Uniwersytet WarszawskiWydział Neofilologii

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Images of Women in Howard Hawks’s Screwball Comedies

Praca magisterska na kierunku filologia angielska

Praca wykonana pod kierunkiemprof. dr hab. Marka Paryża

Wydział Neofilologii

Warszawa, Listopad 2015.

Oświadczenie kierującego pracą

Oświadczam, że niniejsza praca została przygotowana pod moim kierunkiem i stwierdzam, że spełnia ona warunki do przedstawienia jej w postępowaniu o nadanie tytułu zawodowego.

Data Podpis kierującego pracą

Oświadczenie autora (autorów) pracy

Świadom odpowiedzialności prawnej oświadczam, że niniejsza praca dyplomowa została napisana przez mnie samodzielnie i nie zawiera treści uzyskanych w sposób niezgodny z obowiązującymi przepisami.

Oświadczam również, że przedstawiona praca nie była wcześniej przedmiotem procedur związanychz uzyskaniem tytułu zawodowego w wyższej uczelni.

Oświadczam ponadto, że niniejsza wersja pracy jest identyczna z załączoną wersją elektroniczną.

Data Podpis autora (autorów) pracy

Streszczenie

Celem niniejszej pracy jest analiza obrazu kobiecości w "screwball comedies" Howarda

Hawks'a. Filmy Hawks'a kreują obraz kobiety silnej i niezależnej, potrafiącej jednak również

wyraźnie zaznaczyć swoją kobiecość. Kolejne przykłady analizowane są w oparciu o najbardziej

znane z komedii reżysera: Brining Up Baby, His Girl Friday i Ball Of Fire. W każdym z dzieł

protagonistka porównywana jest z innymi kobiecymi postaciami tworzącymi swoistą mapę

różnić między konwencjonalną a progresywną wizją kobiecości. Następnie praca zgłębia więź

między bohaterami przeciwnych płci, akcentując zaskakująco współczesne podejście do relacji

damsko-męskich.

Słowa kluczowe

Howard Hawks, film, womanhood, screwball comedy, gender, feminism, masculinity, class, kobiecość, płeć kulturowa, feminizm, męskość, klasa.

Dziedzina pracy (09000)

Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………… 5

Chapter one: Bringing Up Baby………………………………………………………. 9

Chapter two: His Girl Friday……………………………………………………..….. 25

Chapter three: Ball Of Fire…………………………………………………………... 43

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………. 57

Filmography and Works cited………………………………………………………... 58

Introduction

During the 1930s and 1940s, films about women dealt with major issues in women’s

personal lives. They were usually concerned with affairs, motherhood, difficulties in love life

and the relationship between mothers and daughters. These movies tended to strengthen

conventional values. In their book Hollywood’s America: Twentieth-Century America through

Film, Mintz and Roberts quote Jeanine Basinger, who argues that even though these films

implied that women could not combine a career and a happy family life, they offered women a

glimpse of a world outside the home, where they did not sacrifice their independence for

marriage, housekeeping, and childrearing. Additionally, she claims that these films also

presented women with successful careers, such as journalists and pilots (163). The films also

displayed harsh portraits of untrustworthy, weak and manipulable men, whose central occupation

were their jobs. With women becoming more popular in films, their roles and features started to

change drastically. Women started to appear more dominant and independent, and directors

started to experiment with gender-related themes. With such changes, a new film genre started to

evolve: the screwball comedy. Screwball comedies and film noir have many narrative elements

in common, but screwball comedy is characterized by the presence of a strong female character

that overshadows the male protagonist. His masculinity is challenged and he needs to prove that

he is a real man. Film critic Andrew Sarris, in his book “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet”: The

American Talking Film History and Memory, says that screwball comedies are sex comedies but

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without sex (63). This might be due to the fact that screwball comedies were used as a safe

foundation to explore serious issues like gender through a non-threatening structure.

One director specifically explored the idea of the modern womanhood through screwball

comedies. Howard Hawks’s films represent a change in the way women were perceived. The

women in his movies were strong characters, who were capable of competing with men and

usually were in the main focus of the film. Hawks’s female characters were so unique that they

received the name “Hawksian women.” The name was introduced in 1971 by Naomi Wise to

accentuate the feminist traits of Hawks’s female characters (Rollins 116). However, the term had

currency before its feminist minting. The Hawksian woman was the archetype of a strong and

tough-talking woman. Despite his interest in independent women, Hawks never claimed to be a

feminist throughout his life. He just stated that these strong-willed women were interesting and

lively in film as in real life. Hawks’s first screwball comedy, A Girl in Every Port, established

the beginning of the dominant female character with the actress Louise Brookes as the very first

Hawksian woman (Hagopian). The great popularity of the Hawksian woman was also due to

Hawks’s decision to use the same actresses rarely, so that the audience missed them and wanted

to see them more and more. Women in Hawks’s movies took lead of the action. They were

usually known by their nicknames rather than their forenames, which suggested that Hawksian

women were commonly a part of the male group, rather than just an object of their attention.

Their most notable attribute was their equality with men. They could keep up the pace in a

“ping-pong” conversation, they could have the same profession and they performed well under

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stress. Even though Hawks emphasized the equality between genders, he did not fail to highlight

the feminine qualities such as tenderness and seductiveness. The Hawksian woman tended to

embody masculine features, which the male character often lacked. He was rather the passive

party. In her book, Fast-Talking Dames, DiBattista notes that the Hawksian woman makes her

choices “by personal will rather than by social and economic pressures.” However amateurish

her pursuits might appear, she in fact exemplifies the “professional human being” (180).

Hawksian women were not “classical beauties” and they presented their charm through courage

and great personal charm (Greer).

Men in Hawks’s screwball comedies experienced great changes in their lives, which were

caused by their female partners. One function of the Hawksian woman was to lead the male

character from a state of emotional aloofness to a discovery of his real feelings. Typically,

Hawks’s men suffered initially from a kind of emotional paralysis, displaying a reserve toward

women that at times bordered on overt hostility. The Hawksian woman helped the central male

character to discover his true identity and resolve his struggle with masculinity. In their

relationship, as Wise points out, “Hawks’s characters, both men and women, frequently show a

merging of sexual roles for the benefit of both sexes—the women learn certain ‘masculine’

values while the men become ‘feminized’” (Rollins and O’Connor 113). This sexual reversal

serves to weaken the strict sexual and social differences between men and women. However,

Hawks succeeded in representing the “battle of sexes” in a funny manner, but never to a point of

ridicule. Hawks’s female characters represented modern womanhood in experiencing similar

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problems as their male counterparts. Through this similarity, Hawks managed to enhance the

feeling of competition between genders, while maintaining their differences.

Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday and Ball of Fire are Hawks’s most successful

screwball comedies. They share many similarities and through them Hawks’s progress as a

director can be observed, for example, critics claimed that Ball Of Fire was Hawks’s attempt to

right the wrongs of His Girl Friday. Most actors and actresses became famous after playing in

Hawks’s movies. Katherine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell and Barbara Stanywyck became the

epitomes of the Hawksian woman. In the movies, they were always on a par with their male

counterparts and usually led the action. This thesis will analyze the relationship between the

Hawksian woman and her male counterpart, focusing on the transition from the conventional

view of femininity towards its modern understanding.

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Chapter one

Bringing Up Baby

Bringing Up Baby (1938) was called a flop upon its release but later, after its rerelease in

the early 1940’s, it became very popular among the audience and the critics. Bringing up Baby is

perhaps the funniest of Hawks’s comedies but not the best. Again and again, after no matter how

many viewings, the viewer is delighted by small touches of comedy which are not limited to

statements. They include: elements of gesture, expression, intonation (Wood 68). As a screwball

comedy, the film explores the sexual tension between man and woman and the resulting battle

between sexes. The basis of the movie was a short story Hawks read in the Collins magazine

called “Bringing up Baby” written by Hagar Wild, which visibly differs from the movie. In the

short story David and Susan are engaged, he is not a scientist and there is no dinosaur, intercostal

clavicle or museum (Mast 5). This chapter examines gender relations between David and Susan

as well as Alice and Susan, focusing on the depiction of female characters in order to examine

the Hawksian woman and Katharine Hepburn’s performance in this role.

Bringing Up Baby is a story about David Huxley (Cary Grant), a paleontologist, who is

trying to reconstruct the skeleton of a brontosaurus and waits for the intercostal clavicle bone to

arrive from an exhibition, so that he can finish the work of his life. He is about to get married to

his assistant Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker) so his life has been rather stressful recently. With

his work, he is wants to impress Elizabeth Random (May Robson) who has announced a million

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dollar donation to a museum which deserves it most. Things get complicated when Susan Vance,

Mrs. Random’s niece (Katharine Hepburn), appears in his life and slowly starts to undermine all

of his ideas and wishes. Susan falls in love with David and actually stalks him all the time ,

hoping that he will fall in love with her too. Believing that he is a zoologist rather than a

paleontologist, she forces him into taking care of Baby, a tame leopard that Susan’s brother

Mark sent to Aunt Elizabeth. In the meantime, Elizabeth’s dog buries the missing brontosaurs’s

bone somewhere in their garden, which shatters David completely. Towards the end, David and

Susan free a circus leopard, thinking that it is their missing leopard Baby, which they lost earlier,

and eventually end up in prison because they broke into the house of Dr. Fritz Lehman (Fritz

Feld), where they cornered the animal. In jail, the policeman Constable Slocum (Walter Catlett)

does not believe their story in which Susan quotes sentences from motion pictures she has seen

and he does not believe that Elizabeth is her aunt. The situation is resolved when Alexander

Peabody (George Irving), Elizabeth’s secretary, arrives at the prison and confirms that their

stories are true. In the end, Susan finds David in his museum reconstructing his brontosaurus.

She has found the missing bone and, as she climbs the ladder to give it to David, the ladder starts

shaking and in panic she jumps on the skeleton, which collapses and in the last second David

saves her. Seeing his dream collapse in front of him, he finally admits that he cannot live without

her.

The world presented in Bringing Up Baby is built on oppositions and the first one to

mention is that between Alice and Susan, because it illustrates the progression from the woman

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tamed by society’s expectations to the woman liberated from societal pressure. Alice is David’s

fiancée, a mousy, serious and sexless woman, who respects his work more than she respects him

as a person. He wants to have a honeymoon but she considers it inappropriate and a waste of

time due to David’s ongoing research. Susan is a very energetic, independent and irresponsible

soul who only seeks love and fun. This opposition can be seen as Duty (conceived of as

deadeningly dry and repressive) vs. Nature (conceived of as amoral and entirely irresponsible)

(Wood 70). They might illustrate the transition from the old-fashioned woman to the modern

woman in terms of behavioral schemes and personal features, implying that the modern woman

is a free and independent person who is equal to her male partner. Alice and Susan can also be

viewed in Freudian terms; the Super-ego versus the Id (Wood 70-71). Alice is the superego that

tries to keep everything in perfect order, obeys the cultural rules and strives for excellence. She

does not give in to desires and stays calm and follows her ideal life. On the other hand, Susan is

the exact opposite because she has no plan to follow; she obeys her instinct and does what she

considers right. She is the Id and after she appears on the stage herself, she becomes an

inseparable part of David. The influence of both Susan and Alice on David is quite evident,

because he experiences the change from being similar to Alice in the beginning to Susan in the

end. The difference between Alice and Susan is symbolically expressed by the animals in the

movie. Alice is represented by the brontosaurus, long dead and extinct, while Susan is

represented by the leopard, which is lively and driven by the instinct.

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It is important to broaden the comparison between Susan and Alice and what they

represent to David. As mentioned above, Susan is a wild and dangerous animal, while Alice is

an extinct and static one. Before anything else the leopard is alive while the brontosaurus is

dead. The sexual struggle between Alice and Susan is represented as a confrontation between the

rationalist lady, all work and no play, who views marriage as a professional partnership

unencumbered by “domestic entanglements of any kind,” and a fast-talking dame with a natural

talent for game- and role-playing. This dame may be dizzy, but she is also determined to secure

her sexual choice—a man who does not want to play with her but whom she insists on having

(DiBattista 179). DiBattista also claims that if David followed Miss Swallow’s sexual rule, he

would have become an old fossil, the least impressive specimen of extinguished life in the

collection (200). Indeed, this would be David’s fate with Miss Alice Swallow, otherwise Susan’s

madcap pursuit of him would seem demented, lacking the sanction of Nature.

The relationship that David and Alice share is almost a pure business relation, without

any visible emotions. Alice is clearly the leader in their relationship and makes this known by

telling David what he has to do and how. Although David is surrounded by symbols of death: the

skeleton of the brontosaurus or the entire paleontological museum, ultimately, Alice signifies

lifelessness in his environment. He is very unhappy with her. When Alice says that they will not

have a honeymoon because they do not have enough time for it, David exhales in discomfort and

sadness, and replies that newlyweds always have it. When Alice reminds him that he has an

appointment with Mr. Peabody, David exclaims: “I’ll show him! I’ll wow him! I’ll knock him

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for a loop!” With this, David tries to show his desire to defeat Mr. Peabody and to show that he

is the dominant male on the golf course. She reacts in a very cold manner, prohibits him to use

slang and reminds him who he is and orders him to let Mr. Peabody win. The lack of sexual

affection is very evident. Holding the bone (in an erect state) in his hand, David is trying to

locate where it belongs and suggests to Alice that it might be a part of the tail:

David Huxley: ‘Alice, I think this one must belong in the tail.’ [Referring to a bone he is holding]

Alice Swallow: ‘Nonsense. You tried it in the tail yesterday, and it didn’t fit.’

This exchange, as innocent as it sounds, may carry another meaning. The word “tail” was used

in slang to refer to male genitals. The shot in which we see David with the bone looks as if he

were masturbating and clearly unhappy with Alice and her answer. Yet another shot that shows

the absence of affection between them is when Alice announces that their marriage is just a way

to help him in his work. She even takes it further and explains that their marriage must entail no

domestic entanglements of any kind, which means no sex and no children. For her, they already

have a child, which is, of course, the brontosaurus.

The war between genders applies to David and Susan’s relationship because it

exemplifies the reversal of power relations where the man is superior and the woman inferior . In

this respect, we truly see Susan as the model of the Hawksian woman as she is described by

DiBattista:

The Hawksian woman was a radical screen presence who existed apart or beyond the more stolid

conventions of movie womanhood. Unlike her counterparts in standard adventure films, whose

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characters conformed to flat stereotypes of ‘good’ woman or ‘bad’ girl, she was given

consequential roles to play and was ‘if anything, superior to the heroes’: ‘the good girl and the bad

girl are fused into a single, heroic heroine, who’s both sexual and valuable.’ And smart.

Experience is not lost on her, nor is she passive in confronting the physical and social facts of her

life. The Hawksian woman makes her choices ‘by personal will rather than by social and

economic pressures.’ However amateurish her pursuits might appear, she in fact exemplifies the

‘professional human being.’ (DiBattista 180)

“The Grant and Hepburn characters exist on different levels of reality” (Wood 71): Susan

perceives everything the way she wants it, while David sees things as they are. One of David’s

roles is to be Susan’s play toy, acting and feeling the way she wants him to, not the way he

would like to. Clearly, the woman decides about the course of action. David cannot get what he

wants unless Susan approves of it. When asked if he intentionally set out to humiliate Grant’s

character in Bringing Up Baby, Hawks, without second-guessing himself, simply admitted that

“anything we could do to humiliate him, to put him down and let her sail blithely along, made it

what I thought was funny. I think it is fun to have a woman dominant and let the man be

funniest” (DiBattista 129). Even though it might seem that the man in Hawk’s movie is the only

object of ridicule, it is not the case in the movie. “Fun is to be had by all, in the Hawksian sexual

universe, as long as the female is dominant. She is the blithe Prospero of comic misadventures,

and the male assumes the aspect of a risible creature (still, the best part of any comedy is

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proverbially the clown)” (DiBattista 193). It is obvious that the male character is not a joke. He

is a part of the whole comedy apparatus and not an outsider or a victim.

In terms of female dominance and power, the movie shows the progression from the old

times to the modern era in which women can be empowered and financially independent . This is

exemplified by an inconspicuous elderly lady, Aunt Elizabeth. Elizabeth Random is Susan’s

aunt. In the movie, she is first mentioned as the lady who is offering a million dollar donation to

a museum of her choice, which automatically implies that she is very rich and successful. Later

on, she proves to be influential when she arrives at the prison and demands from the policeman

to let her niece go or else he will lose his job. She is not an example of the Hawksian woman.

Her presence in the movie is justified by her material richness and allows to expand the issue of

female dominance. Considering the time in which the movie was made (the 1930’s which were

the period of the Great Depression), it was very unusual to see a rich woman in film. It is very

important to mention the hierarchy of the characters in relation to Aunt Elizabeth. Her secretary

is Mr. Peabody; she has enough influence to command the chief of the police station and is the

one who invites Major Applegate to a dinner. Elizabeth is apparently more dominant than the

three men and she proves that no man is as successful she is.

Susan dictates the pace of actions and is the driving force in the movie. All characters are

supposed to follow her will and the one who has to do it most often is, of course, David. After

she falls in love with him, she bends his will to her own and thus creates the storyline of their

relationship. Through their inevitable quarrels and problems, Susan starts to show the

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characteristics of the Hawksian woman. Simply put, Susan can be called a “man” in their

relationship. It is important, though, to define manhood at the times when the film was made. In

the 1930’s the traditional view of man was accepted by the society. In his essay Understanding

Manhood in America: The Elusive Quest for the Ideal in Masculinity, Robert G. Davis claims

that during the Great Depression men were the breadwinners and they had to provide for the

family (18). The Great Depression undermined the traditional notions of manhood. But with

women becoming more equal to men, men started to see women as a competition and started to

doubt their “manliness.”

Men felt they had lost status with their wives and children and saw themselves as impotent. A new

competition arose, not only between ethnic groups vying for the same jobs, but also with women

who were sharing the workforce with men. With the unemployment ranks among men numbering

about ten million with the same number of women working, there was a wide-scale attitude

among men that women should be fired so they could go to work themselves . After all, women

were not supposed to be working anyway. (Davis 11)

Many women were working, but the ones who did not have jobs were usually the mothers taking

care of children. Faced with poverty, women were pressuring and blaming their husbands as if

they were responsible for the lack of jobs in the market, and with it provoking constant

arguments. Men had lost their two foundations of identity: profession and family.

One very interesting aspect of the difference between Susan and David is fear. It is

assumed that women tend to be more afraid than men when facing danger. In the movie, it is the

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opposite, especially after the introduction of Baby, the leopard. In this part of the movie we see

Susan calling David, explaining that he needs to come to her place in order to rescue her from a

leopard attack. In fact, the leopard did not attack her but she invented the situation in order to get

his attention and draw him to her. Upon his arrival, David does not encounter Baby right away

and tells Susan that the lie was unnecessary. In order to prove that she was telling the truth, she

says that Baby is in the bathroom. An alarming situation occurs and the man is presented as

agitated. As David enters the bathroom, he sees Baby and out of fear quickly shuts the door.

Susan decides to open the bathroom door and let the leopard out, which makes David jump onto

a table. With this act, we see that David shows more fear of Baby, especially in comparison with

Susan who decides to stay right next to the animal. Angered with her decision to let Baby out,

David leaves her apartment followed by Baby. Once again, Susan is depicted as the dominant

party, apparently not showing any fear of the animal.

The leopard’s name indicates something very interesting to examine. Parenthood is

something which materializes in Susan’s and David’s relationship. Susan is the caring mother,

the one who tries to get David into sharing the care of Baby. David says “I don’t want anything

to do with a leopard,” claiming that he only has two things to accomplish: to complete the

brontosaurus skeleton and to get married. Susan, though represented as a flapper, shows great

interest in Baby’s well-being. She needs David as the male parent. She is not able to “bring up”

Baby alone. It is clear that David is the one who is afraid of parenting. Jumping on the table, he

lifts the dinosaur bone in the air, symbolically showing that his career is more important to him

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than anything else. In the process of seducing David into parenting, Susan assumes the active

role. After some time, David also actively engages into taking care of Baby and accepts his

responsibility in the end, as his and Susan’s opposing attitudes unite and he joins Susan in the

search for Baby.

After Susan has persuaded David to go to Massachusetts and leave Baby at her Aunt’s

farm, they travel together in a car. They make a quick stop to buy some meat for Baby, and in

this situation we see Susan as a dominant character again. Interestingly enough, David enters the

shop in order to buy the food and not Susan. While David is in the store, Susan Shows the

decline of the female “purity” as she commits a crime. Susan is asked by the local deputy why

she parked her car in front of a fire plug, which is forbidden. She quickly reacts and lies that her

car is the one next to the badly parked one. The contrast between the old-fashioned woman and

the modern woman becomes even more apparent as Susan proves that she is capable to

everything what a man can do. As David exits the store, Susan swiftly leads him to the other car

and they drive away. The viewer sees Susan commit a serious crime – stealing a car. On the road

they get into a small quarrel about the stolen vehicle. Not paying attention to the road ahead,

Susan almost hits a truck, with a load of chickens, but eventually evades it. Unfortunately, the

truck turns over and the chickens fall out, which awaken the wild instinct in Baby. As it getting

ready to jump out of the car to hunt the chickens, Susan reacts quickly and grabs its tail, and with

David’s help she manages to stop the animal. At the farm, the quarrel about the stolen car is

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over, but the peace between them does not last for long. Soon after Baby escapes and they join

forces to search for the leopard.

With the introduction of Major Applegate into the movie, a new interpretative possibility

opens. Aunt Elizabeth invites Applegate to dinner and through him another feature of

masculinity is introduced. First of all, we see that his character is the type of man who claims to

know everything. When Susan announces that David is a hunter, Aunt Elizabeth says that the

major is one as well and the major starts a conversation on the topic of hunting. During that

conversation, he pretends to know how to produce sounds of different animals and that he has

been hunting all over the world. The viewer, however, soon realizes that this is not true and that

he is only a poseur. It is important to understand a man’s behavior when he is surrounded by

women. Traditional societies seem to value men’s skillfulness and achievement, in this way

defining “the real man.” Aunt Elizabeth is truly amazed by major Applegate’s stories, while

Susan does not seem to care much, and the difference between old-fashioned and modern woman

becomes apparent. The modern woman is someone who chooses a partner considering more

qualities than just success and financial stability, as it used to be the case before. More and more

often women seek emotional value in their relationships. From the 1930’s onwards, finding a

soul-mate and a friend in a man started to be much more important to them than finding

somebody who will provide for them or will be able to talk about “molecular biology ,” for

instance (Fisher 35). This is important to mention because in Susan we see a woman who wants

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her husband to be a friend of hers, someone she can talk to and have fun with instead of just a

rich man.

In the prison scene, most of the actors appear and try to solve the problem of the leopard.

Susan and David are in the main focus of the shot. There, Susan shows another side of her; the

noir woman. In an attempt to get them out of jail, she starts to use phrases from noir motion

pictures that she has seen and makes up a story about “Swinging door” Susie and the leopard

gang. When she explains it, David adds in a joking manner that her accomplices are Mickey the

mouse and Donald the duck, which later take the human forms of Jerry the Nipper and Don

Swan. During her noir speech, Susan presents herself as very masculine and bossy, ordering

everyone around. Putting herself in the position of a boss, she once again takes the lead. It is

easy to identify the image of a flapper in her acting. She asks for a cigarette before she starts

talking about her and her gang (flappers are well known for smoking in public, while the

lightening up of a cigarette is usually present in Hawks’s films). It is very interesting to observe

Katharine Hepburn in her role because she needs to act as the opposite gender, trying to put up

the noir woman against the flapper. She embodies the true meaning of a flapper; the liberated

woman who drinks and smokes in public, wears fashionable clothes, and chooses her sexual

partners.

Susan obviously loves the way gangsters talk. Dr. David Huxley, her unwitting accomplice in

crime, can’t get a word in edgewise during her jailhouse riff. He is reduced to spluttering

amazement that anyone would listen to, much less speak, such nonsense. Susan likes gangsters

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not just because it is amusing, although it is fun to poke fun at constables, as every self-

respecting, law-breaking comedy can tell you. She also likes this talk because it allows her,

through language (which is the safest way) to try on an identity or to flirt with an existence

beyond, or rather beneath, her usual range of acquaintance. (DiBattista 52)

http://girlsdofilm.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/bringing-up-baby-20.jpg

Hawks’s structuring of the film is very symmetrical, which means that most actions in

the movie follow a scheme from A to B. The most noticeable symmetry is the one between

David’s scientific order slowly evolving into Susan’s vital order. In the beginning, David’s

museum is a vast space where time stands still and which is filled with petrified dead things . The

brontosaurus serves as a reminder for David that his life is motionless, dead and almost over.

The first shot of David represents him as Rodin’s The Thinker, because he is also lifeless and

apparently thinks about finishing the brontosaurus skeleton. Nothing seems to live in this room,

which is ironic because the purpose of a museum is the study of different forms of life . Susan is

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the person who introduces some movement into the museum. While climbing the ladder to give

the recovered bone to David, she starts swaying from one side to the other. David also starts to

follow her movements with his head and adds to the motion effect. The shift from death to life

shows David’s change after meeting Susan. She is the reason why he finally discovers what is

interesting in life and what the real values of life are, such as joy, laughter, freedom, etc.

The clothing plays a big role in the film, as it is conventionally related to femininity and

masculinity attributes. In the beginning of the movie David’s clothing is conventional. When in

his museum, David is dressed in a researcher outfit, on the golf course in casual sportswear and

during a celebrity dinner in a tuxedo. Apparently, he follows the expected dressing codes of the

places he is at. However, the most important scene is when David takes a shower and Susan

hides his clothes, probably hoping to see him naked. In the bathroom, he finds a woman’s

marabou-trimmed negligee and decides to rather wear it then to be naked. What follows is a big

moment in the cinematographic history. Aunt Elizabeth rings on the door and he goes to open it

and she asks him what the problem with his clothing is; due to all the stress Susan has caused

him, he answers “Because I just went gay all of a sudden!” Critics still disagree whether that was

the first on-screen use of the word “gay” in a homosexual context, but obviously female clothes

on a man were not justified, because a man was supposed to wear men’s clothes. Hawks uses

this scene as a proof that even though he gives the female character full control, shown by

Susan`s hiding of David`s clothes, it does not automatically mean that the man loses his

masculinity. Additionally, David in order to protect his masculinity demands male clothes with a

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very decisive attitude. As one can notice, wearing female clothes does not make the man less

masculine; however, it influences other people’s opinion about his sexuality.

Mrs. Random: ‘Well who are you?’

David Huxley: ‘I don’t know. I’m not quite myself today.’

Mrs. Random: ‘Well, you look perfectly idiotic in those clothes.’

David Huxley: ‘These aren’t my clothes.’

Mrs. Random: ‘Well, where are your clothes?’

David Huxley: ‘I’ve lost my clothes!’

Mrs. Random: ‘But why are you wearing these clothes?’

David Huxley: ‘Because I just went gay all of a sudden!’

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_QqvfSFxx5rI/SAGg1oM0SQI/AAAAAAAADcU/Jmg9HdBtZXg/s320/09GAY.jpg

Apparently, Hawks was among the first directors who introduced a modified and modern

image of a woman into film, one who is confident and is ready to be the dominant gender. She is

not afraid to take action and risk in order to achieve her goal. Unlike old fashioned women, she

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takes up a hunt for her perfect male partner and goes to extreme levels in order to accomplish it.

Susan is a spirited woman who knows her possibilities and is keen on chasing them without

thinking that she might fail. She clearly shows her dominance over the outer world and does not

follow orders. The male role in Bringing Up Baby serves as an entity through which the main

female character satisfies her desires. Katharine Hepburn was a perfect cast for this role due to

her energetic spirit and her ways of making people laugh. Her unique approach towards the role

of Susan gave the movie an incredible power and made the character very believable. One could

say that Katharine Hepburn was a Hawksian woman even in her real life and therefore had no

problem with playing the role. The duo of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant were cast together

more than once and every time they did a splendid job.

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Chapter two

His Girl Friday

Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday was released in 1940. The film is based on a play, The

Front Page, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. In the movie, one of the protagonists

was changed to a female. Hawks came up with such an idea during auditions when his secretary

read the reporter’s lines. As a result, the script was rewritten and the female character became

the ex-wife of the male character. Hawks had difficulties casting the movie. He decided to cast

Cary Grant as the male protagonist, while an actress for the movie was not so easy to find.

According to an August 1939 news item in Hollywood Reporter, the production was postponed

due to the lack of the actress. Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Joan Crawford and

Katharine Hepburn were considered for the role but all of them declined and said that the role

was too small. Finally, Rosalind Russell accepted it and the production began. This chapter

focuses on the gender roles and gender equality as represented by Rosalind Russell and Cary

Grant.

With the switch to a female character, Hawks intended to create a series of sexual

tensions throughout the story, constructing a prominent element of romance in the story as

Walter attempts to win back Hildy. Hawks also creates a dynamic that challenges the sexual

politics and gender issues of the time. Hildy wants to fulfill her womanhood by marrying Bruce

and thus becoming a conventional housewife and mother. However, her feminine identity also

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depends on her being a newspaperwoman and she needs to succeed as a female in a male-

dominated profession. Hildy’s feminine identity, which she finally accepts, defies traditional

gender roles of the 1940s. Her character is a liberated woman, one who does not need male

guidance anymore. She manages to do everything on her own and usually succeeds. The image

of the female journalist is important because it has the ability to show women that they are as

competent as men and should demand equality. A fellow journalist says, “Can you picture Hildy

singin’ lullabies and hanging out diapers?” Her job as a “newspaperman” challenges the myths

about the sexes and presents Hildy as an intelligent, independent woman who is fighting for her

place in a male-dominated world. She has the choice between an old fashioned marriage and a

modern career as a “newspaperman”; she decides on the less “feminine” one. His Girl Friday,

with the stress on female independence, can be considered a feminist film which was targeted at

the traditional gender roles long before it became more common in Hollywood.

Before analyzing the movie itself, a short digression about the relationship between the

casting crew and the director should be made. Their relationship is important because Hawks

encouraged the actors to improvise on set and so produced a unique real feeling for the viewer.

Russell saw that Hawks treated her as an also-ran1 and she confronted him: “You don’t want me,

do you? Well, you’re stuck with me, so you might as well make the most of it.” In her

autobiography, Russell wrote that her role didn’t have as many good lines as Grant’s so she had

a writer improve her dialogues. It becomes obvious that she wanted more equality with the male

1 Someone in a competition who is unlikely to do well or who has failed.

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character. Hawks’s screwball comedies are known for being fast paced. In an interview with

Peter Bogdanovich, Hawks said: “I had noticed that when people talk, they talk over one

another, especially people who talk fast or who are arguing or describing something. So we

wrote the dialogue in a way that made the beginnings and ends of sentences unnecessary; they

were there for overlapping” (Who the Devil made it, Knopf). Grant’s character makes a few

inside remarks in the movie. Grant thus describes Bellamy’s character: “He looks like that fellow

in the movies, you know...Ralph Bellamy!” When Grant’s character is arrested, he talks about

the bad fate of the last person that crossed him, Archie Leach, which is Grant’s real name.

Another remark is when Grant says: “Get back in there, you Mock Turtle”, as he played the

mock turtle in Alice in Wonderland from 1933. The purpose of this part is to present Hawks’s

idea of dialogue in this movie, so as to show his passion for incorporating people and objects

from the real world.

His Girl Friday is a film about journalism, love, corruption and injustice. The plot

revolves around a divorced couple; Walter Burns (Cary Grant) and Hildegard “Hildy” Johnson

(Rosalind Russell). The movie starts with Hildy arriving at Walter’s office at The Morning Post

to inform him that she is about to marry Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) and leave with him for

Albany. This news shocks Walter and he starts plotting against their marriage. He reminds Hildy

that being a reporter is her true passion and that she should not give up on it for anything in the

world. He offers to sign a life insurance policy with Bruce for a big amount of money, but in

return Hildy has to write one more story. The story is about Earl Williams (John Qualen), a man

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who shot a police man and was sentenced to death by hanging. Walter even sets up Bruce and

the latter gets arrested over and over again, just to keep Hildy near him. The situation escalates

and Williams escapes custody and comes to the office where Hildy has been writing the story

about him. Walter and Hildy hide Williams in a desk in order to use his capture as a big front

page on their newspaper: “Morning Post arrests the murderer Earl Williams.” Major Fred

(Clarence Kolb) and Sheriff Peter B. Hartwell (Gene Lockhart) want the people to vote for them

in order to win the next election, therefore they want to use the execution to gain votes. They try

to bribe a messenger who is carrying the reprieve from the governor, which announces that

Williams is innocent. Luckily, the messenger comes back to the office and gives the reprieve to

Walter and Hildy and so they manage to set Williams free. After that, Walter proposes to

remarry Hildy, promising her that this time they will have a honeymoon and he will be a better

husband.

Walter Burns is the main editor and head of The Morning Post. The viewer can instantly

see that Walter is egoistic and does not care about the feelings of others. He is unscrupulous and

does not show a hint of conscience or sympathy for others. He treats people poorly and Hildy

even tells him “Walter, you are wonderful in a loathsome sort of way.” But apart from his bad

sides, the viewer can see important characteristics of the modern man. In professional terms, he

treats Hildy as equal, trusts in her skills and praises her success. He disregards Hildy’s gender

completely and in this way he shows that women are as capable as men. He is still in love with

her and does not want to let her go. In order for him to live a normal life, he needs Hildy to fill

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both the private and the business environment. Walter’s need of female support in his life is very

important. He cannot live without Hildy and admits it: “Sorta wish you hadn’t done that,

Hildy… Divorced me. Makes a fella lose all faith in himself. Gives him a... almost gives him a

feeling he wasn’t wanted.”

Hildy Johnson is the best reporter that The Morning Post has ever had. Throughout the

movie, the viewer can see her struggle between being a professional and a woman. This is

caused by two facts: she is the best reporter at the newspaper and she wants to be a domestic

wife. She wants to abandon the profession in order to be a true woman. Her colleagues consider

her more a pal than a woman. The change in her behavior is apparent when she is with them

because she immediately adapts their language. A reporter asks her where she bought her hat and

she answers that she paid twelve bucks for it. Hildy tells a journalist that she could use him for a

bridesmaid if he wants to be at her wedding. Hildy is basically one of the boys. One of the

reporters calls her by her full name “Hildegard,” it becomes obvious how strong their mutual

acceptance is: they can even joke with her about her having an unusual woman’s name. They

invite her to join their poker game and read her interview with the condemned murderer in tones

of awed reverence. They believe that Hildy should not become a home-staying wife and mother

due to her professional skills: “I still say that anybody who can write like that isn’t going to give

it up permanently to sew socks for a guy in the insurance business.” To stress her importance as

a Hawksian woman, she is associated with two stereotyped extremes of female conduct: the

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female who is a victim of men and the dominating woman who accepts her own exploitation in

order to manipulate men.

Hildy is not scared of men and is ready to face them head on. After Walter breaks his part

of the deal, she gets enraged and attacks him quite offensively:

Now, get this, you double-crossing chimpanzee: There ain’t going to be any interview and there

ain’t going to be any story. And that certified check of yours is leaving with me in twenty

minutes. I wouldn’t cover the burning of Rome for you if they were just lighting it up. If I ever lay

my two eyes on you again, I’m gonna walk right up to you and hammer on that monkeyed skull of

yours ‘til it rings like a Chinese gong!

Her feminine features are suppressed in different situations. In an attempt to get the latest news

on William’s escape, she courageously jumps onto a man who has the information about

Williams.

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Hildy and Walter are almost always involved in some sort of fight. At the beginning of

the movie, when Hildy arrives at Walter’s office, they engage in a rapid-fire dialogue which is

unique to Hawks’s comedies. Even though they are arguing, the passion they display indicates

that they still are a couple and the viewer might ask themselves why they divorced at all . In the

opening conversation, Walter and Hildy talk about the times when they were together, about the

current situation and about a possible future. Throughout their conversation, Walter seems to be

the one who feels more regretful about the divorce. He even says: “You’ve got an old fashioned

idea divorce is something that lasts forever, ‘til death do us part.’ Why divorce doesn’t mean

anything nowadays, Hildy, just a few words mumbled over you by a judge. We’ve got

something between us nothing can change.” In this way, he wants to tell her that they are still a

team, both professionally and romantically. On the contrary, Hildy shows no remorse

whatsoever and it appears that she is not interested in him anymore. Throughout the movie,

Walter is trying to get Hildy back and she starts to feel that she means a lot to him. In one scene,

when Hildy insists on going away with Bruce, Walter grabs her hands and starts moving around

with her as if they were dancing, telling her what she can achieve if he stays with him. She

seems very happy about what she hears from him and starts believing that with him she can get

both the career and the husband she wants. After her acceptance of Walter at the end, she also

gets disappointed right away because Walter says that once again they will not have the

honeymoon due to the strike in Albany. Walter shows the signs that he might still have the “old

Walter” in him.

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Hildy is caught between profession and domesticity and has difficulty deciding which is

better for her. It is obvious that she loves her career, and it is quite strange that she wants to

abandon it. A possible reason might be her unsuccessful relationship with Walter. Even though

she loves her job as a newspaperwoman, she cannot pursue her career because it is directly

linked to Walter. Her only choice, as it seems, is to run away from both. She cannot follow her

career anymore because she is unable to separate Walter from profession. At the moments when

she discovers something new about Earl Williams, the first thing she does is call Walter to share

the news. In one scene, somebody else picks up Walter’s phone and Hildy says “Tell him I need

him.” This message conveys two meanings. One is to inform Walter about the latest news on

Williams, while the other is a statement that she needs Walter in her life. Even though they are

not together, she needs his help in order to make use of the information she gets. On the

contrary, with Bruce she could have a happy marriage and children to take care of. She wants to

be a “woman” instead of a “news-getting machine”; she wants to have babies and “watch their

teeth grow.” She claims that this is what she really wants but all her actions speak against it . It is

also hard for her to separate herself from the desire to be a successful woman in order to be a

housewife. Hildy seems incapable of using the best out of both; to stay with Walter as reporter

and Bruce as husband.

The fact that Hildy is treated by her colleagues as one of them deprives her of the

privileges which are reserved for women. Some of the film’s humor lies in the frustration of

Hildy’s desire to be “feminine,” to have men light her cigarettes and open doors for her. In one

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scene, she gallantly holds open a gate for Walter, who cheerfully acknowledges her gesture. He

then proceeds through the next gate without holding it, with the tracking camera movement

leaving Hildy behind as thoughtlessly as Walter does. Walter’s conscious abuse of the rules of

chivalry: wearing his hat while with Hildy, grabbing her light for his own cigarette, laughing

while she struggles with a heavy suitcase, emphasizes the fact that Hildy must struggle to remain

a part of the men’s world.

Hildy is torn between Walter and Bruce, just as she is unsure which of the two possible

paths for her to follow. One is to remain a newspaperwoman who works for The Morning Post

and so enjoy a professional life. She is a reporter out of passion and this is why the choice is so

difficult for her. Sometimes her longing to be just a traditional woman is stronger than

professional dedication and she wants to quit. But Walter constantly reminds her that quitting the

job would kill her. This is debatable since she clearly states that she wants to get married and

have children, but on the other hand, she works with such passion that quitting seems quite

illogical. The other path for Hildy is to become a domestic woman who takes care of her children

and brings them up. It might be said that she sees in Bruce all the good things that she did not see

in Walter. If we remember that she is Walter’s ex-wife, we could say that he has the upper hand

over Bruce since he knows her so well. Near the end of the film, it becomes evident that the

newspaperman wins. While writing the story about Williams, she is not even listening to what

Bruce is saying to her. The immersion in her work overtakes all her intentions of being a

traditional woman and she decides to be with Walter. This said, one could raise the question why

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Hildy chooses between Walter and Bruce at all. Why does not she leave them both if neither can

offer what she really needs?

http:// en.wikipedia.org/

wiki/

His_Girl_Friday#mediaviewer/File:His_Girl_Friday_still_2.jpg

Hildy’s choice in the end is Walter. It is necessary to analyze her decision, because she

chose something with which she was not happy in the first place. In the final scene, Hildy starts

to cry, which indicates that she renounces what she was eagerly fighting for and accepts the life

that she had before. Walter again gives up the honeymoon in order to cover the story of a strike

in Albany. Hildy receives the same treatment she had before without any change in Walter’s

behavior. She will be again the submissive partner who has to do as the boss tells her. This can

put Hawks’s idea of gender equality under great discussion. With Hildy’s decision to come back

to Walter, Hawks shows her as someone who has failed to achieve her goal. The clash between

sexes becomes apparent again and it goes against the plot of the movie which in a big degree

highlights gender equality. The end of the movie is open for interpretation and so allows the

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viewer to create a possible ending. The viewer sees only the beginning of their new relationship

and maybe Walter will treat Hildy better than before.

Hawks’s idea of the equality of genders is present throughout the movie. At the

beginning of the movie, when Hildy is entering The Morning Post, the scene is focused on the

workers. It follows Hildy from left to right, emphasizing the journalists. The press room is full of

people and similar numbers of men and women can be seen. Hawks tries to balance gender

presence in most of his movies in order to emphasize equality. Interestingly, he does not only

highlight the main female characters, but also the ones that are of small or no importance for the

movie’s plot as seen in the following pictures.

http:// static.rogerebert.com/

redactor_assets/pictures/scanners/opening-shots-his-girl-friday/hisgirl15.jpg

http:// static.rogerebert.com/

redactor_assets/ pictures/scanners/opening-shots-

his-girl-friday/ hisgirl3.jpg

I want to consider now the

differences arising from the change of the

main character’s sex. This change might

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seem surprising unless we remember that this is a movie by Hawks, who often “played” with

genders: Hildy is far more domineering, confident, and self-reliant (“I can handle him,” she tells

Bruce about Walter) than her male counterpart in The Front Page. But even though she is a

Hawksian woman, independent and aggressive, she is always intensely feminine and Hildy’s

femininity is crucial. It makes the reporters’ admiration for her immediately justified. Hawks

manages to show both genders through Hildy: “she is twice the man Pat O’Brien was (Hildy’s

male version in The Front Page), yet she never ceases to be very much a woman” (Wood 74).

Her femininity makes her desire to be respectable, to lead a halfway normal life, to “have babies

and take care of them and give them cod liver oil” more important to her. It also adds a new

dimension to the camaraderie in the press-room. The change of the main character’s sex allows

us to compare her with Mollie Malloy, the conventional woman.

Mollie Malloy is a character who ends her life because of human wickedness. She is

considered to be Williams’s lover. The viewer does not get to know about their real relationship.

Mollie is introduced in the office where the journalists are. She asks them not to write untrue

stories about Williams in order to prevent his execution. Mollie tells them that she saw Earl only

once when she picked him up from the street after he lost his job. They start teasing her that she

feels something for him and one reporter even tells her: “Keep your shirt on.” She says that Earl

treated her like a human being and not like as animal. It is hinted a few times that she is a

prostitute. Later in the movie, when Earl escapes and hides in the reporters’ office, Mollie again

appears there and meets him. When the reporters come back, they almost find out that Williams

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is hiding there and they start questioning Hildy about it. In an attempt to turn their attention away

from Hildy, Mollie tells them that she is the only one who knows where Earl is hiding but she

will not reveal this. She quickly rushes to the window and jumps out. Everybody comes to the

window and looks down at her body. However, it is uncertain whether she is dead or not.

Mollie’s role in the film is to serve as Hildy’s antithesis. Critics have discussed Mollie as

an important part of the movie. I. D. MacKillop claims that Mollie is intentionally eliminated

from the film (when she jumps out of the window) so that patriarchy can triumph (189-190).

Tom Powers points out that Mollie is nothing more than a stereotypical hysteric who fails to

meet the expectations of men—those that Hildy does meet (25-28). Mollie illustrates

stereotypical femininity, which stands for sexuality, tenderness, and emotion. So perceived,

femininity can either be degraded within patriarchy or completely removed. The film shows a

version of femininity that has a minor role within patriarchy, implied in the film as “the

country,” or Albany, or in Mollie’s case, the “warm room” in which she can sooth Earl, who is

suffering in the face of a social system they both understand as cruel, dishonest, and

unreasonable. Except for Hildy, the film depicts femininity as passive and even absent outside of

the social sphere. In the film’s terms, the femininity that Hildy wants to achieve does not have a

place within the spheres of engagement and agency (politics and newspaper business). It has to

be moved to the periphery (i.e. the country or Albany), the place of domesticity, which

represents passivity. The film codes these feminine spaces as so passive, in fact, that they begin

to signify death (Cavell 348-351).

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Another minor female character is Mrs. Baldwin (Alma Kruger), Bruce’s mother. Her

part in the movie is very small and purposefully funny. She comes to the office to tell Hildy that

she should not leave Bruce unattended and that she is not good enough to become his wife . Mrs.

Baldwin represents the possible future of Hildy if she chooses to marry Bruce. Mrs. Baldwin is a

caring mother, one who is constantly running after her child in order to protect him from any

possible harm. Hildy even addresses her as mother, but Mrs. Baldwin tells her: “Don’t you

mother me.” Still, one could argue that Hildy’s failure to take care of Bruce signifies her

probable failure as a mother to her children.

One presence in the movie threatens to undermine Hawks’s idea of the equality of the

sexes. It is the off-screen wife of Mr. Pettibone, the courier. He always talks about what his wife

has told him to do and that he is following her instructions. She represents female dominance

over her husband, suggesting the notion of male incompetence and powerlessness. Through her

character, Hawks tries to show that gender equality is a difficult topic and should be handled by

people who know how to deal with it. Judging by how Pettibone speaks, “his wife strikes even at

the male’s interpretation of himself, not just his sexual identity, but also the identity he achieves

through what he does” (Powers 22).

Walter tries everything to prevent Hildy from going away. He arranges for Bruce to go to

prison a couple of times; he constantly reminds Hildy that she is the best “newspaperman” he has

ever had. DiBattista observes:

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To reduce grandiloquent Mephistopheles to a scandal-mongering town snitch is one way to

contain the menace of Walter’s unmorality. You needn’t exorcize the devil; only familiarize

yourself with the local demon and his typical mischief. At this moment Mr. Burns, in the

discharge of his high calling, stands in the door, nerveless and meditative as a child, his mind

open to such troubles as he can find or create. Hawks adapts this characterization, and though he

doesn’t dispute Walter’s devilish mischievousness, he does endow him with thought, point, and

purpose beyond the childish motive of finding or creating trouble. To appreciate this complication

in his character we need only remember that Hildy earlier had said that she, too, had

metaphorically jumped out a window to escape her life with Walter. Hawks doesn’t dwell on

Hildy’s motives nor on Mollie’s impulsiveness, but by connecting Mollie’s literal jump and

Hildy’s metaphorical one he does alert us to the possibility that Walter may pose a real danger for

Hildy. (276)

As DiBattista says, Walter appears to present a real threat to Hildy and her future life. The use of

“jumping out of the window” is a form of liberation for both Hildy and Mollie. Hildy jumped out

of Walter’s clutches in order to save herself, while Mollie jumped out in order to save someone

else’s life.

His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby are very similar movies. They both revolve

around the issue of gender equality. In both movies, the female characters want to have a

peaceful and happy life, close to their husbands and future children. The choice of partner is

another similar issue; Susan wants David to leave Alice and become her husband, while Hildy

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wants to become Bruce’s wife and leave Walter. Even though the films are similar, the

difference between them is enormous. First of all, in His Girl Friday the public sphere is much

more explored than in Bringing Up Baby. In the restaurant scene Hildy, Bruce and Walter are

having a talk; in The Morning Post there is a lot of workers, in the office there are a lot of

reporters. This creates the possibility of interconnecting characters. Bringing Up Baby, on the

other hand, due to its story, does not create enough space for drama. His Girl Friday, in a sense,

tries to tone down the misbehaviors present in Bringing Up Baby. It is easier for the viewer to

admire Hildy’s struggle between being a “newspaperman” or a traditional woman than Susan’s

attempts to make David fall in love with her because His Girl Friday has a stronger social

context. Susan is more childlike and resolute in contrast to Hildy who behaves like an adult, but

struggles with the decisions an adult has to make. Nevertheless, both movies tackle the issue of

gender equality with equal seriousness.

His Girl Friday introduced something new to films about journalism: a female

protagonist. Indeed, it is one of the first movies dealing with journalism in which the main

character is a woman.

One of the very first female journalists on screen – Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson in His Girl

Friday – appears to the contemporary gaze as a rare example from that period in American culture

of strong, powerful woman working extremely effectively in a man’s world, combating

patriarchal prejudice with exemplary professional ability, and balancing her own desire for family

with that for a successful career (Allan 391).

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Considering that Hildy is a professional in her field, she represents the educated woman who

earns her own money and she is not dependent on someone else’s income. Her character presents

an image of equality between men and women. She can do the same tasks as efficiently as men.

His Girl Friday is one of Howard Hawks’s best screwball comedies. It combines

elements of comedy, drama, tragedy, while maintaining a clear structure. The movie contains an

interesting combination of stories: the salvation of Earl Williams from execution and, more

importantly, the relationship of Walter and Hildy. Hawks has shown that women are as capable

as men and should not encounter prejudice. Walter’s negative features aside, he is a man who

respects the abilities of his ex-wife and tries to keep her in the professional domain, which is

populated by men. Rosalind Russell, though she was not the first choice for the role, confirmed

her reputation as one of the quickest fast-talking dames. Hildy represents both the successful

businesswoman and the traditional home-staying mother. His Girl Friday shows a strong woman

who can compete with men while keeping her feminine sides. Hildy’s choice between the public

or business domain signifies the difficulties women had in the times when they were getting a

more equal status to men. In the movie it is displayed as a struggle between traditional and

modern views of femininity and all it entails. Hildy Johnson “battled” her way through the men’s

world in order to become a “true” woman and so earned her place among the memorable

Hawksian women.

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Chapter three

Ball Of Fire

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Howard Hawks’s Ball Of Fire was made in 1941. Similarly to Bringing Up Baby, Ball Of

Fire was also based on a short story. The story was written by Billy Wilder. The script for the

movie was written by Charles Brackett, Thomas Monroe, and Billy Wilder. The film is very

similar to Hawks’s other comedies. It bears the biggest resemblance to Bringing up Baby: it

could almost be seen as a way to right the imbalances that characterize the earlier film

(Wood 95). Again, the Hawksian clash of opposite worlds is present: on the one hand, a world of

serious (even absurd) dedication to learning, and on the other, a world of total irresponsibility, as

in the case of Susan and David from Bringing Up Baby. Ball Of Fire was a big success, possibly

due to the fact that Hawks employed two established partners; Gary Cooper and Barbara

Stanwyck, who starred together in the movie Meet Jon Doe. The movie also shared the casting

problem for the female character of His Girl Friday. The female role was offered to many

actresses, who declined, and then finally was accepted by Barbara Stanwyck, who was

recommended to Hawks by Cooper. This chapter examines Barbara Stanwyck’s role in the

movie and her relationship to male and female characters.

Ball Of Fire is a typical Hawksian screwball comedy. Right after the introduction of both

the male and the female characters, it becomes obvious that they will get together as a couple. As

in Hawks’s comedies before, the female character dominates the male to such a degree that he

becomes her follower. It is a well-known “man vs. woman” scenario that has been repeatedly

employed in Hawks’s films and became his trademark. Still, compared with his previous

movies, Ball Of Fire lacks the symptomatic rapid-fire dialogue and frantic pacing. McCarthy

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points out that the movie misses the fast-paced talks, but achieves a comic effect in presenting

the relationship between Cooper and Stanwyck. Hawks defended the unusual pacing of the film

and said, “When you’ve got professors speaking lines, they can’t speak ’em like crime

reporters,” and added that “it didn’t have the same reality as the other comedies, and we couldn’t

make it go with the same speed” (McCarthy 326). The film is considered to be a different type of

comedy when compared with his previous films, but it still is a good film which shows Hawks’s

maturity as a film director.

The film features a group of professors whose task is to write a new encyclopedia with

the financial support of the late Daniel S. Totten. After his death, his daughter continues to

supervise the progress of their work. At the beginning of the movie, she arrives at their library to

inform them that they have already spent an outrageous amount of money and the encyclopedia

needs to be finished soon. The group consists of eight professors, each a specialist in a different

field. The main character is professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper). He is a grammarian and is

currently doing research on slang. He conducts research on the streets and usually listens to

people while they are unaware of his attention. He then invites the ones with the richest

vernacular to the library so that he can analyze words and phrases unknown to him . The

professor once visits a night club and becomes fascinated by the language of the singer. After the

show, he goes to the backstage room in order to invite her for the research project . The singer is

Katherine “Sugarpuss” O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck). She is about to be interrogated by the police

for a crime that her boyfriend committed. She is in the room with two bodyguards who have

44

been employed by her boyfriend. Potts knocks on the door and the two bodyguards hide to

prepare for an ambush, thinking that it is a police officer. Katherine opens the door and starts to

talk with Potts. Until the end of the conversation, Katherine thinks that he is a “bull” until she

asks him: “Say, are you a bull or aren’t you?” He responds: “Well, if bull is the slang word for

professor, then I’m a bull.” She declines his invitation. As she is closing the door, he manages to

give her his business card and tell her that in case she changes her mind, she should feel free to

come to the address. While Potts is leaving her, the police officers arrive at the backstage just to

find an empty room, as Katherine has just through the window.

Katherine drives around the town with her bodyguards. They tell her that the police are

after them and that there is no place for her to hide for the time being. She remembers Potts and

decides to go to his place. As she arrives at the professors’ library, she is welcomed by all eight

professors. She says that she has changed her mind and wants to help with the research on slang,

but on condition that she will stay at their place. Potts insists that she cannot stay, but the other

professors convince him not to send the beautiful lady out in the cold. After waking up, she joins

Potts and the others to help them with the issues of slang. She brings chaos to the work of the

professors, because they admire her very much and do not focus on work anymore. As she is

very beautiful and interesting, Potts gradually falls in love with her. In the meantime, her

boyfriend is in the court and learns that if Katherine becomes his wife, she cannot testify against

him. He immediately offers to marry her and she accepts. The problem is that Potts has also

proposed to marry her. In a phone call, Lilac introduces himself to the professors as Katherine’s

45

father and demands from them to bring her to him, so that she can marry in her hometown. The

professors do not know that Lilac uses them only to escort Katherine and that he wants to marry

her. On the way they have a car accident and decide to stay in a motel until their car is repaired .

Potts gets to know the truth about Katherine and Lilac and decides to give her up. In the end,

Katherine recognizes Potts as a better life partner and returns to him. The film ends in a fist fight

between Potts and Lilac, where Potts comes out as the winner. With this act, it is “indirectly”

implied that Katherine is his and that he can marry her.

Bertram Potts is a man who is fascinated by language and his task is to write everything

about it into the encyclopedia. The language he uses is very strict and defined by rules. He does

not make mistakes and does not allow people to make them. He spots grammatical mistakes and

points them out straight away. In a conversation with Miss Bragg, she advises one of the

professors to take care about the carpet and says: “It’s a crime to carelessly expose this good

carpet.” Potts instantly replies: “You’ve just committed a more serious crime, Miss Bragg. You

have split an infinitive. Never to carelessly expose. Always to expose carelessly.” He is very

serious about his job and does not allow anyone or anything to collide with the project. In a

conversation with a garbage man, Potts realizes that his work on slang is outdated. Potts

becomes very curious about the language the garbage man uses and decides to gather more data

on modern slang. Through his fascination, the viewer can see how dedicated he is to his work.

He meets Katherine and from this point Potts starts to experience great changes in his life. At the

beginning, he admits that he has difficulties to talk with the women, but after he meets

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Katherine, he himself starts to use language more freely and is liberated from his once strict

behavior. Through his feelings for Katherine he realizes how “outdated” he is and that it is time

to move on with the world. His change is also evident when it comes to the fist fight with Lilac.

Before the fight starts, he reads a book on how to properly fight and this makes him transform

from a scholar to a gangster.

Katherine “Sugarpuss” O’Shea is a woman who comes from a small village and a poor

family. She illustrates all the liveliness and positive energy a person can have. For Potts,

Katherine represents the untold (but not unheard!) glories of colloquial, living language. She

wants to get married to Joe Lilac because of his power. She believes that a woman cannot

achieve success alone, considering the fact that she is from the suburbs. She is blinded by Lilac’s

wealth and cannot imagine Potts as her future husband. Similarly to Potts, she also undergoes a

big change in the movie. First of all, in the beginning, she just uses Potts instrumentally, but

with time, she starts to grow fond of him and slowly falls in love. Her presence in the library

does not only change Potts. The seven professors are also influenced by her companionship.

“Katherine’s crude, sensual vitality stimulates the professors’ capacity for spontaneous

enjoyment; the professors’ innocence and gentleness develop in her a rudimentary conscience

and sensitivity. Katherine’s primitive, if vulgarized, energy apart, Hawks here allows no virtues

to the representatives of irresponsibility” (Wood 97). She calls herself a tramp. Considering that

fact, it can be said that she went through terrible things in life.

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When Potts finally understands that he has been duped, he says, as if in amazement, ‘You’re not

her father.’ Lilac’s retort is coarse and on the money: ‘You’re getting warm. I’m her daddy.’ The

joke, which evokes an appreciative chortle from Pastrami, is funny, but it is also devastating,

because it brings out into the open what kind of life Katherine has been leading . Fathers are

figures of identification; daddies, for women of full age, are targets of infantile fixation or crass—

and mutual—exploitation. If we are alert to this distinction, then the moment Katherine calls

herself a tramp won’t seem as startling as it does on first hearing (DiBattista 63).

After she meets Potts, she changes into a caring woman, someone who values love and respects

it as something pure and divine. She realizes that she wants true love and not one which is

governed by personal advantage and money. This can also be considered as her liberation from a

woman who is controlled by a man into a woman who will cooperate with a man. When she

declares her love for Potts in front of Lilac, she says:

I love those hick shirts he wears with the boiled cu sff , the way he always has his vest buttoned

wrong. He looks like a gira e and I love himff . I love him because he’s the kind of a guy who gets

drunk on a glass of buttermilk, and I love the way he blushes right up over his ears. I love him

because he doesn’t know how to kiss, the jerk.

The plot of the movie implies that Katherine experiences two kinds of liberation. The first kind

of liberation is from oppressive Lilac, which represents her independence from men. The second

indicates the awakening of the Hawskian woman and discarding the values of “traditional

48

women.” She gets the freedom to choose her partner and live her life as she wants and without

limits. The notion of an independent and capable woman becomes even stronger every time the

viewer sees her surrounded by eight men, while she still maintains her feminine power.

The relationship between the professors and Katherine can be compared with Snow

White and the seven dwarves. Still, there are two different possible interpretations of this

analogy. The first concerns Katherine and the professors and the second Miss Bragg and the

professors. They serve as a comparison between the Victorian and the modern woman, in regard

to their relationships to men. An obvious difference between the story of Snow White and Ball

Of Fire is the number of professors compared to the dwarves, but the audience can identify Potts

as the “prince,” rather than a dwarf. Another indication of the connection is the loss of Snow

White (in this case Katherine) to the evil and her return with the help of the prince, in this case

Professor Potts. The other similarity to the story of Snow White lies between Miss Bragg and the

professors. She fits the Snow White picture only to a certain degree, because she only cooks and

cleans for them.

The housekeeper, Miss Bragg, is a formidable, bossy mother-figure, the professors’ absurd

children: Professor Oddly (Richard Haydn) has stolen a pot of jam and has to be reprimanded. But

the moment any conflict arises over their work, they are the masters—they grow up, and order

Miss Bragg about peremptorily. It is not only a matter of dedication. When oddly steals a pot of

jam he is an individual; when their work is threatened they are a group (Wood 97).

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With respect to the identification of Katherine with Snow White, another interesting observation

can be made. Snow White is created entirely out of the fantasies of her male creators (the Disney

studio was composed almost entirely of men) and lacks any independent existence, any feminine

reality. She is an embodiment of the superlatively Victorian male fantasy of womanhood:

innocent, naive, passive, beautiful, domestic, and submissive. On the contrary, Potts and

Katherine acknowledge their sexual fantasies of each other in suggestive terms, referring to their

own “instincts” and “boiling points” with regard to one other. Professor Oddly claims that a

woman should be treated as a “sensitive and delicate” flower, which “one rough, impetuous bee

can completely destroy.” Potts disagrees with this conception, saying that he is younger and

bolder than Oddly - as if to reject the antiquated, Victorian notion of womanhood.

To further broaden the notion of Victorian womanhood, Ball Of Fire shows a strong

similarity to Bringing Up Baby. While Professor Oddly talks about his late wife, Hawks’s

extraordinary camera work creates a very interesting notion of death and life, the old-fashioned

and the modern. The camera changes between the bachelor party, where Oddly speaks about his

wife, to the bungalow where Katherine is staying. Oddly was married long ago, so his deceased

wife marks the end of the idea of the Victorian womanhood. On the contrary, Katharine

represents the modern woman which attracts Potts. The juxtaposition of death and life resembles

that in Bringing Up Baby, where Alice is represented as the brontosaurus (long gone and extinct)

and Susan as the leopard (alive and lively).

50

Similarly to Bringing Up Baby, Ball Of Fire can also be read through Freudian theories,

which serve to show how deep the connection between the characters is. Both Potts and Lilac

gave Katherine wedding rings. When she finally meets with Lilac, she refuses to marry him and

tells him that she loves Potts and wants to marry him. She sends the ring back to Potts and the

ring she sends implies something interesting. Katherine actually sends Lilac’s ring to Potts.

When the professors see the ring, professor Gurkakoff explains that Katherine chose Potts and

that she loves him. He says that she sent back the ring which she did not want and kept the one

she wants. According to Freud, the subconscious mind never makes mistakes and that’s why the

professors believe that she still wants to marry Potts. Nevertheless, Potts still doubts this and

says that he refuses to be coddled with psychoanalytical nonsense. Potts is caught between the

“mind” and the “body.” The mind is represented by him as the professor, the ivory tower, and

the body is represented through Katherine. This dualism can also be expressed in Freudian

terms. Throughout the film, Potts conceives of himself as needing to “control” and “suppress”

his desire for Katherine for the sake of his continued ivory-tower existence. Miss Bragg puts it

even more simply: “That is the kind of woman,” she claims, “who makes whole civilizations

collapse!” But the film discredits this old conception of humanity as constantly repressing our

desires for the sake of civilization’s patina; at the end of the film, under a different pretext, Potts

expresses his “apologies to Mr. Freud,” and so frees himself from Freud’s dualistic conception

of the self.

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Katherine determines the pace of the movie, for she is in control of everything. She is

savvy and bold compared to the Victorian woman. With her as an embodiment of the modern

woman, it seems as if Ball Of Fire suggested that the newfound equality of sexes is more

exciting for both men and women. It also enables Katherine to influence the way men perceive

her. She pulls the strings in every possible sense. The film also emphasizes the fact that she is a

real woman, because the ideal relationship to her partner consists of acknowledgment and

interpretation. Because she is a “master” of modern street language, all her words are written

down and pored over for their meanings. She is the center of everything that happens in the

movie. She becomes the central figure for the professors, for Lilac and his gang, for the police

and for us. Compared with Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, Ball Of Fire does not present

the male versus female image as much. It tries to combine the best of both worlds in order to

visualize the world by accepting the Hawksian woman as a standard for evaluating female

behavior. Stanwyck convincingly represents the core values of the new age woman; moreover

she goes even further than Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russel.

The relationship between Potts and Katherine is one of a kind. They speak “different”

languages, they behave differently and they have completely opposing interests, yet the viewer

can see that they are made for each other. They fall in love for different reasons. In the

beginning, Potts considers Katherine just as an aid to finish his job and later on he starts to see

her also as a woman. For him, she represents the highest level of how alive a language can be

and through her he realizes that it is high time to change his “outdated” vocabulary and also

52

himself as a person. She, on the other hand, starts to fall in love with him just because he is an

honest and straight-forward person. She admires his “childish” love and she becomes aware that

Potts represents the kind of man she always wanted. Since they use different varieties of the

vernacular, they fail to communicate clearly. For example, when Potts wants to declare his love

for her and decides to propose marriage, he uses very sophisticated language and quotes from of

Shakespeare’s play Richard III:

Look how this ring encompasseth thy finger,

Even so thy breast encloseth my poor heart:

Wear both of them, for both of them are thine.

(Richard III, act 1, scene 2)

Even though it is the kind of language that Katherine does not completely understand, she

comprehends the meaning of it. As a grammarian, Potts can clearly identify the moment when

words become useless and when it is time to take action. Katherine is afraid to marry him, since

she believes that it might hinder the professors from work, as it did when they met her for the

first time. This is exactly when Potts switches to deeds and takes three books to put them under

her legs so she can kiss him more comfortably. When Potts thinks about her, he stops being

Professor Potts and instead becomes Pottsy (a nickname given to him by Katherine). Pottsy is

someone who completely differs from Professor Potts. When he accidentally enters Katherine’s

bungalow, thinking that it is Oddly’s, he starts expressing the difficulties he feels since he is in

love: “Oddly, I don’t know my tenses anymore. I’ve gone goofy, completely goofy, bimbuggy,

53

slaphappy.” In this way he admits that his physical needs are more important than his job and

that he is capable of sacrificing his interests just to be with Katherine.

Katherine’s and Bertram’s relationship also drastically affects the professors. It appears

that the seven professors also fell in love with Katherine and that they feel obliged to love her in

order to show Potts that they accept her. As already mentioned, the seven old professors really

are similar to children at times. Robin Wood even calls them absurd children (103), because they

behave like children and only “grow up” when their work progress is threatened. This is

understandable, to a certain degree, since six of the professors have been bachelors their whole

lives and only one was married twenty-five years ago. It seems as if they were too “childish” to

marry, but it also appears that Katherine’s and Potts’s relationship makes them realize their

mistake. They feel that they are going to marry Katherine together with Potts. Katherine’s

presence in the library makes the professors irresponsible. She becomes the central figure for

them and they stop writing their encyclopedia.

The one person who is against Potts’s and Katherine’s relationship is Miss Bragg. She is

the mother figure in Ball Of Fire. She cleans and cooks for the professors and she is the woman

in their library. With the introduction of Katherine to the group, she feels threatened by her

presence. She considers Katherine as a distraction for the professors. She openly says that

someone needs to go, either she or Katherine. Miss Bragg is also the first to discover that

Katherine is chased by the police, long before the professors. When she confronts Katherine,

Miss Bragg gets hit and locked up in a room so that she cannot escape. Bragg’s problems with

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Katherine can be seen as a protest of the Victorian womanhood against the modern womanhood.

Bragg does not tolerate Katherine and Katherine does not understand Miss Bragg. Bragg even

claims that Katherine is the type of woman who can lead humankind to a collapse.

The characters in the film are divided into “the good guys” and “the bad guys.”

Apparently, the professors are the good side while Joe Lilac and his bodyguards are the bad side.

The plot presents the gangsters as uneducated hooligans. The film juxtaposes the academic with

the uneducated of person. The professors are representatives of an educated world, which

excludes violence, while the thugs represent a world of people who achieve their goals with

physical power. Exactly in this representation, Katherine’s change becomes evident. She starts

off in Lilac’s crew as someone who loves the gangster lifestyle and therefore acknowledges Lilac

as her future husband. However with time, she starts to understand the benefits of education over

violence. Her willingness to learn sets her apart from the life she was leading. Hawks’s camera

work captures the balance between the primitive and the civilized in a very satisfying and

beautiful way. The professors’ triumph over the gangster happens when Bertram engages into a

fist fight with Joe. There he uses both his education and physical power to win the conflict:

History and Science (the sword of Damocles and Archimedes’ use of reflected light) are evoked to

defeat the gang who are holding the professors at gunpoint to force the converted Katherine to

marry her one-time hero. But there comes a time in any Hawks’ film where learning gives way to

something more basic. Bertram, on the way to rescue Katherine, studies an ancient boxing

55

manual. Joe knocks him down contemptuously; Bertram throws the book aside and falls back on

pure instinctive indignation: Joe is soundly beaten (Wood 98).

Ball Of Fire is a very mature comedy which shows the relationship between two different

types of people. Potts and Katherine depict a love story between a “dull,” job focused man and a

lively, modern woman. Throughout the movie, they experience constant changes which bring

them closer together and so create the perfect relationship. Barbara Stanwyck was the best

possible choice for this role, since she was a very experienced actress, who had played in many

screwball comedies before. She was nominated for the academy award for the best actress in a

leading role. Katherine perfectly fits the description of the Hawksian woman, since she manages

to be “the boss” between eight men. As she builds up her relationship with Potts, she is always

on a par with him and usually dictates the course of action. On the other hand, Professor Potts is

not that similar to the men from previous screwball comedies. The viewer does not feel as if the

pair is competing against each other. It feels more as a synergy, which has the purpose of

fulfilling their mutual interest, rather than the goal of just one of them. Howard Hawks liked the

film so much that a few years later he made a remake of Ball Of Fire called A Song Is Born.

56

Conclusion

The three heroines from the discussed films were true representatives of the Hawksian

woman. They dictated the pace of the movie and proved that women are not weaker than men.

They had the power to change the way people perceived femininity. They showed that being a

woman did not mean inferiority to men. A woman could be a dominant side while retaining her

feminine features. Even though Hawks did not consider himself a feminist, his view on

femininity and gender related issues was very advanced considering the time in which his films

were made. He believed that “laughing” the man out could create a very comic effect and so

draw attention to the equality between genders, emphasizing that women are independent and

free.

The Hawksian woman was the idea of a “new” woman. The characteristics of the

Hawksian woman enjoyed great popularity within the female audience. His movies clearly

demonstrated that women are as capable as men, but still he emphasized how important

cooperation between them was. At the end of the 1940s, the Hawksian archetype began to

decline in Hollywood cinema. This was a consequence of the end of the Second World War. As

men were returning to their homes, women, again, needed to take control of the domestic sphere

and support the soldiers. This introduced the change to the perfect housewife, the woman who

stayed at home and the caring mother. Despite the decline of the Hawksian Female archetype in

that period, its influence lasts and even today it can be seen in many 21st century TV shows and

films.

57

Filmography

Ball Of Fire. Dir. Howard Hawks. Samuel Goldwyn, 1941. Film.

Bringing Up Baby. Dir. Howard Hawks. RKO, 1938. Film.

His Girl Friday. Dir. Howard Hawks. Columbia, 1940. Film.

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