Parallax View

Much in life makes for the anonymity of the individual human being and, not surprisingly, most people drift mindlessly with the current carrying them towards the final oblivion of death. But some men hate the very thought of drowning in the flux and flow of impermanence, of simply living and dying without indelibly marking their [...]

by Kathleen Murphy and Richard T. Jameson [Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977] Howard Winchester Hawks was home the afternoon of July 12, 1976. For some time there, it looked as if it wouldn’t happen. Kathleen Murphy had finally taken the leap and declared Howard Hawks: An American Auteur in the Hemingway Tradition [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977. This essay on Bringing Up Baby is a chapter of the author's University of Washington doctoral dissertation Howard Hawks: An American Auteur in the Hemingway Tradition.] Bringing Up Baby‘s narrative and thematic directions have much in common with those of Shakespearean comedy. Positing the green world of [...]

[This was a program note written to accompany the October 10, 1972, showing of Scarface in "The Cinema of Howard Hawks," an Office of Lectures & Concerts Film Series at the University of Washington. At that time Scarface was a very rara avis; indeed, the print shown was the property of a private collector. It [...]

[Written for a November 14, 1972 showing of the film in a University of Washington Office of Lectures & Concerts Film Series on Howard Hawks. Reprinted in an all-Westerns issue of the film journal The Velvet Light Trap.] I can remember my reaction to Rio Bravo upon its initial release in 1959.  I liked it, [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] I believe the really good people would be reasonably successful in any circumstance; that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure much more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to [...]