Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era. Critic Leonard Maltin called him "the greatest American director who is not a household name." Roger Ebert called Hawks "one of the greatest American directors of pure movies, and a hero of auteur critics because he found his own laconic values in so many different kinds of genre material." He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Sergeant York (1941) and earned the Honorary Academy Award in 1974.
Hawks in the 1940s
Poster for the comedy Fig Leaves (1926), one of the few early films Hawks valued positively later in his life.
A Girl in Every Port poster
Howard Hawks in 1929 or 1930
Classical Hollywood cinema
Classical Hollywood cinema is a term used in film criticism to describe both a narrative and visual style of filmmaking that first developed in the 1910s to 1920s during the later years of the silent film era. It then became characteristic of American cinema during the Golden Age of Hollywood, between roughly 1927 and 1960. It eventually became the most powerful and pervasive style of filmmaking worldwide.
Film classic Gone with the Wind (1939) starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh
Still from the silent film The Birth of a Nation (1915), starring Lillian Gish (second from right)
Theatrical release poster for Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925)