The long-awaited, two-week "Early Howard Hawks Blog-a-thon" at Ed Howard's Only the Cinema kicks off today. "During this time," announces Howard, "my blog Only The Cinema will be exclusively devoted to the films Hawks made up until 1936, and I'll also be soliciting and posting links to writing about these early Hawks films from many other bloggers and critics." Howard also explains that This arbitrary cutoff point has been established in order to encourage people to investigate the less often discussed portions of Hawks' career, before he made the majority of his most famous films. Everyone has something to say about His Girl Friday and Rio Bravo, but how often do you hear anyone even mention Tiger Shark?" That would be the one where a damn woman (Zita Johann) has to go and get between Edward G. Robinson (in fine form, Portuguese accent and all) and his best mate, Richard Arlen, while they're trying to catch some damn tuna. I'm sorry, I know it's early in the day for that kind of language, but seeing Edward G. Robinson in a vulnerable place just brings out the mother hen in me. Great tuna-catching scenes, too. When's the last time you saw that on the poster for Michael Bay's latest?

The 1936 cut-off date doesn't exactly restrict potential contributors to a bottomless pit of obscurities: Hawks, who had another thirty-five years of career left him, had already knocked off Scarface and Twentieth Century by that time. That still leaves plenty of movies, especially those from his days in silent films, that don't get the kind of attention now that his "later" stuff gets. So this public service going on at Only the Cinema stands to be educational if a few people with something to say about the movies hardly any of us have seen choose to pipe up. It's not too soon to start giving some back.