The Screengrab

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives honors the late work of the consummate entertainer of twentieth-century Hollywood movies, Howard Hawks, with a series devoted to the movies Hawks directed from his 1948 classic Western Red River, with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, through his later masterpiece with Wayne, Rio Bravo, down to their final collaborations (1967's El Dorado, featuring Robert Mitchum and a young James Caan, and the 1970 Rio Lobo, where you get to see Wayne beat up George Plimpton; the cast also includes Jack Elam and later Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox studios chief Sherry Lansing in her starlet days), which were assembled from parts scavenged from their predecessors. For Hawks fans, the series offers a chance to re-evaluate some works not usually ranked among his finest efforts, notably Land of the Pharoahs with Joan Collins, which proved that Hawks was no more a natural at getting English actors to look unembarrassed while pretending to be ancient Egyptians than any other mortal (even, or maybe especially, when he had William Faulkner working on the script) and Man's Favorite Sport?, starring Rock Hudson as an "expert" author of fishing book who thinks fish are disgusting. (The movie receives an extensive subtextual reading in Mark Rappaport's 1992 Rock Hudson's Home Movies.) In fact, the only Hawks feature from 1953's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to the director's death in 1977 that's not included is his ambitious, personal, and disastrous 1965 race-car movie Red Line 7000. Maybe the programmers were afraid to screen it for fear that it still wouldn't look a lot better than Speed Racer.

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Have you been sitting there staring at CNN thinking, I wish someone would translate the political debates of the day into terms I can understand, such as classic '70s movies? Good news! In an article in the journal National Interest, John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell use The Godfather and the conflicting approaches suggested for dealing with the threat from Sollozzo and the Tataglia family to explain the thought processes of what the authors identify as tht three main currents of American geopolitical thought following September 11, 2001. It is Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), the consigliere and family diplomat, whp represents "liberal institutionalism"; his mantra is "we oughta talk to them." "First, like many modern Democrats," write the authors, "Tom believes that the family’s main objective should be to return as quickly as possible to the world as it existed before the attack. His overriding strategic aim is the one that Hillary Clinton had in mind when she wrote in a recent Foreign Affairs article of the need for America to 'reclaim its proper place in the world.'” He butts heads with Sonny the hothead, who is the voice of neoconservatism, brandishing a big stick and quick to accuse anyone who expresses a lack of enthusiasm for seeing him swing it of disloyalty to the family.

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The other day we caught up with the congenial David O. Russell, the director who rassled George Clooney while making Three Kings and whose tirade against I Heart Huckabees star Lily Tomlin became a YouTube sensation. At the time, all we knew was that James Caan had left the set of Russell’s latest opus, Nailed, for the usual reason: “creative differences.” Now that we know what those differences were, the story is even better.

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A new David O. Russell film is in production, which must mean that the notoriously prickly filmmaker isn’t getting along with somebody. George Clooney was the first to report that Russell might not be all sunshine and roses on the set; actor and director famously had “creative differences” while making Three Kings. Clooney elaborated in an interview with Playboy in 2000. “David is in many ways a genius, though I learned that he's not a genius when it comes to people skills...He yelled and screamed at people all day, from day one...he screamed at the script supervisor and made her cry. I wrote him a letter and said, 'Look, I don't know why you do this. You've written a brilliant script, and I think you're a good director. Let's not have a set like this. I don't like it and I don't work well like this.'...He turned on me and said, 'Why don't you just worry about your fucked-up act? You're being a dick. You want to hit me? You want to hit me? Come on, pussy, hit me.' I'm looking at him like he's out of his mind. Then he started banging me on the head with his head. He goes, 'Hit me, you pussy. Hit me.' Then he got me by the throat and I went nuts. I had him by the throat. I was going to kill him. Kill him.”

So that went well, and although it’s sad that there’s no video evidence of this dust-up – at least, none that’s surfaced so far – the same can’t be said for I Heart Huckabees.

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