DVD of the Week: Come and Get It

Several months ago, I admitted my enduring enthusiasm for “Come and Get It,” the 1936 historical drama by Howard Hawks; I discuss the film in the clip above. It’s set in a Wisconsin logging company and deals both with the American past (the movie’s two parts take place, respectively, in 1884 and 1907) and, to some extent, with the director’s own past (Hawks claimed that his grandfather was one of the logging tycoons depicted in the novel by Edna Ferber on which the movie is based). I wrote previously about the brilliant performance by Frances Farmer, in her first starring role—a double role, as the saloon waitress with whom the young, ambitious foreman Barney Glasgow falls in love in 1884, and as her daughter, with whom he falls in love twenty-three years later. I didn’t say anything about Walter Brennan, who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Barney’s best friend, the Swedish immigrant Swan Bostrom. (Brennan, who had acted in Hawks’s “Barbary Coast” the year before, was something of a fetish for Hawks, who later graced him with superb supporting roles in “To Have and Have Not,” “Sergeant York,” “Red River,” and “Rio Bravo.”)

Most of all, what I didn’t mention was the exquisite visual and gestural wit that Hawks applies to situations where sentiment looms. His strong strain of emotion stays mainly under the surface, which he adorns with a touch of comedy. His antic tropes and tics both mask and suggest earnest feelings and symbolize, in a classically Freudian way, what he couldn’t express or his characters couldn’t know. In “Come and Get It,” Swan’s exuberant splay-legged leaps into Barney’s arms, the taffy-pulling of a pair of lovers, a step over which visitors trip in Barney’s office, and the play with a child’s toy that leaven a grave discussion between father and daughter about love and sex are just a few of the whimsical devices of Hawks’s invention that resound uncannily in the mind’s more peculiar recesses. It’s a crucial and emblematic element of the director’s artistry; it amplifies every aspect of his films—not least, the actors’ performances. It’s a kind of artifice that, in its extravagance, is as odd and unpredictable as life itself, and that contributes greatly to his films’ air of psychological authenticity and insight.

In the clip, I talk about the particulars of “Come and Get It”; I can as readily imagine offering a clip with highlights of Hawksian tricks and twists that would both catalogue their varieties and begin to unfurl their densely compacted substance.

P.S. I’m grateful to Jaime N. Christley, whom I follow on Twitter, for reminding me of a curious detail concerning “Come and Get It.” It’s a story that Todd McCarthy tells in his biography of Hawks and that Hawks tells Peter Bogdanovich in “Who the Devil Made It.” The film’s producer, Samuel Goldwyn, was ill and didn’t supervise Hawks closely; the director drastically rewrote the script, Goldwyn was unhappy with the results, and, near the end of shooting, intervened, replacing Hawks with William Wyler, who directed the last sequences. Wyler’s visual imprint shows there, particularly in the use of contrasty, painterly lighting and of a deep-focus shot to capture a grand dramatic moment. His emotional imprint shows too—these scenes are more overtly sentimental than the rest of the movie, and the climactic fight between the protagonist and his son is terribly softened. (In “Red River,” which Hawks shot mainly in 1946, he showed how such a scene should be done.)