The House Next Door

By Ed Howard

[This is a contribution to the Early Hawks Blog-a-thon hosted at Only The Cinema. It will run from January 12 to January 23, 2009.]

Howard Hawks' 1928 silent film A Girl In Every Port is both a singularly fascinating glimpse into Hawks' early aesthetic and thematic development, and a massively entertaining action/comedy romp. It is, as befits the director who later became known for his dramas about tight-knit groups of men in high-pressure situations, essentially a buddy comedy. More than that, it is practically a love story, a romance, about the development of a masculine friendship closer than any traditional romantic relationship. It's the story of the sailor Spike (Victor McLaglen), who in his travels around the world is plagued by a mysterious other sailor who keeps leaving his mark (an anchor within a heart) on the girls who Spike tries to romance when he goes ashore. When he finally runs into this other sailor, Bill (Robert Armstrong), the two predictably brawl and butt heads, but they soon find camaraderie in their shared distaste for the police, who arrive to break up the fight. After a night spent drunkenly wandering the town—Hawks economically suggests a lot with a great shot of the pair's wobbly legs walking down the street together—they become inseparable friends, enlisting on the same ship and always carousing as a pair from then on.
_______________________________________
To read the rest of the article at Only the Cinema, click here.