The Hollywood Masters: Howard Hawks Created Classic Films in Many Genres

Howard Hawks is the man behind such classic and near-classic films The Dawn Patrol (1930), Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), Sergeant York (1941), Ball of Fire (1941), Air Force (1943), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948) and Rio Bravo (1959) and such first-rate entertainments as I Was a Male War Bride (1949), Monkey Business (1952), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Land of the Pharaohs (1955), Hatari! (1962), Man's Favorite Sport? (1964) and El Dorado (1966). Ironically, Hawks -- one of the most celebrated of American filmmakers -- was little celebrated by his peers in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences during his career. Despite making some of the best films in the Hollywood canon, he was nominated just once for a Best Director Academy Award, in 1942 for Sergeant York. He lost to John Ford -- his friend, contemporary, and the director arguably closest to him in terms of his talent and output.

Ford, a four-time winner of the Best Director Oscar, told Hawks that it was he and not Ford who should have won the Academy Award that year. The Academy eventually made up for the oversight in 1975 by voting him an honorary Academy Award, which came to him shortly before his death while he basked in the midst of a two-decade-long critical revival. To many cineastes, Howard Hawks is one of the faces of American film and would be carved on an American film pantheon's Mt. Rushmore honoring America's greatest directors, beside his friend Ford. It took the French Cahiers du Cinema critics to teach Americans to appreciate one of its own masters, and it was to the Academy's credit that it recognized the great Hawks in his lifetime.