Howard Hawks made movies for a very, very long time. Because he was born in 1896, this means his career started in silent film. I intended to watch at least one silent film in this marathon of his, and it just so happens that A Girl in Every Port was the only available online. It was actually on Youtube and you can watch it now if you want.
Hawks made seven silent films, one of which ended up technically counting as a talkie even though it was filmed as a silent film and only had 15 minutes of dialogue added after the fact. I don't believe any of his silent films have all that great of a reputation, which makes sense for a director whose most famous genre, screwball, is heavily reliant on dialogue.
But if one were to watch one silent film of his, it seems like A Girl at Every Port was the one to pick, the one that most resembles his later works. Hawks biographer Todd McCarthy said that film scholars considered this to be his most important silent film work. How lucky for me! Or perhaps, the reason it was ever on Youtube and the reason others weren't.
Also, this is evidently the movie that put Louise Brooks on the map. Or more accurately, it got the attention of G.W. Pabst, who directed two movies starring Brooks that made her an international star. Brooks is an interesting figure to say the least. She popularized the bob hairstyle and seemed like she would have fit in very well with the whole free love movement, although she was about four decades too early.
A Girl in Every Port kind of has a cartoon-like quality to it. A sailor travels around the world and in every part of the world, he finds a girl, but each girl he finds has a mark of a different sailor. Which I'm not entirely sure why this bothered him to be honest. It's not like he was planning to marry any of them.
Anyway, eventually he runs into this guy, the one who seems to mark every girl - what a weird concept. Like I said, cartoon logic. And they get in a fight, but get interrupted by the cops, and both of them decide to fight the cops. Spike, played by Victor McLaglen, pays for his own bail and his opponent, because he wants to return to the fight, but they end up working out their differences and become best friends.
Later on in the movie, Spike comes across Louise Brooks, who he falls in love with. She's just stringing him along and has also been with Spike's best bud, Salami. She's remarkably candid with Salami about this, essentially sharing that she plans to take this dude's money and bail. Misunderstandings ensue, and male friendship is more important than any woman.
It's okay. It was worth watching for me personally just to see Brooks and McLaglen, who was an early silent film star who successfully made the transition to sound, winning a Best Actor award in 1935. But I don't know if most people would watch a movie just for that?
Like I said, the movie is best understood as a cartoon. These two guys are able to take down like 10 cops by themselves and might as well be doing the cartoon arm punching 5 guys in one motion thing. The tattoo thing on every girl is... just weird and Spike not willing to, it's implied, sleep with anyone with that tattoo is very weird. Like why the fuck do you care, you really think all these women are just waiting for you and doing nothing else in the meantime? Like I sort of get it in the sense that I know this is how men used to (and maybe still do) think, but I also don't get it because I don't know why this is a thing that would bother them if they don't actually plan to commit.
Anyway, Hawks didn't write most of his movies, or at least he didn't write the screenplays to most of his movies. I know he could have probably have gotten a written by credit on some of his movies. But he does write and direct this. He seems to have little interest in title cards - they are used as infrequently as possible, with back-and-forth dialogue going on with no indication what they are saying except to use context clues to figure out. Which is not particularly hard, I just found it interesting.
But the important element of Hawks writing this is that it considered to have the early makings of Hawks tropes. Two men fighting over a woman. Male friendship. It doesn't really have one of the important elements, the Hawksian woman, because Brooks isn't really that.
I don't think Hawks liked his silent movies at all, because I don't think he wanted them to be silent. In his later years, there was a Hawks retrospective in the 70s and one of his silent movies, Trent's Last Case, was on the list, and Hawks wanted it off the list and destroyed. I am not kidding. Now he doesn't like that for a specific reason - he thought it was going to be a sound movie but they didn't have the rights to make it a sound movie - so he found the whole movie a chore. But I'm not sure he felt any more positive about his other silent movies either. It's not like any of them are considered classics now.
And really, when you consider the things Hawks is famous for in his movies, it makes sense. Hawks was successful quickly in the sound era. His second sound film won an Oscar for best writing and three years after that, he made his first recognized classic, Scarface. (which I have yet to see, but hope to include on this marathon). For now, he was boxed in within the limitations of what film could do.
2/4 stars
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