Howard Hawks

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.