True Best Movie: Howard Hawks
After Franju’s TBM, let’s go for Howard Hawks.
Usual Best Movie: Rio Bravo
True Best Movie: Ball Of Fire
This kind of director is intimidating. The range of movies he’s made is so wide that it almost makes no sense to highlight one movie rather than another. It is something true for any director in general (it hasn’t stopped me from trying though _) and for Hawks in particular.
Comedies, westerns, dramas, noir, gangster, peplum, war, sci-fi horror, musical… He’s’ pretty much done it all. I can’t think of another director that has covered so many different genres with so much talent. Even Billy Wilder, probably my all-time fav, seems a bit short (no peplum and no sci-fi horror as far as I can tell).
Still, this freak game I’ve created, this TBM game I’m playing at, demands an answer.
As always, nothing to say to the UBM: Rio Bravo is the masterpiece everyone says it is and it’s probably even better that what people usually say it is (I’ll probably say more in another post).
But I guess I can’t resist to Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Gregg Toland’s photography, and the Wilder-Brackett script’s wit combined. It’s so perfectly funny, it says so much between the lines that you don’t even need to laugh it loud to enjoy it. It’s telepathic amusement.