Howard Hawks | A Girl in Every Port / 1928

loving men

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Kevin McGuinness (screenplay, based on a scenario by Seton I. Miller, with intertitles by Malcolm Stuart), Howard Hawks (director) A Girl in Every Port / 1928

 

I’ve always been bemused by the fact that the hard drinking, motorcycling and car racing enthusiast, close friend to macho writers and actors William Faulkner, Ben Hecht, Ernest Hemingway, and Gary Cooper, and rich boy celebrant of boy club behavior, also directed a substantial number of films that represented gay figures and often coded LGBTQ behavior (works such as Fig Leaves, Bringing Up Baby, Red River, I Was a Male War Bride, The Big Sleep, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the film I’m about to review, A Girl in Every Port), as well as having created a substantial number of proto-feminist females—which film commentators have described as “the Hawksian woman” in works such as Bringing Up Baby, Ball of Fire, and His Girl Friday.

     Indeed, you might almost characterize many of his male characters as the Hawksian man, who prefers the company of his own sex more than that of female gender, which would include John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and other aggressively heterosexual males in films like Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Rio Lobo at the end of his long career. His easy-going directorial style, appealing to both men and women, allowed him to work with some of the most notable of Hollywood figures in almost every kind of genre from screwball comedy, war time adventure tales, westerns, and mysteries. And in many respects he defined Hollywood genres by often turning them around so that they revealed their flexibility under his great direction. If some like Orson Welles saw Hawkes’ works as “great prose,” while finding John Ford’s films to be “pure poetry,” many major directors, admiring his improvisational and collaborative style, strongly felt his influence: Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, François Truffaut, Michael Mann, and Jacques Rivette among them. Jean-Luc Godard described him as “the greatest American artist.”

    Certainly, no one would describe the chauvinist, womanizing sailors Spike Madden (Victor McLaglen later recognized for his roles in Dishonored, The Informer, and Gunga Din) and Salami (Robert Armstrong of later King Kong fame) as characters of a great US movie. The ire that Salami raises in Spike by beating him to the women he encounters in various international ports and leaving behind his calling card by branding them—either with a leg bracelet or tattoo of his finger ring insignia, and a loose anchor—might equally raise the hackles of any of us who recognize females as beings vastly most interesting and intelligent than merely playthings to fuck and leave behind.

      Yet despite this film’s obnoxious initial proposition, by its end this movie manages to switch genders so that these mindless lechers meet up with a woman, Marie (the always memorable Louise Brooks) who wants the same thing as they do, along with their money; and she leaves the two macho sailors who have slugged their way across several continents, to fall into each other’s arms and plan to settle down on a little farm together. Indeed, even after their first boxing bout, which ends in their venting all their pent-up male testosterone on the equally loathed local police force, they have already committed to traveling the world together; and even before being cured of their lothario-complex by Marie, Spike has invited Salami to settle down with him. It simply takes Marie’s attempt to wedge her body between their male alliance—call it camaraderie if you don’t want to face the fact that they can’t keep their hands off one another or want to ignore the fact that early on Salami has also branded Spike by the imprint of his ring—for the two to realize, as Salami puts it to Marie, “Nothin’ doin’ kid, that big ox means more to me than any woman.”

      And even if when Spike discovers that the woman he claims he wants to marry has also long ago been branded by Salami’s anchor so that he has to knock out of his best buddy, the film finishes up with him stroking his hand across his friend’s head as he moves in for what we know, the minute the director calls cut, will be a kiss. And both still have time before the blackout to restate their eternal commitment to one another which anyone but someone like Clark Gable or Mel Gibson would have admit were the words of a couple who were committing to marriage.

    Marie has no choice but to slink off into the sunset to find herself another dumb cluck with whom she might hitch a ride into heterosexual bliss.

   Even the tough poet-novelist Blaise Cendrars recognized A Girl in Every Port to be a film that “definitely marked the first appearance of contemporary cinema.” And French archivist and cinephile Henry Langlois proclaimed Hawks to be “the Gropius of the cinema,” by which I presume he was suggesting that Hawks was the architect and teacher of how to construct a great film, despite A Girl in Every Port’s obvious flaws.

      In the early LGBTQ cinema bible, The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo goes even further in testifying to Hawks’ importance for gay and lesbian filmmaking:

 

“Howard Hawks always concentrated on the guys, and in his films things went better—better than [Cecile DeMille’s] Ben Hur, at least. Dealing almost always with close, dependent, emotional male relationships, his films were informed with a particularly schizophrenic sensibility with regard to maleness and the intrusion of women into its world.

     ....Robert Armstrong repeatedly starts a brawl in order to keep his buddy Victor McLaglen away from the ladies in A Girl in Every Port, a film which Hawks called “really a love story between two men.” The title could well be ironic; the phrase “a girl in every port,” a bravado claim, was almost always used facetiously. No sailor ever had a girl in every port, and every sailor was paranoid about the fellows’ finding it out.”

       

      One might, finally, interpret Salami’s tattoo as not being a statement of his conquering and possession, but as a warning to others to keep away, hinting that the girl was dangerous and deceptive, someone, who like Marie, would steal your life-savings and skip out of any real relationship in which her lover imagined engaging. After all, Marie is a high board diver, a woman who can swoop down from the clouds like a vulture to steal the heart and wallet of dumb men like Spike. While in Hawks’ world men are equals; they fight and squabble on level ground, getting angry and forgiving one another in matter of a few seconds. The very moment Salami has dragged his enemy into the bay to beat his brains out, when he realizes that his sailor friend can’t swim he proceeds to save his life, while after, when Salami discovers all his cigarettes are wet, Spike offers him a fresh one wrapped in plastic.

       So strangely enough their chauvinism is redeemed by a misogyny so severe that they’d rather be chaste male lovers than active heterosexuals. In the end, one might argue their logic to be the reverse of that of many male prostitutes: what does sex have to do with the love of someone of the same gender?

       And, of course, just the year before the far braver director William Wellman had even more brilliantly explored a world, in his brilliant picture Wings, in which two male comrades not only experienced love but brought it very close to something we can describe as being sexual. And the very same year as Hawks’ film German director William Dieterle in Sex in Chains would make it clear that two men could very easily transform their love into sex, although for them, as Russo might observe, it would end badly as it did for most men and women who actualized their same-desires in cinema throughout the 20th century.

 

Los Angeles, May 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).