For the two most important
roles other than Grant’s and Arthur’s, Hawks turned to one veteran and one newcomer. Since his great success in
The Dawn Patrol
in 1930, it had all been downhill for Richard Barthel-mess in sound pictures. By 1938, at forty-three, he was virtually a forgotten figure. Hawks offered him the role of the disgraced flier Bat McPherson and shrewdly used the actor’s physical flaws for his own devices.
Not long before, the former silent star, whose original appeal was based to an extent on his boyish good looks, had undergone plastic surgery in Paris for bags under his eyes. Infection had set in, leaving him with deep crisscrossed marks, which only heavy makeup could conceal. To Barthelmess’s distress, Hawks insisted that he appear without makeup because “those scars tell the story and are important
to your character.” Hawks also removed the thick wooden planks the smallish actor wanted to use to make him appear taller, which actually subtly accentuates the character’s sense of inferiority in the many group shots with the film’s generally rangy men.
At the same time, Hawks had his hands full with the twenty-year-old Columbia starlet Rita Hayworth. The former dancer had been around Hollywood
for three years and had appeared in more than a dozen pictures without making anyone sit up and take notice. Conflicting stories abound concerning how she ended up in
Only Angels Have Wings
. Hawks sometimes claimed that he had noticed her in another picture and asked for her to come in. The most famous account, advanced from apocrypha into legend by the fan magazines of the era, had her campaigning
for the role by showing up in a stunning new five-hundred-dollar dress at the Trocadero when she knew Hawks and Cohn would be dining there together. However, the truth was considerably more prosaic. George Chasin of the Small Agency, a young agent who would later represent Alfred Hitchcock, sat for several days outside Hawks’s office until he was able to corner the director
to talk up his client.
Hawks told him that Linda Winters, a new twenty-year-old protégée of his brother Bill’s—and later under her real name, Dorothy Comingore, the female lead in
Citizen Kane—
was set for the second lead, but Chasin managed to persuade Hawks to test Hayworth. On November 30 and December 2, Hawks shot tests with Winters, Hayworth, and the more established actress Rochelle Hudson in scenes with Barthelmess,
Arthur, Sig Ruman, and other actors. Hayworth finally won Hawks over, with the director concluding that she had one of those “faces that the camera likes” and that her tremendous sexual allure was just the ticket for the part of the woman who had burned Grant’s Jeff Carter so badly that he had turned against all women.
Victor Kilian, cast as Sparks, had served in the trenches for Hawks on
The
Road to Glory
. But most of the other actors—Thomas Mitchell, fresh from
Stagecoach
, as Jeff’s best friend, Kid; the genial Ruman as the Dutchman, the owner of the establishment; John Carroll, Allyn Joslyn, and Noah Beery Jr. as some of the other fliers—were appearing in their one and only Hawks film. Unlike John Ford and some others, Hawks was not interested in building a stock company and tended
to reuse leading actors rather than supporting players, with the exception of Walter Brennan.
After seven more days of tests, production started in earnest on Monday, December 19, on the Columbia Ranch with the scene of Jean Arthur’s Bonnie Lee arriving at the port of Barranca (now spelled with two
r
’s). Filming was scheduled to run forty-two days, until February 8, with release set for May.
After six days of interior scenes on the Dutchman’s set, which occupied stages 8 and 9 on the Columbia lot, it was back to the massive waterfront mock-up for five days of crowd scenes that carried the company through the New Year. Cinematographer Walker recalled that Hawks said next to nothing to him before filming began about what he expected from him. “He would leave the visual planning to me, then
would come over to correct certain things and make suggestions. After the first day, he said, ‘I like that mood, let’s try to keep it.’” During the week of shooting with dozens of extras on the Barranca set, the crew had tremendous problems with wind and weather under the tarp, and Walker was very impressed with the way Hawks handled it all. “Nothing bothered him, he said very little, there was
no small talk. He told me tersely what he wanted, and everything remained very calm.… At one point when we were waiting out a problem, we were walking along, he with those long strides of his, and I said, ‘You just take these things so calmly. I think it’s wonderful, but how do you do it?’ Hawks said, ‘I learned a long time ago when big trouble comes
along and I let it get to me, I’d lose my breakfast.
I never saw anything in this business that was worth losing your breakfast for.’”
One day Capra dropped by the set to visit Hawks and Walker and saw something that forever after defined Howard Hawks to him: “They were shooting a scene with some wind machines and a lot of heavy equipment and there was a lot of black smoke in the studio. I was friendly with Howard—as friendly as you could get—so
I went over and I saw that everybody coming out was black and covered with smoke. But when Howard came out, he was absolutely untouched. His pants were pressed, his hair was in place and he didn’t have a spot on him. I said, ‘My God, even the smoke won’t touch him.’ That was Howard.”
As much as he could, Hawks shot the picture in sequence in order to enhance the dynamics of group interaction.
Cary Grant and the rest of the men were terrific and provided no problems, but, just as he had been unable to communicate effectively with Katharine Hepburn on
Bringing Up Baby
, he encountered heavy resistance to his methods from another pro, Jean Arthur. Questionable to begin with in the role of a showgirl knocking around Latin America, Frank Capra’s greatest leading lady was simply too wholesome,
irrepressibly upbeat, and unironical to fit comfortably into Hawks’s world. She was not adept at improvising with the quicksilver Grant, and when Hawks would try to direct her to act in the sexy, subtly simmering way that he liked, she simply refused, saying, “I can’t do that kind of stuff.”
Hawks didn’t hide his disappointment and resentment, and the feeling became mutual. At the end of the
shoot, Hawks said that he told Arthur, “You are one of the few people I’ve worked with that I don’t think I’ve helped at all. Someday you can go see what I wanted to do because I’m gonna do this character again.” In a typically self-serving story, Hawks claimed that several years later he returned home to find Jean Arthur waiting in his driveway. She had just seen Lauren Bacall in
To Have and
Have Not
and, according to Hawks, contritely confessed, “I wish I’d done what you’d asked me to do. If you ever make another picture with me, I’ll promise to do any goddamn thing you want to do. If a kid can come in and do that kind of stuff, I certainly could do it.” In later years, Hawks admitted that Arthur was “good” and attributed her inability to follow his direction to “a quirk.” To see
how Arthur is wanting in
Only Angels Have Wings
, and to realize how a certain sexual spark is missing as a result, one has only to imagine any number of other Hawks actresses from different eras in the role, not only
Bacall but Louise Brooks, Carole Lombard, Frances Farmer, Barbara Stanwyck, Ann Sheridan, or Angie Dickinson.
Hawks had just as much trouble with Rita Hayworth, but ironically, with
an inexperienced actress he was able to get what he wanted; as Joseph Walker remembered, she “would do anything Hawks told her to do.” Hawks personally didn’t find her “terribly sexy,” but did find that “she had a sex
quality
that came across … on the screen,” so he emphasized that aspect of her personality at the expense of anything else. His choice certainly worked spectacularly well in terms
of the film as well as her future, but at the time the hopeful actress felt that Hawks condescended to her and didn’t take her seriously. “It was a difficult film for me,” she later said. “I hadn’t been in a big ‘A’ picture before and I was really frightened. Cary Grant was so lovely and kind to me. He said, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be okay.’” She added, “Mr. Hawks asked me to do certain things that
I was very unhappy about, but between Cary and Hawks I did it. Cary is more genteel about things. Hawks is quiet. You can hardly hear him speak when he talks to you, but he’s kind of hard.” So bitter was she about Hawks’s insensitivity to her that decades later, when the film historian John Kobal was preparing a biography of her and mentioned that he was going to talk to Hawks about her, “she froze,
and suddenly, out of nowhere, she asked in a voice tingling with hostility, ‘Why?’”
For his part, Hawks realized that she was shy and hadn’t yet developed a performer’s ego and that it would be a mistake to “ask for things that were beyond her.” Instead, he posed her in the sexiest possible ways and tricked her to make her effective in scenes he realized she wasn’t up to. He introduced her with
dramatic brilliance, having all the men stop what they were doing and just stare as she comes down a flight of stairs. In her first solo scene with Grant, she was obliged to come into his office to begin a conversation that would summon up their past together. In the first rehearsal, having been given no instruction by her director, she entered very quickly and just looked blankly at Grant, prompting
Hawks to laugh. He then suggested she try it slowly: come in, close the door, and lean back against it so that her form-fitting dress would do its work. “She did and she looked awful good doing it because she had that … dancer’s quality … of assuming a position,” Hawks said. He then had her say, “Like my hair this way?,” telling the audience all it needed to know about their past; she and Grant
kiss, after which she says, “I’m not so sure we should have done that.” The finished scene carries a suggestive dose of the female
insolence that Hawks would fully realize with Lauren Bacall in
To Have and Have Not
six years later.
Hayworth had a scene in which she was supposed to cry, but try as she might she couldn’t make it convincing. Hawks solved the problem by moving the scene outside,
turning the rain machines on, and letting the water drench her face. Most difficult of all for her was a long drunk scene in which she and Grant were supposed to discuss their past. When Hawks and Grant agreed that she wasn’t “up to being a good drunk,” the director told Grant to simply tell her, “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” and pour two pitchers of water and ice cubes on her head
and then say a line while she reacted hysterically, upon which they could dissolve to a shot of him drying her hair and telling her to blow her nose. Later, while suggesting that Hayworth, “at her best, was slightly … unreal,” Hawks admitted, “I’m not sure Rita
ever
really knew what it was all about.”
Making changes constantly on the set with Furthman and the actors, Hawks worked at a deliberate
pace, with the shooting schedule bulking up accordingly. By February 8, the day he was to have finished, the end was nowhere in sight. If Harry Cohn was concerned, he had nevertheless agreed to Hawks’s nonnegotiable stipulation, and was forbidden from coming onto the set. First-unit filming didn’t end until March 24, after seventy-three days, or thirty-one days over schedule. The film, however,
was far from complete. Several other units were engaged to shoot portions of the picture, and a lot still had to be done. The ever-reliable Richard Rosson, with Russell Metty on second-unit camera, shot some night footage at Metropolitan Airport in Van Nuys. Later, Rosson flew to Las Vegas to photograph some snowy mountains, and most of the aerial footage was shot by Elmer Dyer; Hawks’s good friend
and Hollywood’s top stunt pilot, Paul Mantz, flew the planes, working around Salt Lake City, and St. George, Utah; and Riverside, Bishop and Muroc Dry Lake in California, among other locations. Roy Davidson did all the miniatures, which included the freighter at sea as well as all the (obviously fake) plane takeoffs and landings.
Hawks returned to do retakes with Cary Grant and Victor Kilian
as late as April 13. For unknown reasons, Charles Vidor (who, seven years later, would direct Rita Hayworth to her best performance in
Gilda
), and not Hawks, was called in to direct two days’ worth of retakes and added scenes. Vidor made the interior scene of the mountaintop lookout with Barthelmess, Don Barry as the injured Tex, the doctor, the father, and the boy, as well as a process scene
of Cary Grant and Rita Hayworth in the plane. Vidor also did a retake of a scene between the two in the Dutchman’s, which was not
identified in the production log; some of this material did not end up in the finished picture. Just before the release prints were struck, Hawks, making use of the precedent Frank Capra had set at the studio, managed to have his title-card credit changed from his usual
“A Howard Hawks Production” to the possessive “Howard Hawks’” for the first time.
On May 10, a mere twelve days after the final scenes were shot,
Only Angels Have Wings
had its invitational premiere at the Pantages in Hollywood. Victor Fleming, just having returned to work on
Gone with the Wind
that day after a week’s illness, turned out to see his friend’s latest creation, as did many celebrities
and most of the important cast members. Richard Barthelmess threw a party at Café LaMaze afterward, which Hawks attended. The official world premiere took place the following day at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Except for some carping about the casting of Jean Arthur, the reviews on both coasts were flat-out raves. While calling the film a “standout,”
Variety
’s Abel Green noted the
similarity to
Flight from Glory
and reported that Barthelmess’s entrance, marking his return to the screen after a three-year absence, was greeted with applause by the opening-day Radio City crowd. In Hollywood, and no doubt elsewhere, men were reported going nuts over Hayworth, issuing wolf whistles and shouting when she was on-screen. Never having had any luck creating a star at his studio,
Harry Cohn took note, signed her to a new contract with a raise from $250 to $350 per week, and heeded Hawks’s advice to wait until public reaction set in before rushing her into another picture. In short order, she landed on the cover of
Look
magazine and started receiving fan mail. Despite her miserable time on the set, the film marked Rita Hayworth’s breakthrough.