Monkey Business

Howard Hawks worked across nearly every major American film genre — screwball comedy, gangster picture, western, war film, noir, musical — with a directorial style so understated that his authorship went largely unrecognised by American critics until French New Wave writers, particularly at Cahiers du cinéma, championed him in the 1950s and 1960s as a defining auteur of Hollywood cinema. Hawks favored fast, overlapping dialogue, self-sufficient professional characters, and a recurring interest in tight groups bound by competence and loyalty rather than sentiment, visible across films as different as "Scarface" (1932), "Bringing Up Baby" (1938), "Only Angels Have Wings" (1939), and "Red River" (1948). He directed Cary Grant more often than any director besides Alfred Hitchcock, across five films spanning nearly fifteen years and several genres, including two of the defining screwball comedies of the studio era. Hawks received an Academy Honorary Award in 1975 in recognition of a career that had never won him a competitive Oscar.

Ginger Rogers began as a vaudeville and Broadway performer before moving into film in the early 1930s, where she is most enduringly remembered for the ten musicals she made opposite Fred Astaire at RKO between 1933 and 1949, including "Top Hat" (1935), "Swing Time" (1936), and "Shall We Dance" (1937). Their partnership defined the Hollywood musical of the decade and made Rogers, in the choreographer Hermes Pan's phrase, the equal partner who "gave him sex" as Astaire gave the pairing style. Rogers deliberately sought roles outside the musical genre to avoid being confined to the Astaire partnership, and the strategy paid off when she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the straight dramatic role of "Kitty Foyle" (1940), a performance with no dancing at all. She continued acting in film, on stage, and in television into the 1960s and beyond, and worked twice with Cary Grant in romantic-comedy vehicles during his freelance period at RKO in the 1940s, in productions distinct from both her Astaire musicals and her later dramatic work.

Charles Douville Coburn was born in Macon, Georgia, on 19 June 1877, and raised in Savannah. He began working in theaters as a boy, ushering and eventually managing a Savannah playhouse before moving into acting. He spent decades on the American stage, including running his own Shakespearean touring company with his first wife, Ivah Wills Coburn, and became a respected figure in New York theater and a founder of what became The Players club scene long before Hollywood took any interest in him. Coburn did not begin appearing regularly in films until 1933, when he was already in his mid-fifties, following the death of his wife. He quickly became one of the era's most reliable character actors, specializing in blustery, monocled tycoons and grandfatherly figures whose gruffness typically concealed a soft-hearted core. His late start did not slow him: he worked steadily and prolifically through the 1930s, 1940s and into the 1950s. His peak years came in his sixties and seventies, when he received three consecutive Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor: for The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), for which he lost, The More the Merrier (1943), for which he won, and The Green Years (1946). He continued working in film, radio and eventually television into his eighties. Coburn died in New York City on 30 August 1961, at eighty-four, having appeared in roughly ninety films over a nearly thirty-year screen career that began only after most actors' careers were winding down.