"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."
