“For me,” Caan concluded, “he became more of a father figure than a director. He taught me the meaning of life: ‘She’s good looking, she’s not; that’s a good steak, and that’s not; and this is fun, and that’s not.’ So that’s who Howard was to me.” Caan, who had an infant daughter but whose marriage was going south at the time, started a romance
during the shoot with his costar Michele Carey, who was divorced with a four-year-old son. The couple announced their engagement in June 1966, but they never married.
Robert Donner remembered, “I got engaged on
El Dorado
and Hawks and Duke Wayne and Bob Mitchum were having a little tequila one night. I was playing one of the heavies and they just thought it’d be hilarious if I had to get married
looking as I looked. I mean, my hair was down to my shoulders, and I had a full beard, and the three of them were friends of Bill
Wellman, who would be my father-in-law. So they figured out a way to switch the schedule around so I was still on the picture when I got married, and I had to get married in my full beard and long hair. They thought that was very funny.”
Donner also recalled the regular
poker games in Ed Asner’s Ramada Inn motel room, which was right next to Hawks’s. One night the game got pretty loud. “Ed’s saying, ‘Keep it down, Jesus. You know, Hawks is next door.’ And, well, we weren’t keeping it down, I guess, because all of a sudden, there’s this beating on the wall. We quieted down a little bit more, the game goes on, it gets a little louder … all of a sudden we hear,
‘BAM! BAM! BAM!’ Three shots. We go running outside, and there stands Hawks in his boots and a nightshirt, and he’s got this .44 in his hand. And he says, ‘Anybody I see in one minute is going home.’ And you never saw people split faster in your life.”
Ed Asner was one man John Wayne didn’t take to, referring to him derisively as “that New York actor.” Nobody, least of all Asner, could understand
what provoked this, since nothing ever passed between them, although in later years, when Asner became an outspoken liberal, people joked that Wayne had been prematurely sensitive to Asner’s political leanings.
As for Mitchum, Hawks hadn’t been wrong in thinking that he’d be a perfect foil for Wayne. Given the actor’s reputation for boozing and laziness, the director was pleasantly surprised
by his work habits, even if Mitchum didn’t mix with the rest of the company all that much, preferring to retreat to his trailer when not involved in a scene. Hawks said, “When the picture was half over I said, ‘You know, you’re the biggest fraud I’ve ever met in all my life.’ He grinned and said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘You pretend you don’t care a damn thing about a scene, and you’re the hardest-working
so-and-so I’ve ever known.’ He said, ‘Don’t tell anybody.’”
Completing the Tucson part of the shoot after thirty-six working days, the 156-person company flew back to Los Angeles on November 22, the very week
Red Line 7000
was opening in Los Angeles. Six more weeks of production were scheduled at the studio, but Hawks, with Rosson’s help, took nine, finally wrapping on January 28, 1966, three
and a half months after he started. The $4,535,322 final price tag had certainly exceeded the intended budget by more than 10 percent, but Paramount, of course, hadn’t said a word; by fall, the current regime would be out in the wake of Gulf + Western’s take-over of the company, with Robert Evans installed as head of production.
There were no disputes about the writing credit this time, but Hawks
got into extended disagreements about the title—he wanted
El Dorado
written as two words, Paramount wanted one—and the reference to Harry Brown’s novel. The director now insisted that his film was based not on
The Stars in Their Courses
but on
Rio Bravo
. However, since Paramount had already paid a tidy sum for the rights to Brown’s book—which Hawks was now saying, with a straight face, that he
might want to make into a film one day—and was not inclined to pay an additional stipend to Warner Bros., this line of reasoning was soon dropped.
As the editor, John Woodcock put the picture together virtually alone, and he was astonished when, upon informing the director that the rough cut was ready for his appraisal, Hawks proceeded to invite about thirty people to see his new film at the
studio theater without ever having seen it himself. Hawks gave Woodcock a few instructions during the projection, added a few more comments after the well-received screening, then took off into the night.
The initial public preview took place on April 22 at the Plaza Theater in Palm Springs, not far from Hawks’s house on Stevens Road. The reaction was a world apart from that to Hawks’s last film,
producing relief all around. However, Hawks and Woodcock tinkered a bit more, eliminating a musical number reminiscent of
Rio Bravo
when Gregg Hawks told his father that “a sheriff shouldn’t sing” and, in order to get the all-clear from the Catholic Legion of Decency, cutting the scene in which a topless Marina Ghane (who was spending a lot of time at Hawks’s place in Palm Springs these days)
tells James Caan which way the bad guys have gone. Paramount had long since given up the idea of putting the picture out that summer and, with the new regime in by fall, ended up holding back its domestic release for a year and a half from the time it finished shooting.
The world-premiere engagements actually began on December 17, 1966, in Tokyo and Osaka, where the film did outstanding business.
By the time it opened in the United States, in June 1967, it was going head-to-head with another John Wayne Western,
The War Wagon
, produced subsequently by the Duke’s own company, Batjac. This may have been unfortunate, but it probably didn’t have much effect on business, which was strong for both pictures. Within a year,
El Dorado
had generated rentals of $6 million on box-office receipts of
$12 million making it the twelfth biggest picture of 1967. Hawks had proved that, at least when working on familiar territory with big stars, he could still deliver the goods.
With the release of
El Dorado
, Howard Hawks was irrevocably thrust into the arena of the film buffs. The film’s commercial success and reception by mainstream reviewers as a return to form after an eight-year lull (most critics truly did not note the close resemblance to
Rio Bravo
) gave it sufficient stature to be argued about, and
El Dorado
soon became one of the flashpoints
in the raging battle between the auteurists and their enemies, of which there were at least three stripes. For the pro-Hawksians, who had been forced increasingly into a corner by his recent missteps,
El Dorado
provided proof once again that Hawks was one of the immortals who still walked among us. For Andrew Sarris, the guru of stateside auteurism, it was a masterpiece, the best American film
of the year, “a poetic fantasy … tinged with melancholy.” For his archrival, Pauline Kael, who had liked Hawks films in the past only to turn against him when she saw the cult building up around him, the picture looked like a TV movie. Inaccurately stating that it was entirely shot in the studio, “except for a few opening shots,” she accused Hawks, as well as Wayne and Mitchum, of being too old and
rich to care anymore. To Sarris, by contrast, Wayne’s “oldness has become spiritually resurgent. His infirmities ennoble rather than enfeeble him, and every wrinkle on his skin has come to terms with his endless quest.”
How could such opposing views ever be reconciled? In fact, they could not, which goes a long way toward explaining why Hawks, not to mention Wayne, remained caught in the cross
fire of opposing critical factions for so long. To one side Hawks represented Hollywood classicism, tradition at its purest. To others, he was old-fashioned, conservative, worn out, someone not to be taken seriously or even valued anymore. Others resisting the acclamation of Hawks were modernist critics, literary-oriented and mostly Eastern intellectuals with a built-in bias against genres in general
and Westerns in particular, and liberals and leftists for whom anything with John Wayne’s name on it was automatically discredited.
But perhaps the most blistering evaluation of
El Dorado
came from Harry Brown, the author of
The Stars in Their Courses
. In a letter to Hawks, Brown claimed that the finished film bore no relation to his novel, and demanded that the attribution be removed from
the picture’s credits, adding, “Someday directors, Great [sic] or not, are going to stick to set-ups and camera-angles and let
writers
handle the scripts. I’d hate to be hanging until that day came, though.”
Hawks brushed Brown’s objections aside, and the credit stuck. The director didn’t take the highfalutin claims made for his work by some of his ardent admirers very seriously either, but he
was certainly grateful for their support and did nothing to discourage it. In an apparent first film festival appearance for a Hawks work,
El Dorado
was selected as the official United States entry in the San Sebastian Film Festival in June, and on the 23rd of that month Hawks flew to Paris to promote the picture. He spent a good deal of time with Chance, who took some particularly striking photographs
of him in front of the film’s giant poster on the Champs-Elysées that show him looking anything but tired and over-the-hill.
He also became fast friends with the picture’s specially engaged publicist, Pierre Rissient, a great and gregarious film buff who sat in on and translated during his myriad interviews and dinners over the course of several days. Some of these interviews, notably the one
conducted by Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narbon, and Bertrand Tavernier for the recently politicized
Cahiers du Cinéma
, became difficult when they touched on the subject of Hawks’s intended next project, a drama about the Vietnam War.
Hawks said he intended to make “a film that is true, realistic.” Like
Red Line 7000
, it would consist of “three stories blended into a single one. It’s based on a
true incident. It’s the story of something concrete that the army wants to accomplish, and that they do accomplish in the course of the film.” Asked his point of view about the war, Hawks said, “You know, it’s a whole new sort of war, it doesn’t resemble anything we’ve ever seen before. The Americans are fighting against very short men, who are right at home in their land. A tiny little bag is enough
to carry all the equipment that a Vietcong needs to defend himself.… The Vietcong move around more easily. The people I’ve talked to say that it’s the American soldiers who come from farms, from the country, who adapt the best. They’re supposed to be awful good.”
In his thinking about the project, Hawks was greatly inspired by a film to which Rissient took him,
The Anderson Platoon
, an hourlong
French documentary shot the previous year about a black lieutenant who painstakingly
leads his platoon on a mission to take a hill north of Saigon while under heavy attack. The men were shown to possess strong camaraderie and mutual feeling across racial lines, and while exposing the harshness of the war, the film ennobled the human effort expended in fighting it and was not overtly ideological.
In other words, it was right up Hawks’s alley. After dining with its director, Pierre Schoendorffer, himself a veteran of Dien Bien Phu who would, twenty-five years later, make an epic dramatic feature about that fateful battle, Hawks began openly stating that he was going to use Schoendorffer to shoot combat sequences in Vietnam, while he, Hawks, would film everything else in the States. As it
happened, he discussed this arrangement only in the most general terms with Schoendorffer himself. Schoendorffer said, “Hawks asked me a lot of questions, he listened a lot. We had ‘human’ discussions, about the experiences of men that I had known. Politics was not my preoccupation, and it wasn’t his either. I was full of admiration for Howard Hawks, and would have been interested to see the way
it would have turned out.”
During his interview, Hawks did manage to discomfort the otherwise worshipful
Cahiers
crowd by refusing to be goaded into a critique of American society and the Vietnam war. There is no evidence that Hawks or anyone else ever put pen to paper on the Vietnam project; Schoendorffer never heard from Hawks again after their handful of sessions in Paris. Hawks claimed to
have abandoned the idea altogether when a little research showed that official army assistance would not be forthcoming without script approval, and Hawks would never have accepted such a condition. He also insisted that the film would not have made a statement about the war: “I
never
made a statement. Our job is to make entertainment. I don’t give a God damn about taking sides.” Bertrand Tavernier
revealed that when he pressed Hawks further about it, the director said “he wanted to take some of the scenes deleted from
Sergeant York
and put them into his Vietnam film. That was frightening.” One can only agree with Tavernier’s conclusion that, given Hawks’s naive refusal to engage the inevitable political implications of such a project and his lack of firsthand knowledge about the war, “It’s
good for him that he never made that film.”
Not surprisingly, the project Hawks pursued much more seriously during this period was something completely unrealistic, a throwback to his silent days. In 1965, Hawks optioned the rights to his 1928 success
A Girl in Every Port
, and to Lewis Milestone’s 1927
Two Arabian Knights
, which concerned two devil-may-care adventurers who escape from a World
War I German prison camp disguised as Arabs and make off to the United
States with a beautiful Arab girl.
Mr. Gus
, or
Now, Mr. Gus
, as Hawks variously called the project, went through a succession of story incarnations, winding up, a decade later, as a script that represented a virtual remake of
A Girl in Every Port
, about two men who circle the globe fighting oil-rig fires in the manner of the
celebrated Red Adair. Whatever the premise, “the big erector project,” as Hawks liked to call it, would be a buddy-buddy comedy on a very large scale.