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Last round in the Great Hawks Debate
Bill Paul's defense of Hawks's greatness attractively offers to raise questions of methodology. But instead he argues from my supposed plethora of grave inaccuracies to my general debility as a critic, and then reverts to standard auteurist interpretations, which, without being in any way illegitimate, assume that he's answered a whole swatch of difficult questions. Principally: what latitude of interpretation is allowable, or indeed necessary, in considering art, or entertainment, particularly in mass media? Paul implies that ambiguity entails richness; but there is also the ambiguity of evasion and poverty.
Paul is so innocent in his certainty that Hawks can only be watched one way, his admiring way, that I found myself beginning to feel like Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter: I don't want to shoot this kid down. To make matters even more complicated, both our articles were cut, his more drastically than mine; and who wants to fight a guy with one arm not working, like Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock? It's true, of course, that Paul uses his pro-Hawks pitch to semi-discredit all my work as ravaged by amnesia (like William Bendix in The Blue Dahlia). But that's just a standard bit of furor academicus, so why jjot let the taunts pass (like Gregory Peck in The Big Country)? Why gratify that New Yorkish relish for pitting critic against critic in needlefights of intricate detail? But there's something else. Paul's piece is a fair example of academic auteurism, and it links with my sensations of being almost the last of the pre-Sixties limitedauteurrists, an Odd Man Out at bay against hordes of HitchcockoHawksians, whose thundering hooves and Ph.D's. will trample down every other brand of auteurism, unless us oldtimers get down off the porch and start repairing our broken fences (like Kirk Douglas in Man Without A Star). And by the way: the films up there in parentheses are there alls beating all but Hawks's tiptoe best.
Bloopers a Go-Go
This section may be unbelievably boring, mainly because I've been unable to solve in an entertaining manner the problem bequeathed me, of teasing out three layers of text: the Hawks movie, what I said, and what Paul thinks I said. No...