ZooScope

Category: Director: Howard Hawks

  • Red River. Dir. Howard Hawks. Monterey Productions. 1948.

    American expansionism and the frontier myth – the romanticisation of prosperity found in claiming the ‘wilderness’ and the forceful expansion of the American border – pillars of the Western genre [1]. From Jan Troell’s The New Land (1982), John Ford’s Wagon Master (1950) to Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush (1925); Western cinema has constantly glorified the rich…

  • Bringing Up Baby . Dir. Howard Hawks. RKO Radio Pictures. 1938.

    Howard Hawks created a mass of parallels between the female and the leopard Baby in Bringing Up Baby. He displays a classical Hollywood screwball gender notion – women are wild while men are sensible. It is obvious that the female protagonist Susan has a closer relationship with the wild animals than everyone else in the film.…

  • Bringing Up Baby. Dir. Howard Hawks. RKO. 1938.

    In this article, I will analyse the scene in which David first encounters the dog, George, and Susan’s aunt, Mrs Random, while caught wearing Susan’s dressing gown. I will argue that here a direct comparison can be made between Susan and George. George is used to emphasise that rather than sharing characteristics with a wild…

  • Monkey Business. Dir. Howard Hawks. 20th Century Fox. 1952.

    Forever young – what seems to be an unrealistic and silly fantasy to some, is Dr. Barnaby Fulton’s (Cary Grant) everyday life: in Howard Hawk’s screwball comedy Monkey Business (1952), he tries to develop a formula which reverses the ageing process. Even though Barnaby is completely dedicated to his work, he fails. It isn’t until…

  • Bringing up Baby. Dir. Howard Hawks. RKO Radio Pictures. 1938.

    Bringing up Baby is a film which explores the relationship between humans and animals through the use of doubling. This is particularly evident in the scene where Susan lets a wild leopard escape from a circus and culminates in the scene where the leopard is wrangled into a jail cell by David. The use of doubling…

  • Bringing Up Baby . Dir. Howard Hawks. RKO. 1938.

    In the romantic comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938) Hawks explores the association between animalism (behaviours or feelings associated with animals) and chaos. The comedy emerges out of the interactions between the unlikely pair: Susan (Catherine Hepburn) and David (Cary Grant). This is because Susan is an eccentric, chaotic and a law evading romantic and David is a…