Only Angels Have Wings
was
heavily promoted by Columbia, particularly in the national magazines, but with the opening of the New York World’s Fair on May 3 essentially killing film business in the city that spring, the picture did just a “pretty good” $143,000 in its two-week Radio City run. Throughout most of the country, however, it proved a lively draw with notable staying power and ended up earning well over $1,000,000
in revenues, in the imprecise box-office accounting of the day, fulfilling Columbia’s hopes for it as the company’s third top grosser of the year, after Capra’s
You Can’t Take It with You
and
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
. It was shortly announced that
Only Angels Have Wings
would be one of twelve titles to represent the United States at the first-ever Cannes Film Festival, set to open on the French
Riviera on September 1, 1939. However, events in Europe that summer would delay the inauguration of the festival by seven years.
The distilled, microcosmic nutshell of a world Hawks created in
Only Angels Have Wings
has been called “a boy’s own land,” an “operetta seaport” that is “removed from reality, like the land of Tolkien’s Hobbits.” It has also been described as “a Racine tragedy,” a
“heady atmosphere of primal struggle” in which “Grant almost seems the high priest of some Sartrean temple,” “a self-sufficient hermetic society with its own values” in which Hawks finds a setting “ideal for the expression of his metaphysic.” It is, in fact, all these things, depending on how seriously one chooses to take the picture. The critic Dave Kehr has convincingly proposed the picture as
representing “the equilibrium point” of Hawks’s career. “The themes he was developing throughout the 30s here reach a perfect clarity and confidence of expression, without yet confronting the darker intimations that would haunt his films of the 40s and 50s.” It is also true that
Only Angels Have Wings
finds Hawks simultaneously operating at maximum effectiveness as an entertainer and a commercial
filmmaker on the one hand and a philosopher and intuitive artist-poet on the other. Even those who can’t take the film seriously are forced to acknowledge its snappy, cynical, and suspenseful “White Cargo melodrama” qualities, as well as the dazzling allure of Cary Grant, who never looked better or so fully expressed his hard, dark side. The vast majority of more general viewers, including the
critics and audiences of 1939, who enormously liked it but weren’t about to start thinking of it as great art, could reasonably consider it a prime example of what Hollywood could do best, one of the most exhilarating films of what has often been called the best year in American film history.
Critics who began looking deeper into the director’s work from the 1950s onward have found in
Only Angels
Have Wings
one of the richest mines in all of Hawks. His ability to compress, to take a story that originally occurred over a period of many weeks and reduce the action down to little more than twenty-four hours; to boil down to essences; to convey meanings through gestures, physical objects, and composition; to obliquely state what in other hands would be blatantly put was never greater. His
adolescent notions of stoicism and refusal to fear death were more clearly expressed here than in any of his other films: none of the later characters live so continuously in death’s shadow, and nowhere is there a scene that so concisely states the stubborn denial of it as the famous “Who’s Joe?” exchange. The manner in which Hawks delineated the importance of integration into the group achieved a
standard here that Hawks often strove for in his later work and sporadically achieved but never surpassed. In terms of the purity with which it expresses its director’s attitudes and personality, his quasi-existential,
closet-romantic impulse to assert the importance of individual self-definition against the dark void of the outside world,
Only Angels Have Wings
can fully support the serious claims
that have been made for it as “a completely achieved masterpiece.” One can also use it to assess the limitations of his world and sensibility, and the film starkly puts to the test how deep and profound pulp material can ultimately be. The film greatly benefited from the renewed zest and romantic optimism Hawks was feeling at the time, as he was just in the initial throes of falling in love
with Slim, the most important woman of his life.
The extent to which Howard Hawks lived in a fantasy world, however, can be seen in his imagining that
Only Angels Have Wings
was good because of some notion of documentary realism. In fact, the second-unit sequences of actual planes flying, the only recognizable exterior shots in the entire film, actually yank one out of the action, so disconnected
are they from the artificial world of Barranca. The film contains a tremendous amount of truth and insight into people and behavior, but virtually no reality. Not since the greatest of the Sternberg-Dietrich collaborations—
Morocco, Shanghai Express, The Scarlet Empress, The Devil Is a Woman
—had so much distilled visual poetry, daring behavioral stylization, and eccentric, undiluted personal philosophy
come through with such brazen but covert force in a first-class Hollywood entertainment.
None of his many interviewers ever thought to ask Howard Hawks about the identity of the young woman who read the part of Hildy Johnson at Hawks’s request one night after a dinner party. Nor has anyone ever stepped forward to take credit for giving the performance that convinced the director that a sex change would lend a special angle to a remake of his favorite play. Nor,
in fact, has anyone else ever mentioned having been present at this legendary evening at Hawks’s home. So we have only Hawks’s word that this event actually took place, with Hawks, the antithesis of the fast-talking, harddriving verbal type, playing the manipulative editor Walter Burns to the Hildy of some sweet young thing. But the story is good enough that one would like to print the legend, for
it led to one of the greatest American screen comedies, an arguable improvement on its brilliant source material, a high point in Hawks’s own career, and a culmination of the 1930s screwball genre from a man who was there at the start of it all some six years before.
In July 1938, Howard Hughes made the biggest headlines of his life when he completed his epochal round-the-world flight in the
record time of just over ninety-one hours. Later that year, word began circulating that he was planning a return to the movies after his withdrawal in disgust, six years earlier, in the wake of
Scarface
. First, however, he sold the screen rights to
The Front Page
to producer Edward Small. With
Only Angels Have Wings
just barely into production, Hawks went to see Cohn to try to sell him on producing
another version of
The Front Page
as Cary Grant’s next starring vehicle for Columbia. Initially, Cohn imagined Grant in the reporter role, with the editor Walter Burns being played by the celebrated newspaper columnist and staccato-speaking radio commentator Walter Winchell, who had already appeared in a couple of pictures for Zanuck at Fox. When Hawks informed the studio boss that he wanted Grant
to play Burns and a woman to appear as the reporter, Cohn, Hawks related, was initially aghast but
quickly came around to his idea during the course of a single meeting. In early January 1939, Cohn bought the remake rights to
The Front Page
from Eddie Small.
With Hecht and MacArthur unavailable—Hecht was busy doing uncredited rewrites for Victor Fleming on
Gone with the Wind
and preparing his
next film as a director,
Angels over Broadway
—the first screenwriter Hawks approached to ring the transformation was Gene Fowler. The man responsible for setting the playwrights back on track when they were having second-act problems during the writing of
The Front Page
, Fowler was a natural candidate for the job, but he resented, as Hecht did not, the changes Hawks wanted to make. Rebuffed, the
director instead turned to another old Hecht crony, Charles Lederer, the prankish, wealthy nephew of Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, who had begun his career polishing dialogue on
Scarface
and helping Bartlett Cormack with the adaptation of Lewis Milestone’s 1931 film of
The Front Page
.
While remaining in Hollywood to direct
Only Angels Have Wings
, Hawks stayed in close contact with his writers
as Hecht briefly accompanied Lederer to Palm Springs to help him revise the
Front Page
plotline. It was Lederer who took Hawks’s basic notion the crucial extra step to make ace reporter Hildy Johnson the ex-wife of Walter Burns, who schemes to lure her back into his professional and personal life before she marries a straight-laced mama’s boy the next day. Hawks credited Lederer’s idea with making
“all the scenes much better and the characters more definite. Now we knew what we were talking about—two people who had been married and in love and divorced. After that, it wasn’t really a great effort to do the story. We were a little snagged up before that because the relationship was nebulous.”
After Hecht helped him a bit more on structural revisions, Lederer remained in the desert to complete
the first draft, which he presented to Hawks on May 22, just twelve days after the
Angels
gala premiere. Lederer did two more drafts by the beginning of July. But Hawks, feeling that the dialogue needed more punch, then decided to call in Morrie Ryskind, who had pitched in so helpfully on
Ceiling Zero
. Ryskind was a particularly apt choice, not only for his comic mind but because of his intimate
familiarity with the material; his celebrated and frequent collaborator George S. Kaufman had directed the original Broadway production of
The Front Page
. Ryskind worked through the summer right up to the start of shooting at the end of September, by which time more than half of what Hawks considered the “finest modern dialogue that had been written” had been rewritten.
Changing Hildebrand
into Hildegard enriched the dynamic of the story in obvious ways, enabling it to become “a very curious and complex romantic comedy in which love is expressed through work and work is expressed as love.” Hildy becomes a markedly stronger character as a woman, doubly important to Walter and not only because of the romantic connection: Hawks made sure to include a scene not present in the play—Hildy’s
superb prison interview with murderer Earl Williams—that showed this celebrated pro
in action
, doing her job, proving how good she really is and thereby how worthy of Walter’s high esteem. Her sex also changes the dynamic in the otherwise all-male courthouse pressroom and alters the focus of the scene in which Earl Williams’s floozy Mollie Molloy tells off the “gentlemen of the press.” It also,
of course, required a total rethinking of the character to whom Hildy is engaged. In the play, Hildy’s intended, Peggy Grant, was the one boringly “nice” individual in whom Hecht and MacArthur clearly had no interest. Bruce Baldwin, shrewdly written in the new
His Girl Friday
as being unqualified to enter Hildy’s world of the newsroom and presented by Hawks as the only person who speaks slowly,
is used as the butt of jokes to ridicule the safe, dull, conventional life Hildy is on the verge of embracing. He is also, however, given a vestige of decency and legitimacy that enhances his position as a mere foil and punching bag for Walter in his attempts to win back Hildy. He may be a chump, but as newly conceived for the film, he becomes, unlike Peggy Grant, not only an obligatory character
but a memorable one.
Structurally, Hawks and his writers followed the pattern the director had first employed on his adaptation of
Twentieth Century
: adding an extensive “prologue” establishing the prior personal and working relationship of the central couple, then boiling down the play’s three acts—in the case of
His Girl Friday
, into a tight seventy minutes—while largely retaining the constricted
settings of the theater piece. The first twenty minutes of
His Girl Friday
, from Hildy’s entrance through her long conference with Walter Burns and the luncheon they share with her fiancé, Bruce Baldwin, were entirely invented for the film. In creating this foregrounding material, Hawks moved the beginning of the action up to the daytime, which then eases into night as the story unfolds, the same
progression used in
Bringing Up Baby
.
The original play boasts one of the most famous final lines in American theater history: after scheming to keep Hildy onboard long enough to help him with the Earl Williams case, Walter encourages him to leave to join his fiancée, giving him a watch as a parting gift; after Hildy has left, Walter reveals his essence by phoning the police and telling them
to apprehend
Hildy, since “the son-of-a-bitch stole my watch!” In the more relaxed pre-Code days of 1931, the original film of the play was able to get away with this line, which, eight years later, Hawks could not have done even if he’d wanted to. But by this time, Hawks felt the line had become so familiar that it was shopworn, and he wanted to find something better. This assignment fell to
Morrie Ryskind, who came up with what he thought was a brilliant new ending, in which Walter and Hildy have a wedding in the newsroom and break into a huge fight as soon as they say “I do.” Abner Biberman’s Diamond Louie was to have had the last word: “I think it’s gonna turn out all right this time.” This was never shot, however, since Ryskind, a little proud of himself, laid it all out for a bunch
of other Columbia scribes at a writers’ hangout after work one evening. Just a few days later, one of the screenwriters who had been there told him that he had just seen Ryskind’s ending being filmed on a nearby soundstage—for a different picture.
Ryskind was incensed but had no choice except to come up with yet another wrap-up. This time, he recalled, “I devised the one of a guarded marital
reconciliation between Walter and Hildy. This was kept under wraps until Howard filmed it. Both Howard and I agreed that the romantic flavor of the new ending worked out better than our previous one, so in a way, I’m grateful to that writer at Columbia—who shall remain anonymous—for giving us the impetus to make a great film even better.” The final ending cleverly sends Walter and Hildy out to take
the train to Albany, Hildy and Bruce’s original destination, in order to cover a labor strike, with Walter snidely remarking, ‘I wonder if Bruce can put us up.”