Now about these Hawksian women

Lauren Bacall wasn’t the first ‘Hawksian woman’, but she remains the most famous example of the archetype, in large part thanks to the role Howard Hawks played in discovering her – or, to be more precise, the role his wife played. Slim Hawks saw Bacall on the March 1943 front cover of Harper’s Bazaar, and encouraged her husband to invite the young model for a screen test. It was successful, and Howard then went about moulding the 19-year-old neophyte, changing her name (she was born Betty Joan Perske), insisting she lower her voice and start sassing men.

Hawks’s female leads had usually starred in a number of movies by the time he worked with them, and so his role in shaping Bacall’s screen persona from her debut situates her as his platonic ideal – it was no coincidence that her character in To Have and Have Not (1944) was named after Slim. In both that film and their next collaboration, The Big Sleep (1946), she exemplifies the essential nature of the Hawksian woman: she is cool under pressure, quick with a retort, and more than capable of looking after herself. While her co-star in both, soon-to-be husband Humphrey Bogart, was 25 years older and far more experienced in front of a camera, she stands beside him, seeming his equal.

Still, though they can flout the leading man’s wishes – in To Have and Have Not, this amounts to not leaving for safety when the hero has insisted that she do so – the type of Hawksian woman personified by Bacall ultimately cedes to his authority. As a trusted lieutenant, she is given more of a role in the action than many women had in films at the time, and is even allowed to rescue the hero on occasion (see the way Angie Dickinson saves John Wayne with the throwing of a flower pot in the 1959 western Rio Bravo), but the man remains in charge.

Then there’s the secondary model of the Hawksian woman, which sees her dragging the film’s leading man along in her wake. This is the variety typified by Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby (1938), Anne Sheridan in I Was a Male War Bride (1949) and Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire (1941): strong, canny women who drive the plot via sheer force of will, manipulating the less astute man into helping her achieve her objective, with the inevitable romance brewing after the subsequent high jinks have seen them thrown together in all sorts of awkward situations.

While Hawks is often known as the ultimate man’s director for his vivid depictions of male professional camaraderie, the films led by this secondary type of Hawksian woman push their male heroes towards a more passive, traditionally feminine role; this is made explicit in both Bringing Up Baby and I Was a Male War Bride, where Cary Grant’s leading men have very prominent scenes wearing women’s clothing. 

A prime feature of the two main models of Hawksian woman is their love of, and deftness at, sparkling repartee. Hawks loved showcasing the intelligence of his heroines via courtship-by-banter, with their ability to engage in a round of badinage proving their compatibility. His Girl Friday (1940) – which broke records for the speed of its dialogue delivery – famously stands as the best example of this trope, the rapid-fire exchanges between the two journalists (and ex-spouses) played by Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell dripping with flirtatiously acidic wit.  

Although the Hawksian woman didn’t start appearing fully formed until the late 1930s, her characteristics are visible in some of Hawks’s earlier work. In Scarface (1932), the way Poppy (Karen Morley) teasingly mocks brutal gangster and soon-to-be love interest Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) certainly fits the bill. And Ceiling Zero (1936) – a forerunner to Only Angels Have Wings (1939) in its aviation focus – boasts the fabulous creation of Tommy Thomas (June Travis): lady pilot. While she ultimately proves rather tangential to the action, sidelined altogether during the movie’s climax, her attraction to the dangerous world of flying and her prowess at verbal jousting with beau James Cagney place her as an early exemplar. 

Then there are the outliers, like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) – the rare Hawks classic that keeps the men on the periphery, transferring his fascination with male professional camaraderie to the hyper-feminine, glamour-filled world of showgirls. The singers played by Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe do have male love interests, but they are not main characters; at heart, the film is a platonic love story between Russell and Monroe, who take on the mantle of the Hawksian woman between them. That mantle fits the swaggery, quick-witted Russell most comfortably, yet Monroe’s forthright unflappability in her unashamed diamond-seeking also measures up.

Though certainly a progressive vision compared with more domestic-centred depictions of women common at the time, the Hawksian woman archetype had its drawbacks. Often, she was the only woman – or at least, the only one with any narrative importance – and derived her entire worth from how she gelled with the core group of men; she had to squeeze herself into their environment, rarely vice versa. The seminal ‘Cool Girl’ monologue from Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl could well be describing her: “Being the ‘Cool Girl’ means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who loves football, poker, dirty jokes and burping … They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.” Indeed, in the book Hawks on Hawks, the director recoils from any feminist label: “I’ve been accused of promoting Women’s Lib, and I’ve denied it, emphatically. It just happens that that kind of a woman is attractive to me.” 

But while the Hawksian woman may have been borne less from proto-feminism than of male fantasy, the fact remains that the archetype still resulted in many of the strongest and most memorable female characters of classic Hollywood. As the saying goes, you’ve got to play the hand you’re dealt, and they played theirs in commanding, iridescent style. 

Even for a time after Hawks’s final film, Rio Lobo (1970), the Hawksian woman lived on – notably in the films directed by his most famous fan: John Carpenter. No big-name director has professed his love for Hawks as much as Carpenter (four of his 10 choices in the 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll are Hawks movies), nor been as vividly influenced. And fittingly, many of his films present us with a Hawksian heroine. Between the almost mythical cool with which Laurie Zimmer fights the encroaching bad guys in Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Lauren Hutton’s fearless feistiness in Someone’s Watching Me! (1978), not to mention the various characters played by Adrienne Barbeau and Jamie Lee Curtis in his films throughout the 1970s and 80s, Carpenter did more than anyone else to keep the archetype alive.

Because so much of what constituted the Hawksian woman stemmed from being a woman in a male environment, as the cinematic landscape has continued to inch towards gender equality, the usefulness of the model has begun to fade. Though there remains a depressing number of film releases where the only female roles are the wives and daughters of the male leads, increasingly movies are being made in which women are defined on their own terms. 

Yet in an era when cinema was still overwhelmingly and inescapably a man’s world, the Hawksian woman proved – with wit, cool and abundant courage – that she could go toe-to-toe with him any day, every step of the way. And what a joy it was to watch her do so. 

Razor Sharp: The Fabulous Women of Howard Hawks plays at BFI Southbank in June 2023.