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Furthermore, Hawks's work, for all of its concern with objects handled with economy, is often just as concerned with a topic dear to Lang: gesture as a type of deep inscription, as in the emphasis on branding as an extension of ownership in Red River, on the marked or scarred body in not only Scarface but also in A Girl in Every Port, Only Angels Have Wings, and Rio Lobo (1970).

IN 1927, A YOUNG FILM CRITIC NAMED LUIS BUÑUEL, living in Paris at the time, wrote a review of Buster Keaton's latest film. College. In his review. Buñuel praised the virtues of the "American school" of filmmaking, epitomized for Buñuel by Keaton, over the European. American cinema is defined by its "vitality, photogeny, no culture and new tradition," while European cinema is defined by its traits of "sentimentalism, prejudices of art, literature, tradition." The Europeans produce "superfilms" that repeatedly display their technique, while the Americans hide their technique in order to "give lessons to reality itself" (65). However, Buñuel is not merely rejecting the European school of filmmaking technique (particularly in its then-fashionable German Expressionist and French Impressionist forms); he is also rejecting a certain European style of film performance. He cites, as an epitome of this European approach, Emil Jannings, whose performances are dominated by explicitness in facial expression and body language; in Jannings, "sorrow is a hundred-faced prism." By contrast, Keaton's facial expressions are "as modest as that of a bottle," even while the face itself has its viewpoint "in infinity" (64-65). Through his "monochord expression," Keaton embodies a kind of essence, an idea about humanity that causes the viewer to smile "the smile of health and olympian force" (64). For Buñuel, much of Keaton's greatness as a comic artist has to do with his "direct harmony with objects, situations and the other means of his work" (64-65). This sense of "direct harmony" has little to do with the character Keaton plays in College, since the comedy here is often predicated upon that character's "failing" to master an object. Rather, the sense of achieved harmony occurs through Keaton's skill as an actor in controlling these objects, a control that paradoxically is applied toward failure of mastery within the film's diegesis. Such a mastery in handling the object is not, for Buñuel, utterly unique to Keaton (however gifted Keaton may have been) but rather symptomatic of America in general, suggesting a strong link between this kind of performance style and American culture.

American actors often possessed healthy, streamlined bodies, highly mobile if not acrobatic, and were able to thoroughly dominate a space: Douglas Fairbanks, Tom Mix, Pearl White. But they were also able to control and command these bodies through subtle facial expressions and gestures that were much more closely attuned to the motion picture camera's capacity to magnify small details. In writing on these kinds of performances in Cecil B. De Mille's The Cheat (1915), Colette would declare that "America is building conservatories solely for cinema actors" (20).

This fascination with things American was central to much of Europe during and after World War I. Through American culture, an economically and a politically devastated continent could imagine a positive (if not utopian) alternate universe, one which was, as Buñuel notes, creating new traditions, unencumbered by formality and the weight of history, a prosperous country fully embracing the new and the modem. Hollywood cinema was often at the center of this fascination, its actors the idealized representatives of this modern America. American actors moved and gestured with physical freedom, elegance, and a lack of self-consciousness that, for many Europeans, became the hallmark not simply of an American style of acting but of American behavior in general. There seemed to be an absolute harmony between the behavior and performance style of American actors and the ideals of their culture. Sergei Eisenstein would write of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) as a film that possesses "an astonishing harmony of all its component parts, a really amazing harmony as a whole" while also adding that "our age yearns for harmony" (140). Moreover, Ford's actors "could be students of American history" in their embodiment of this ideal image of America (145).

While the cultural origins of various traditions of stage performance are widely documented (Kabuki and Noh in Japan, the commedia dell'arte in Italy, for example), less research of this nature has been done in terms of film. One reason for this is that distinctions between styles of acting in various national cinemas are not always clear-cut. As James Naremore has noted, the cinema's emergence in the late nineteenth century coincided with the increased importance of the "realistic" and psychological stage drama, for which the ideal of acting was one that strove toward naturalism (34-67). To a large extent, the cinema not only inherited but also built upon and extended this ideal. Most cultures and most national cinemas demonstrated a fascination with this more nuanced, psychological approach, even if they did not completely abandon alternate or more indigenous styles. And while there have been some important exceptions to this trend, naturalism has remained central. However, there is more than one way an actor may appear to be natural onscreen. In American cinema and theater, the dominant technique for naturalism in acting developed through the Stanislavsky-inspired Actors Studio, an approach that did not make a significant impact on film acting until after World War II. Prior to this, there were other options available for this appearance of naturalness.

If we are to isolate certain privileged moments in American cinema that help us to clarify-as well as complicate-the notion of a distinctly American style of screen acting, the films of Howard Hawks offer particularly fertile terrain. Hawks is widely recognized as a major director of actors, someone whose sharp eye for talent led to the "discovery" of performers, and to their transformation into stars (most notably Lauren Bacall), and whose direction of established performers catapulted them to higher levels of achievement, firmly establishing them as actors of the first rank, most notably Carole Lombard in Twentieth Century (1934) and John Wayne and Montgomery Gift in Red River (1948). In the literature on Hawks, one often finds critics attempting to capture the experience of watching his performers in action, searching for phenomenological equivalents in prose of what it feels like to watch an actor in a Hawks film. Manny Farber reaches one of the heights of his descriptive mode of criticism when he refers to Ann Dvorak in Scarface (1932) "striking out blindly with the thinnest, sharpest elbows, shoving aside anyone who tries to keep her from the sex and excitement of a dance hall" (25); or to Gary Grant in His Girl Friday (1940), who can "get away with so much Kabulike exaggeration, popping his eyes, jutting out his elbows, roaring commands at breath-taking speed in a gymnasium of outrageous motion" (29). Writing of this nature suggests that in Hawks the actors are not simply part of the overall fabric and structure of the film but are, on some fundamental level, the very driving force and center of the films.

But there is another reason for the choice of Hawks in this essay. When his film A Girl in Every Port opened in Paris in 1928, it garnered a response similar to the one Buñuel expressed for the Keaton film. In his review, Jean-George Auriol's claimed that Hawks belongs to a group of directors who "are keeping up the great American tradition" (13). one based upon self-effacing economy and clarity of filmmaking style. And if, for Buñuel, Keaton stands at the center of College as the embodiment of a particular face of modern America, for Auriol it is the "athletic perfection" of Louise Brooks in A Girl in Every Port, though hers is only a supporting role, that embodies this modern America. Such an attitude about Hawks's Americanness continued over the following decades. In 1953, Jacques Rivette wrote that Hawks "epitomizes the highest qualities of the American cinema" (73), while ten years later Henri Langlois declared that Hawks "is the most American of filmmakers" (73). Much more recently, Jim Hillier and Peter Wollen's 1996 anthology on Hawks is simply entitled Howard Hawks: American Artist. Why would Hawks's Americanness be so often isolated in this way? To my knowledge. Hawks himself never self-consciously assumed the role of an American artist in the manner of his friend John Ford, whose films so often announce their mythical and historical American status and whose actors frequently carry the weight of this on their shoulders, sometimes assuming iconic positions of great physical beauty.

What has often been thought to be American about Hawks's films is not so much their engagement with issues of American history and myth as their modernity; his is a completely unselfconscious cinema, direct in its methods, linear in its unfolding, fluid, fast, and functional, a world with little extended time for sentiment or self-pity. In the words of Langlois, this is a cinema "rooted in contemporary America in its spirit as well as in its surface appearance" (73). As literal pictures of modern America, though, Hawks's films are disappointments. The films mainly keep inside of cramped, functional quarters, showing us very little of contemporary American architecture, décor, and technology. Instead, modernity in Hawks is largely articulated through the physicality and rhythm of the actors. In his classic 1968 study of Hawks, Robin Wood writes that "Hawks is above all a 'physical' director" (30). Wood frequently notes the importance of gesture in Hawks and how the thematic and moral issues at stake in the films are given cinematic life through physical action (see esp. 68). However, if Hawks is a distinctly American filmmaker in the way that performance functions in his films, he achieves this status in a highly individual manner, at once assuming a relationship to larger American conceptions of the physical while also remaining (to use an auteurist term for a moment) Hawksian.

My focus here will be on one element of this physicality: the use of gesture, specifically the gesturing hand in relation to the object. Hawks once stated that he "learned a lot" from watching Buster Keaton's films (Bogdanovich 292). While he did not elaborate on what it was he learned from Keaton, the notion of the actor enjoying a direct harmony with objects is most likely one major source of this admiration. The ease with which American actors (particularly comic actors like Keaton) handled props was central to the reading of Americanness in performance and behavior. Skillfully handling an object becomes an emblem of American manual and physical dexterity, indicative of Americans' pragmatic mastery over the material world. Hand gestures are, of course, one of the fundamental tools of any actor's repertoire. They also represent a type of problem any actor faces when performing: What does one do with one's hands? Are they at the side of the body? Are they folded in front of you? How and when do you gesture? Props can be called into service in solving such dilemmas because they give the hands something to work with. At their most expressive, however, props can go far beyond this, becoming what Naremore calls "expressive objects," in which "feelings or psychological states are communicated by the way that one handles things" (84). Hawks's films are filled with examples of actors drawing upon this expressive power: the manner in which Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo (1959) twirls a whiskey glass in her hand while telling John Wayne about her late husband is one example of many. This alone, however, would not make a Hawks film stand apart from hundreds of others. There is a deeper structural element at work.

What Can a Man Do with Hands Like That?

In Rio Bravo, Dean Martin plays an alcoholic ex-sheriff whose hand often visibly shakes. At one point, as he reaches for a whiskey bottle, his hand quivers so violently that he cannot hold it. "What can a man do with hands like that?" he asks. In a number of Hawks's films, the hand is not simply a gesturing tool for the actor but a motif. Most often this motif of the hand is related to issues of trauma and loss: Edward G. Robinson's hand being bitten off by a shark in Tiger Shark (1932), forcing him to wear a hook for the rest of the film; the amputation of Kirk Douglas's finger in The Big Sky (1952); the burning of Richard Barthelmess's hands in a flying accident in Only Angels Have Wings (1939); and so on. The homosexual subtexts of A Girl in Every Port and The Big Sky are articulated through the same gag, in which one man asks another, in a jail cell, to pull his sprained finger. But it is that cross-breeding of science fiction and horror. The Thing (1951), that presents the fullest realization of this aspect of Hawks. In this film, the eruption of the thing itself, a monster with "crazy hands"-one of which is eventually severed and made the object of scientific examination-becomes the locus of fascination with and anxiety over the hand. There is a perpetual need in Hawks to isolate the hand in some way, to injure it or to cut it off entirely, as though nothing could be more devastating, in this world of gestural richness, than to lose one's hand.

Throughout Hawks's work, we often find actors defining a character through the repetition of a single hand gesture. Note, for example, how Humphrey Bogart repeatedly pulls on his ear in The Big Steep (1946), an extension of his thought process as the detective Philip Marlowe. In the same film, Elisha Cook, Jr., stands out so strongly in his one sequence because he works at the opposite end from Bogart: he doesn't gesture at all. But most often in Hawks this use of gesture will revolve around an object: the frequent flipping of coins performed by both George Raft in Scarface and Thomas Mitchell in Only Angels Have Wings; or Katharine Hepburn's placing an olive on top of one hand before smacking it with her other hand, so that the olive flies into the air and then drops into her mouth in Bringing Up Baby (1938). One may go so far as to say that, in Hawks, one lives to gesture, that gesture is connected to a life force. Mitchell's death scene in Only Angels Have Wings derives much of its power from the fact that he can no longer gesture (his neck is broken); instead Cary Grant must repeatedly place a cigarette in Mitchell's mouth for him to smoke.

Actors who worked with Hawks more or less confirm his method of direction. It was not a minute, highly controlled method, in which every gesture and movement, every line reading, was carefully mapped out in advance by Hawks-a method of direction parodied at the beginning of Twentieth Century, when Oscar Jaffe, the theater director played by John Barrymore, draws chalk marks on the floor for the actress Lily Garland, played by Lombard, to precisely follow. Instead, most of Hawks's films appear to have been created on the set as much as they were created in preproduction, and the contributions of the actors, who were often encouraged to improvise movements or suggest lines of dialogue, were always fundamental. Hawks's method was not uncommon for directors who began during the silent period, before the more tightly organized Hollywood production methods of the 19305 and 1940s began to discourage, if not entirely prevent, films from being shot in such a loose manner. In spite of difficulties with the studios, Hawks (like Leo McCarey and Gregory La Cava) continued to work in this method throughout his career. What such a working method pre-supposes is that the film is created through and, quite frequently, by the actor as much as by the writer and director.

In terms of its attitude toward the actor, Hawks's type of filmmaking would appear to be quite different from that of more obviously formalist European directors such as Hitchcock, Eisenstein, or Fritz Lang, all of whom use the actor in a more plastic manner, molding gesture, movement, and physical expression, and subordinating the actor to a more rigorous and preconceived design. Gesture and the object are likewise important to the cinemas of all of these directors. But Hitchcock, Eisenstein, and Lang frequently shoot the object in close-up, placing it at the center of a strongly montage-based cinema, in which these close-ups alternate with close-ups of faces and hands, fragmenting bodies and objects in space. Hawks, on the other hand, like most American directors of his period, favors medium and medium-long shots within a fluid, continuity-based system of cutting. Gestures and objects are rarely detached from the body of the actor. It is precisely this sense of continuity between the form of the film and the movements and gestures of the actors that so entranced European viewers. The "harmony" of the continuity system created an environment in which the movements and gestures of the actors could flow seamlessly from shot to shot, imparting to these movements a sense of grace and self-confidence. Nevertheless, in spite of this apparent sense of harmony, the enormous weight that gestures and objects can assume is central in Hawks's films, no less so than in the work of more obviously formalist filmmakers.

Seduction and Economy

Let us begin by examining, in some detail, one example of how Hawks directs his actors, paying particular attention to the function of gesture. In The Outlaw (1943), a film Hawks worked on only briefly before leaving the project after a dispute with its producer, Howard Hughes (who then took over direction), the differences in the handling of gesture between Hawks's footage and Hughes's are quite marked, and they allow us to see very clearly that gesture for Hawks carries an enormous weight that it does not for Hughes. This is apparent early in the film in two brief, back-to-back sequences. The first sequence was directed by Hawks, the second by Hughes. I would draw particular attention here to the handling of lack Buetel. who had never made a film before and who clearly received a great deal of attention from Hawks. This is Buetel's first sequence in the film and Hawks is attempting to give him a star entrance. For Hawks, this essentially means infusing Buetel's body with gestural meaning. Several specific elements of the way that this sequence is performed are worth isolating.

Buetel is always doing something here; he pulls a match out of his pocket (see fig.1a). strikes it against a column (fig. 1b). lights a cigarette (fig. 1c), then holds the cigarette while speaking his lines in a low-voiced, somewhat off-hand manner (fig. 1d), his body frequently held in an angular position (fig. 1e). But in spite of the gestural richness this sequence conveys, there is, in fact, an economy of means here. Buetel only gestures with two objects, the match (quickly disposed of) and, especially, the cigarette. This strategy of paring down the number of objects an actor may work with in a sequence to one or two primary ones is typical of Hawks. Compare this to the actors in the films of Hawks's contemporaries, such as George Cukor. In Cukor's Dinner at Eight (1933), lean Harlow is introduced lying in bed, handling a multiplicity of objects within her reach. Within less than two minutes, she handles a telephone, a box of candy, a powder puff, a hat, a magazine, and a large hand mirror. This undoubtedly has its own expressive function: the incessant need to grab hold of any object at hand is a coherent and legible method for showing the comic avarice of the nouveau riche Harlow is portraying. But in Hawks's films, regardless of the dramatic and psychological context, an actor is more likely to be found working over a single object through the course of a sequence (as Buetel does here), as though attempting to derive from that object every possible level of expressive significance.

Second, this process of working over an object allows the actor to effectively replace the function, which close-ups traditionally assume in Imparting power and significance to the object. Such a fascination with the close-up of the face and the object was central to discourses surrounding the cinema in the 1920s (when Hawks began as a filmmaker) and the cinema of Hitchcock and Lang contains numerous instances of the exploration of the possibilities of faces, body parts, and objects in close-up (see McElhaney). Hawks's cinema does not refuse this fascination but instead allows attention to be drawn to an object through the systematic and extremely focused gestures of the actors.

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Third, this manner of slowly working over an object allows for a strong erotic component to emerge. Buetel does not simply hold the cigarette but seems to be fondling it, as though it were an extension of his body. Acting in Hawks is not so much a question of giving a "good" performance as it is an act of seduction, performed upon the objects at hand and in relation to the other actors. In spite of Hawks's reputation as a master of fast-paced entertainments, one is equally struck by the frequently slow, deliberate rhythm to the performances in his films, as though gesture and movement are being carefully analyzed, the camera unwilling to completely let go of these faces and bodies. Buetel's eyelids are slightly hooded, giving him an insolent and erotic look. His low-voiced line readings and restricted facial expression suggest, in a manner typical of Hawks, that the ultimate meaning of a sequence resides less in the explicit content of the dialogue, or in the play of expressive emotions across a face, than in the manner in which that dialogue is spoken, against which a world of bodily and gestural richness unfolds. The Outlaw deals with a page out of American history, with three real-life figures of the American West who have also become myths. However, Hawks is fundamentally disinterested in giving life to either history or myth in this sequence; rather, he wishes to infuse the American past with a modern sense of style and behavior. Buetel's languorous manner of gesturing and moving has more in common with Bacall in her two films for Hawks, To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep, than it does with Westerns that attempt to provide a sense of historical verisimilitude.

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In the very next scene, by contrast, Hughes shows virtually no interest in gesture. Instead, he is almost entirely preoccupied with close-ups of faces, as Buetel and Walter Huston awkwardly look at one another across a chasm of stiff shot/reverse shots (see figs. 2a and 2b). For Hughes, Buetel maintains a wide-eyed expression in which dialogue carries the bulk of meaning. As a result, Buetel's amateur standing is unwittingly exposed by the camera. (He almost looks like another actor entirely for Hughes.) Hawks's methods slightly veil or mask Buetel's technical limitations through precisely controlled gestures and facial expression.

The degree to which Buetel's performance seems controlled is also revealing. Buñuel cites photogeny as one of the fundamental properties of American cinema. To be photogenic in Hollywood is to be a natural camera subject, someone not necessarily dependent upon conventional acting technique in order to make an impression. Hence Hawks's fascination with casting inexperienced actors based largely on their natural, photogenic physical attractiveness rather than their acting technique. While other national cinemas and filmmaking practices have used nonprofessional actors in a variety of capacities, Hollywood has been dominated by the mythology of the unknown (often someone with no ambition to be an actor at all) who is discovered in "real life" and transformed into a star. Siegfried Kracauer has linked the Hollywood star and the nonactor in one respect: both act out "a standing character identical with his own or at least developed from it.... As with any real-life figures on the screen, his presence in a film points beyond the film" (99).

With Hawks, though, the situation is slightly more complicated, for what is at stake is not so much the attempt to preserve and do justice to the reality of the discovered individual as it is an attempt to turn this individual into a very specific ideal, a type. This is particularly the case with Hawks's women actors, who, increasingly from the late 19305 on, begin to be molded into a certain pattern: the independent woman, feminine but often aligned with masculine interests and pursuits, insolent but also vulnerable, a character epitomized by Bacall in To Have and Have Not. But Bacall has repeatedly stated that her own personality bore little relation to the character she portrayed in To Have and Have Not and that only through Hawks's coaching and direction did this famous screen persona emerge. Thus naturalness in performance style in Hawks is, in many respects, quite unnatural and stylized. The performances are often as strongly iconic as they are spontaneous, no doubt the result of this consistent paring down of gestures, movements of the body, and use of props. Buetel seems to be striking poses here, as though each gesture, movement, and posture is designed to make a specific impression. He is as much a fashion model as an actor, aloof and somewhat overly aware of his own seductive appeal. While Hawks may not have given his actors precise instructions on how to act, clearly he created an atmosphere in which his actors came to understand that they were expected to perform in a certain style, to conform to certain recognizable types.

The iconic physical stance and attitude which Hawks's actors often assume is an aristocratic one, albeit an aristocracy of a peculiarly American, democratic nature-if that does not sound like a complete contradiction in terms. When Farber writes that "the feeling of snobbery in any Hawks work is overpowering" (27), he is pinpointing a sensibility predicated upon notions of style, upon a distinctly modern and American cult of personality rather than on older, European aristocratic standards of behavior. What defines the "snobbery" of certain Hawks actors has less to do with the inherent class distinctions of the characters they are portraying (Hawks almost never made films about the American upper-class) than with the manner in which actions or gestures are carried out and how these, in turn, are extensions of the usually detached, elegant personality of the individual.

In the films of Hawks's contemporaries (who often work within the same genres as Hawks and often use the same actors), the actors, by contrast, are comparatively looser, more freely physical with their bodies and movements. In the opening sequence of William Wellman's Wings (1927), for example, Clara Bow and Buddy Rogers constantly draw attention to the youthful and childlike physical qualities of their characters, acting with their entire bodies in a way that seems both sexual and innocent: the introduction of Bow in the film's opening sequence, emerging from underneath a pair of bloomers hanging on a laundry line, brings sexuality and innocence together in a single image. Both actors in Wings will do such things as jump over fences, roll about on the ground, or lie face down on the ground and playfully crisscross their legs. For Hawks's actors, though, a vertical posture is always ideal. Trauma (be it farcical or melodramatic in tone) ensues when one loses this ability to confront the world standing up: Gary Grant as a "big game hunter" in riding gear, crawling around on all fours chasing a dog in Bringing Up Baby, for example. Grant does not seem to naturally belong on the ground in the way that Wellman's actors do; instead, the comedy arises because he looks like a fallen aristocrat, reduced to an animal-like state.

In spite of Hawks's penchant for improvisation, then, his work is as much about the wish to control the world as it is about life lived, as Wood phrases it, "from a spontaneous-intuitive centre" (28). For Hawks, improvisation and spontaneity on the set are less about letting the unexpected happen than about waiting for that moment when the world, at once predetermined and spontaneous, suddenly springs to life through the performances of the actors. This is a cinema not so much about embracing diversity and chaos as about celebrating the will of certain privileged individuals (his carefully chosen actors) to carry off an idealized state. Perhaps this is why Rivette detects in Hawks "a Teutonic spirit" in which the fascination with continuity and linearity is, in reality, "a manifestation of Fate" (73).

The Object: Circulation and Exchange

In order to further clarify the role of gesture and the object in Hawks and American cinema, it is necessary to briefly move outside of American cinema entirely. In Fritz Lang's M (1931), the relationship between the gesturing hand and the object becomes part of a brilliant structure; in this film, virtually every gesture is shaped by its relationship to crime, death, or violent inscription. M, like so many classic films of Weimar cinema, is strongly shaped by a romantic and folkloric tradition of objects endowed with a magical or sinister force. Objects are not so much in harmony with the characters of this film as they are coinhabitors of the same spaces. In spite of attempts by humans here to collect, control, and exchange these objects, the objects remain, symbolically if not literally, indestructible; implicitly they survive after the demise of organic life, from the world of the homeless to the world of the criminals (see figs. 3a and 3b).

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In the film's penultimate sequence, two great stage actors of the period, Peter Lorre as the serial killer Beckert, and Gustav Gründgens as the criminal Schraenker, square off as Beckert is placed on trial in a kangaroo court. Both Lorre and Gründgens make gesture fundamental to their interpretations of their roles, each in a very different manner. Gründgens gestures emphatically. His fingers continually point toward and accuse Lorre, his leather gloves adding weight to his gestures, a weight at once literal and metaphoric, for Shraenker's gestures are not his alone but those of an entire collective (see fig. 4a). Lorre, on the other hand, makes full expressive use of his small hands and sausage-like fingers in order to draw his gestures inward, back toward his own body in self-loathing and self-recrimination (fig. 4b). In both cases, these gestures are clearly intended to carry a meaning at once specific and general; they belong to the characters these actors are portraying, but they also carry enormous social weight. They become the type of social geste central to Brechtian performance. (Lorre was, in fact, starring in a production of Brecht's A Man's a Man in the evening while shooting M during the day.) Gesture in this film, produced within a culture that had suffered from over a decade of economic chaos and political uncertainty and was now on the verge of Nazism, never completely escapes a sense of pervasive contamination.

In a film like His Girl Friday, by contrast, and in a manner typical of Hawks, objects are at once useful and impermanent, and often they carry little or no significance after we see them being used by a character. Like M, His Girl Friday revolves around (among other things) the hunt for a shy, retiring criminal who is, ethically speaking, less reprehensible than much of the culture that surrounds and stalks him. Let us look closely at the sequence in which Rosalind Russell's Hildy comes to interview John Qualen's Earl in prison before his attempted escape. In spite of the somewhat Germanic lighting in the prison and the Langian overhead shot of Earl's cell (see fig. 5), the handling of gesture here and throughout the film epitomizes certain elements of Hawks's approach. Objects here and the gestures which give life to those objects are largely shaped by, on the one hand, their useful and pragmatic quality and, on the other, by the possibilities they offer for play-the object as a type of toy. In either case, they are repeatedly being used and then used up, forgotten, as the film and its characters move on.

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The first major moment in this sequence in terms of gesture and the object is the twentydollar bill that Hildy pretends to drop so that the prison guard (Pat West) can pretend to claim it as his own (see figs. 6a-c). A five-second exchange in which twenty dollars is also exchanged is all that Russell and West need to suggest the level of corruption operating here. The breathtaking swiftness with which this is handled is quite different from Lang's treatment of this sort of thing. One could read this gesture-a payoff is quickly offered and just as quickly accepted-as deeply cynical, as pinpointing the corruption of the system that would want to execute someone like Earl. But it is also a cynicism worn lightly, an acknowledgement that such corruption may exist but may not be endemic to the system. American cinema constantly acknowledges and represents corruption within its own culture and system of government. But it does so in a way that suggests that the corruption is the result of isolated individuals or groups perverting the nature of American democracy rather than of serious flaws within the basic structure of democracy itself. Frank Capra's populist films of this period, particularly Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), made one year prior to His Girl Friday, are typical. But while Capra turns this struggle to defend the principles of the American democratic system into a series of explicit and often emotional debates and speeches, Hawks's debate over the issue of American corruption is displaced onto this single, swift gesture.

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Hildy's encounter with Earl raises another matter. As with the prison guard, an object is at the center of this meeting. The object in this case is a cigarette, most likely intended by Hildy to be a mild bribe or attempt to soften up Earl so that he will confide in her. Unlike the prison guard, however, Earl refuses. His comically inappropriate politeness causes him to automatically accept the cigarette and briefly hold it before passing it back to Hildy; he doesn't smoke (see fig. 7). After Hildy takes the cigarette back from Earl, she does not smoke it either but simply holds it, turning it around in her hand and looking at it as she talks. Why is Hildy handling the cigarette in this way? And why doesn't she smoke it?

If the fixation upon a single object is one of the primary tools at an actor's disposal in Hawks, there is one other major method of using the object that is central to these films: the object as the source of exchange. Generally, actors in cinema will draw upon an object as an extension of a monological impulse. An actor will handle an object in order to express something about the character and then, most often, will put it down once that object has served its dramatic function. Actors in Hawks, on the other hand, will tend to use the object as the source of a dialogical impulse. The object is not simply used by an actor alone but, like that twenty-dollar bill, passed from one actor to another. Actors are rarely allowed the possibility of performing for themselves but instead must relate their gestures to the other actors, creating a world in which the ensemble or tightly linked social world is paramount.

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The cigarette is a privileged object in Hawks, one that, more than any other, serves to link actors. The repeated exchange of cigarettes and matches is central to the formation of the romance between Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, for example. Consequently, it is crucial that Hildy follow Earl's example here and, for the time being, not smoke. Furthermore, the fact that Earl and Hildy cannot share a cigarette points to a fundamental gulf between the innocent, slow-witted but violent world of Earl and the fast-paced, fast-thinking world of Hildy. Nevertheless, Earl does not simply refuse the cigarette but takes it from Hildy and then passes it back to her, so that the structure of exchanged objects is still in place.

Qualen conveys the limitations of Earl as a personality and as a thinker by drawing upon a limited gestural repertoire: he uses basically the same open-handed gesture to connote "the world" and to quote the speech of the socialist in the park who said that "everything should be made use of" (see fig. 8). Otherwise, his hands grip the bedpost. Throughout Hawks, we frequently find a reluctance to endow objects with a too overt symbolic or psychological weight. Even when an object exceeds its practical or useful function in a sequence, it cannot do so excessively. Neurosis articulated through gesture and objects is to be avoided from a filmmaker who, in the words of Farber, "is as divorced from modern angstas Fats Waller" (27). Recall, for example, the visit Bacall pays to Bogart in his office in The Big Sleep, during which Marlowe twice draws attention to Vivian's neurotic gestures (repeatedly rubbing her knee or later absent-mindedly counting the fingers on her glove), excessive gestures that clearly signify that she is lying to him. In both instances Marlowe turns these gestures into objects of ridicule: "Go ahead and scratch," he tells her as she rubs her knee.

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At the same time, the way Russell periodically twirls the cigarette and, looks down at it as she speaks clearly makes the object an extension of her thought process, particularly when she asks Earl, "What did you think about?" The gesture here relates less to what Earl is thinking than to what Hildy is thinking, since she is constructing in her mind an image of his situation that she'll be detailing in her newspaper article (see fig. 9a). The gesture of the dropped cigarette (fig. 9b), moreover, carries great symbolic weight, at once bringing closure to the encounter (she's got her story) and also terminating her involvement in this man's fate. If Qualen's Earl is such a pathetically comic character, it may be that, in a world in which control of gesture and objects is fundamental, he is unable to play the game, to turn objects into "productions for use" except in the most naïve, uncomprehending, and, finally, destructive manner. In a cinema emerging out of a culture that, in Buñuel's words, possesses "no culture" but instead creates "new traditions," it is crucial that the object, as both a source of exchange and as the pivot around which gestures take place, becomes a very small territory in the constant process of being conquered, the object as a source of mastery, a frontier.

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Conclusion: How American?

Let us return to those Germanic high-angle shots from the beginning of this sequence from His Girl Friday, and return as well to Rivette's arguments about Hawks's Teutonic spirit. This thing called the American cinema has been, since at least the 1920s, home to not only very American figures like Hawks and Ford, but also, and increasingly, to Lang and Ernst Lubitsch, Hitchcock and Michael Curtiz, Robert Siodmak and Otto Preminger, and along with them an extraordinary group of actors who brought to American cinema their own unique performance styles and gestural repertoires, which in turn could then be absorbed into American styles of acting. When Dorothy Malone begins to stroke the outrageously phallic miniature oil well at the end of the German émigré Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956), the performance rhetoric of American melodrama and the more iconographic and symbolic visual language of German and Eastern European acting are perfectly merged.

While Hawks claimed that style of Murnau and German silent cinema (so central to the development of the visual style of Ford) was adopted for one film and then quickly abandoned, this is not entirely accurate: Scarface, for example, has a pronounced Germanic look, and the relationship between Hawks's approach to gesture and a Viennese-born director whose professional path he crossed more than once, Josef von Sternberg's, are often quite close, so much so at times that one could easily imagine Buetel in The Outlaw having been directed by Stemberg rather than Hawks. (Their respective methods of working with actors, though, were entirely different.) If gesture is central to Hawks, this may have less to do with how gesture represents a world of harmony, utterly united in spirit and ideology, than with how gesture temporarily brings together but also separates this fragile, isolated universe, attempting to carve out a space for itself amidst the chaos of the world outside.

Furthermore, Hawks's work, for all of its concern with objects handled with economy, is often just as concerned with a topic dear to Lang: gesture as a type of deep inscription, as in the emphasis on branding as an extension of ownership in Red River, on the marked or scarred body in not only Scarface but also in A Girl in Every Port, Only Angels Have Wings, and Rio Lobo (1970). In Lang, the fascination with inscription lends itself to a modernist reading, with inscription as a metaphor for the mark of the author, who attempts to inscribe himself within the work while repeatedly coming up against the possibility of his own erasure from the text.

With Hawks, such a fascination with the deep marks of inscription and with gestures that seamlessly, fluidly express personality and allow for the connection with objects, suggests something else. These gestures express not so much the desire to create a world marked by the hand of the author as the desire to create an ideal society, built around matters of style, transparency and play. Such a desire emerges out of certain American ideals of community and the individual. But in the case of Hawks, American culture cannot completely accommodate such an ideal: hence the need to move away from the center of American life, sometimes to move away from America entirely in order to create worlds that are less microcosms of America than refuges from it. But this alternate world is one in which gesture runs the risk of losing its spontaneity, a world of crazy hands, burned, severed, scarred, a world in which extreme and hysterical emotions may burst forth only to be repressed once again in order for this culture to survive intact. Gesture in Hawks is often both spontaneous and pre-determined and, no doubt as a consequence, is often connected simultaneously to life and death, like the cigarette passed back and forth between Russell and Qualen; she plays with it for a while, then drops it to the ground. It is an object caught between harmony and elegance, on the one hand, and madness and violence on the other, the latter two of these faces of America not accounted for by Buñuel but nevertheless part of the complex fabric of American culture and American cinema.

NOTE

An earlier version of this essay was presented at a symposium on gesture at the University of Kent/Canterbury in May 2004. My thanks to Frances Guerin and Andrew Klevan for extending an invitation to this symposium.