Howard Hawks

The Grey Fox of Hollywood

By: Todd McCarthy

Narrated by: Ryan Horn

The first major biography of one of Old Hollywood’s greatest directors. Sometime partner of the eccentric Howard Hughes, drinking buddy of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, an inveterate gambler and a notorious liar, Howard Hawks was the most modern of the great masters and one of the first directors to declare his independence from the major studios. He played Svengali to Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift, and others, but Hawks’s greatest creation may have been himself. As The Atlantic Monthly noted, “Todd McCarthy. . . . has gone further than anyone else in sorting out the truths and lies of the life, the skills and the insight and the self-deceptions of the work.”

©1997 Todd McCarthy (P)2024 Cherry Hill Publishing

Critic reviews

"Excellent...a respectful, exhaustive, and appropriately smartass look at Hollywood's most versatile director."--Newsweek

"McCarthy does a good job of distilling not so much a style as an unflinching philosophy of life.... He gives us the stoic, comic essence of Hawks and his films."--Entertainment Weekly

"Spectacular.... McCarthy's thick, rich biography...chronicles in vivid detail how perhaps the last great popular artist in the movies worked."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

Terrible Narration, Good story

I never, I mean, NEVER, write reviews. Much less, bad reviews. It's hard reading a book about a subject matter you may know little about.

HOWEVER, this narrator is so far off the mark it has me screaming the correct pronunciation of names, places, cities, you name it, this guy can get it wrong.

There’s also a chapter that isn’t completely read.

The narrator is TERRIBLE but all

The challenge of writing a biography for Howard Hawks is unenviable for History, there’s so little info about this man’s origins that we don’t get to know him intimately enough and if that doesn’t help - THE MAN LIES CONSTANTLY. Given that Hawks very rarely let us in on his own internal subjectivity it’s no wonder it’s such a daunting task but McCarthy pulls it off.

On the narrator. HORRIBLE. Honestly I expect more from audible, I’m already halfway through and this man has already recorded and messed up a handful of lines and repeated to correct himself which would be fine if I wasn’t paying for it. But it’s the worst narration yet and then fact that I wrote a review is inherently proof to that because I never rate or write reviews but this was just so bad.

To have or have not the big sleep chapter 26

Chapter 26 is butchered. 10 minutes in it drops story of To Have or Have Not and jumps to Red River. Skips over the Big sleep completely. WTF?

Boring beyond belief

Poorest reading ever…mispronounced words and lack of proper emphasis render the entire experience a time wasting drag.