Man's Favorite Sport

I've been really busy on a number of things lately, so I haven't made a follow-up post to the Fallen Sons or any of the other ongoing projects on this blog. I did, however, watch an old Howard Hawks movie recently, and thought it might be a little fun to comment on it. Howard Hawks has made one of my favorite old movies of all time, Hatari! which was released in 1962. He's also responsible for a whole laundry list of classic old movies, from Scarface to The Big Sleep to Bringing Up Baby to Rio Bravo to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and many, many others. I actually doubt most people would consider Hatari! one of his most memorable other than me (and my family, because we all grew up watching it). Nor would most consider his next film, 1964's (according to Wikipedia. My DVD case says 1963) Man's Favorite Sport one of his most memorable, but for some reason, I've had a copy of it for a long time. Probably because my dad used to buy old movies on DVD all the time and he ended up with an extra copy due to carelessness, and when I noticed that he had two of them, I asked him if I could take one of them.

As Henry Mancini says, man's favorite sport is girls. And while the rom-com relationship between Rock Hudson and Paula Prentiss is charismatic most of the time, and they certainly have chemistry, they do a little too hard into making them fight at the beginning, to the point of making her really unlikable and putting her in a hole that she has to dig her way out of. Luckily, once they get to "the lake" she goes about doing exactly that, and her nature changes considerably to one that's more attractive.

Finding out later that Hawks was hoping to kind of re-create the Bringing Up Baby vibe makes this a little bit more understandable. But only a little bit. While BUB may well be considered a true classic of the early, "genderless" rom-com (i.e., the screwball comedy), I never really thought that Katherine Hepburn's Susan Vance character was all that likable either. (It's worth pointing out the BUB was initially a flop when it was released in 1938, and Hepburn's career was seriously set back by it until The Philadelphia Story was released. It only started to become a classic when it was replayed on TV in the 50s, where it started to become synonymous with the screwball comedy genre as a whole.) In general, I don't often love the female leads of screwball comedies anyway; they're too pushy, demanding and entitled and only when they start to lose that vibe do they become likable enough for the romance to feel credible. 

I'm not quite sure if Prentiss ever quite reaches that point, to be honest. They made her too unlikable early on, and then focused on the screwball over the rom-com aspects. It helps that Hudson's character fiance, Tex, is a non-entity; nothing more than a plot device that he doesn't really seem to care all that much about except the bare minimum that the plot requires.

Some screwball comedies, especially those later than the classic period, focus much less on the romantic angle, and much more on the screwball comedy angle. The early Naughties ensemble piece Rat Race is a great example of this.

In any case, some of these earlier screwball comedies like this one, made during the height of the Rock Hudson/Doris Day years, are an important cultural artifact. They're interesting to watch beyond just the entertainment value of the movies themselves, although those aren't inconsiderable themselves.