Late Hawks.

"What Howard Hawks did best - whichever studio signed the check (over 44 years, he worked for them all), whatever genre he operated in (ditto) - was clear space for his actors and encourage them to really react to each other," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. "This is so rudimentary that most don't even bother with it. Anthology's retrospective, Late Hawks, savors Hawks's slow, sweet winding down."

"By a not-so-strange coincidence, I am teaching my first course in Howard Hawks this fall semester, after 43 years of being engaged in film studies," notes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "Why the long wait? Like his illustrious contemporaries, John Ford and Jean Renoir, he is as difficult to teach as the equally sublime Alfred Hitchcock and Buster Keaton are easy - that is, easier to teach to young people, and easier for young people to appreciate."

"Humphrey Bogart met Lauren Bacall on Hawks's watch," writes Bruce Bennett, riffing on this "ingeniously curated" series for the New York Sun. "Only in Hawks's pictures was John Wayne able to rival the quality of the on-screen goods he delivered for John Ford. And filmmakers from Jean-Luc Godard to Walter Hill, Michael Mann to John Carpenter will gush with the least provocation on the subject of the sturdy yet supple male-male camaraderie and the sexy, capable, level-gazing heroines (latterly dubbed 'Hawksian women') that define the director's oeuvre."

The L Magazine's Mark Asch notes that Hawks "always seemed to be making movies about the way people talk when they're really comfortable around each other."

Today through Friday; then, next Wednesday through next Friday.

Posted by dwhudson at June 4, 2008 9:52 AM