Howard Hawks

The Grey Fox of Hollywood

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by Todd McCarthy

Type

Biographies

Subject

Director > Howard Hawks

Keywords

Howard Hawks, director

Publishing date

1997

Publisher

Grove Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 756 pages
6 x 9 ¾ inches (15 x 25 cm)

ISBN-10
ISBN-13

0-8021-1598-5
978-0-8021-1598-0

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Book Presentation:
The first major biography of one of Old Hollywood's greatest directors.

Sometime partner of the eccentric Howard Hughes, drinking buddy of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, an inveterate gambler and a notorious liar, Howard Hawks was the most modern of the great masters and one of the first directors to declare his independence from the major studios. He played Svengali to Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift, and others, but Hawks's greatest creation may have been himself. As The Atlantic Monthly noted, "Todd McCarthy. . . . has gone further than anyone else in sorting out the truths and lies of the life, the skills and the insight and the self-deceptions of the work."

Press Reviews:
McCarthy's mostly fluent writing occasionally suffers from "Varietyese": studio executives are "suits"; Gary Cooper "opined." ... Generously, the book acknowledges its debt to earlier Hawks critics like Peter Bogdanovich and Molly Haskell, but it stands on its own as an evenhanded, gratifying portrait of a distasteful man and his enduring work. -- The New York Times Book Review, Diane Jacobs

"A fluent biography of the great director, a frequently rotten guy but one whose artistic independence and standards of film morality never failed." —The New York Times Book Review

"Hawks's life, until now rather an enigma, has been put into focus and made one with his art in Todd McCarthy's wise and funny Howard Hawks." —The Wall Street Journal

"Excellent. . . . A respectful, exhaustive, and appropriately smartass look at Hollywood's most versatile director." —Newsweek

See the publisher website: Grove Press

See the complete filmography of Howard Hawks on the website: IMDB ...