The Private Taste for Paula Prentiss

"I think that Paula Prentiss is good. She ought to be a big comedy star. I don't know what's the matter." -Howard Hawks


















" I rececently watched for the second time Howard Hawks' Man's Favorite Sport?, a film that was universally ridiculed when it appeared in 1964 and I myself hadn't much liked. This time I was delighted and deeply moved by the grace and humor with which the story is told, and moved by the reverberations of a whole substratum of meaning, of sexual antagonism, desire and despair." -Molly Haskell, 1971

Hawks on Early Sound Cinema

"I wrote all the story and all the dialogue for The Dawn Patrol… I didn’t tell them I had never made a talking picture. They didn’t find out till I was about a month into it. And I used to get notes saying that I had a chance to make a good scene and I blew it. Because the dialogue was very understated, very natural—it wasn’t stage dialogue. And I think I had forty letters from the front office saying I missed things. Picture came out, made more money than any that year. And made a couple of fellows who were head of studios very angry with me because they said, “Now people are going to try to do that kind of dialogue and they won’t know how to do it.” But they began to switch over and then they used the understated dialogue for many years until Kazan made that picture where people got really emotional and started acting. I’ve forgotten the name of it. And then people started getting melodramatic again."

-The Men Who Made the Movies, 1973


Faulkner, Hawks and Steve Fisher

For the Hatarians

Dick Schickel on Howard Hawks, 1973:

"For if you have ever been a red-blooded American boy, the values of masculine comradeship and civility, practiced in isolated places, are bound to have seeped into your system—principally from the movies—and there is an inexplicable thrill in living by them, however briefly, under the eye of someone like Hawks who really represents an old-fashioned way of doing, a way that is not as readily available to us as it once was. You want to be as good as you can when he’s around. And somehow he does make you an edge better than usual—in my case, less angry, less anxious, less cynical than I customarily am on the sidewalks of New York. So it’s machismo. So what? Mostly I find it preferable to the neurotic whining that I hear around me most of the time."

Clarification of the Concept

Linda Bengalis' "Female Sensibility"

The reason this blog is dedicated to femininity is not because we think it's in any way superior to masculinity. Masculinity is great. But we take the position that femininity is disgustingly underrated. (Undervalued and often unseen, and frequently not named.) What would a history of the world look like that took into account muses and wives? What would a history of the world look like that was not even about heroes, but about the everyday?
Femininity does not belong only to women, but to all who need it.

riot grrrls & teen idols

I heard a song today,
by Ricky Nelson,
that is ripe to be covered
by a riot grrrl group,
if only there were any.


LastKiss

Hear that bass and that skeletal drumbeat? And those squiggly background vocals? Sounds like 1992 to me.

Here's a prime example of that genre, a Blur song made grrrl:

There's No Other Way

But we are not a music blog (though this topic does fall under our subtle subtext of feminist propoganda), so let's come back to cinema. Because, though I'm fan of everything Ricky Nelson has ever done, from "Traveling Man" (a groupie anthem!) to the bitter "Garden Party" ("Yoko brought her walrus..."), my favorite song by Ricky Nelson is from the Howard Hawks epic indoor western, RIO BRAVO. It's a duet with Dean Martin, called My
Rifle, My Pony, and Me.


Here's Dino. At The Nibbler, we prefer our men sweaty, sad, and downfallen. (Which reminds us, we will cover William Holden shortly.)