Only Angels Have Wings

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.

Jean Arthur was born Gladys Georgianna Greene in 1900 in Plattsburgh, New York, and worked as a photographer's model before entering silent films in the early 1920s, where she found little success. Her career was remade by talking pictures, which revealed a voice — husky, cracking upward into a squeak at moments of feeling — that became one of the most distinctive instruments in American comedy. She rose to stardom at Columbia Pictures under Frank Capra, starring in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and became closely associated with Howard Hawks and George Stevens as well. Her two films with Cary Grant, Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and The Talk of the Town (1942), fall within this peak period and rank among the era's most admired blends of comedy and feeling. Arthur was famously reluctant about her own stardom, reportedly suffering severe stage fright and camera anxiety throughout her career despite her success, and she walked away from studio contracts more than once, including a public dispute with Columbia's Harry Cohn. She largely retired from film after Shane (1953), attempting a brief return to television and stage work, including a much-discussed 1967 Broadway run in The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake that closed quickly, and a short-lived 1966 CBS sitcom, The Jean Arthur Show. She died in 1991 in Carmel, California. Arthur is remembered today as the definitive voice of Depression-era American comedy, an actress whose visible discomfort with fame paradoxically deepened the authenticity of the everywoman characters she played.