetermined sentimentality of a song like “Break the News to Mother.” Suddenly a new mail call comes in that snaps the group out of their melancholy. The volume and tempo of the voices pick up, leading into the final bit of jaunty underscore and the film’s inevitable happy ending.

Figure 1.5 Mourning for Kid.

Source: Only Angels Have Wings.

In his monograph on Hawks, Leland Poague sees the two singing scenes – the scene on the dock at the beginning of the film and the one in the bar – as “primarily female,” as compared to the masculine affordances of the professional aviation outfit.⁴ But the musicking could instead be seen in a way that deconstructs the male/female dichotomy, as both genders participate musically in both scenes. The native musicians are primarily male, men and women listening and singing along, and the airmen form a primarily homosocial musical society until Bonnie joins them, but in both cases the musical product comes from both genders. One might argue that the natives’ “otherness” mirrors a female otherness (and that the natives are feminized), so that when Bonnie sings along with them she is only an other joining another group of others, with a hint of the trope of the Western woman forcing herself upon the natives’ way of life.⁵ This post-colonial reading would be hard to argue with, but the scene in the bar is more ideologically complex. When she leads the men in “Some of these Days,” Bonnie’s musical expertise shines through, although they were doing well enough without her aside from that single pesky chord (and indeed play perfectly well without her at other points in the film), so we cannot really speak of the female influence allowing better music to be made. The other musicians, and Geoff, take the lead in the following “Peanut Vendor,” Bonnie now playing the piano as part of the ensemble rather than as its leader. On whose terms does Bonnie make music with the men? First, she plays a dominant, then a supporting role in the musical group, and Geoff is happy to take the opposite role, only listening in “Some of these Days” and leading in “The Peanut Vendor.” This sharing of power within the relationship is undermined as the plot soon becomes a conventional love triangle when Rita Hayworth turns up in the role of Geoff’s ex-flame, then with Geoff deciding on her behalf whether Bonnie should stay with him in Barranca. But this important early scene of musical performance seems to offer a brief vision of more equal gender relationships, a type of relationship also hinted at in Bringing Up Baby (1938) and to be expanded upon in To Have and Have Not (1944) (to be discussed in Chapter 4). Although he is certainly not a feminist in his working life, Geoff is quite willing to relinquish musical power to a woman who shows herself to have more talent than he. The gender and musical dynamics here are more complex than Poague, Haskell, and other critics of this film have given Hawks and his collaborators credit for; if only the rest of the film bore out the promise of this scene. Poague is partly correct to say that with Hawks “it is usually the case, as in Only Angels, that women are quite readily acc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Howard Hawks’s Sonic Style
• 1 Arranging an Ensemble
• 2 Speaking a Duet
• 3 Singing a Chorus
• 4 Humming a Tune
• 5 Barking a Quartet
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Hawks Musico-Filmography
• References
• Index