Based on the 1929 novel and play by future Pulitzer Prize-winner Martin Flavin,* The Criminal Code shows only too well its stage ancestry, like creases in a sheet of paper. Key words and lines of dialogue are often repeated, but in a different context that ironically alters their meaning. (One such line: “It’s what’s in […]
Tag Archives: Howard Hawks
Miriam Hopkins, glitteringly lovely and massively moving, gives the performance of a lifetime as “Swan,” who beds with a dishonest man for security and loses her heart to an honest, poetically minded man in Barbary Coast, one of the most dazzling dramatic entertainments of the Great Depression. The film was written by Ben Hecht and […]
I intended to be with you on our honeymoon. — Walter Burns to ex-wife Hildy Johnson, recalling the mine cave-in whose reportage he had to oversee and that separated them on that occasion It is Howard Hawks who came up with the inspired idea to make Hildy Johnson a woman in His Girl Friday, his […]
Susan: Your golf ball. Your car. Is there anything in the world that doesn’t belong to you? David: Yes, thank heaven: You! The “Baby” of the title is a leopard; this is a tale of two lookalike leopards, one tame, the other vicious. Embedded here in a “screwball” romantic comedy, they underscore the need of […]
The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest English-Language Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis Texas sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne, gracious, wonderfully complex) stands against wealth, power, inhumanity, embodied by land baron Nathan Burdette, who wants to […]
Dennis Grunes 