Letterboxd — Your life in film

An example of my favorite typical Hawksian set up of a rag-tag intentional community formed around a dangerous job, investigating the nexus between masculinity, camaraderie, and the death drive. The lack of a well established classical star persona makes this one of Hawks' purest, playing with a looseness of narrative typical of his later works.

This is reason enough to love the movie from a committed Hawksian like myself, but what really sets this apart is perhaps Hawks' single most explicit investigation of gender dynamics. Hawks' women are usually understood through a useful but narrow "Hawksian woman" lens, here we have a scene early on where a woman explicitly resists being masculinized and fetishized. Perhaps most cutting is the portrait of various kinds of macho posturing that poison their relationship to women (especially Dan's increasingly demented obsession over his love interest's supposed promiscuity), the kind of critique that becomes all the more powerful because a certain kind of masculinity is obviously so near and dear to Hawks' heart.