- Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Revisiting Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at the Music Box this weekend (as part of the ongoing series of classic musicals) rekindled an internal debate that I’ll likely never resolve: Who’s the greatest American filmmaker, John Ford or Howard Hawks? Every time I consider the question (it happens every couple years) I know I’m embarking upon a fool’s errand, and yet it seems vital that I do. Just about everything I value in Hollywood cinema finds its greatest expression in the work of these two directors—principally, the development of serious, even philosophical art from the materials of genre storytelling. If Ford was the poet laureate of American movies, lyrically exploring the national character through the endless permutation of favorite motifs, then Hawks was its supreme prose stylist, his precise, unfaltering syntax conveying a complex worldview with perfect clarity and without sacrificing the immediate pleasures of popular narrative film.
Ben Sachs writes about moviegoing every Monday.
