For Fans of Howard Hawks

Rio Bravo is the film Hawks made in direct response to High Noon, which he considered dishonest about what it means to be a professional. A sheriff who goes begging for help is not a Hawks hero. What he made instead is one of the most relaxed, warm, and confident westerns ever put on screen: a lawman and a ragged group of friends holding a dangerous man in jail against impossible odds, and doing it with good humor and no self-pity. It contains some of the best work Dean Martin and John Wayne ever did. The film runs 141 minutes and you feel none of them. Start here.

Most newcomers go to the screwball comedies or the film noirs. Only Angels Have Wings sits between those modes: a story of mail pilots in South America flying impossible routes over the Andes, and the group of men who have built an entire philosophy around the fact that they could die at any moment. Cary Grant leads a cast that includes a young Rita Hayworth and a heartbreaking Thomas Mitchell. The attitude toward death in this picture is something you carry with you. No other Hawks film states the professional code more plainly or more beautifully.

The plot of The Big Sleep famously makes no sense. Hawks reportedly asked Raymond Chandler who killed the chauffeur during production, and Chandler said he did not know either. None of that matters, because the film is really about spending time with Philip Marlowe and Vivian Rutledge, and about the pleasure of watching two people who are both too smart and too honest to be entirely safe. It established a template for crime entertainment: put compelling characters in a complex situation, let them talk, and trust that the audience will follow the people even when they lose the plot. The book, first read, then the film: both repay the visit.

The studio clocked the dialogue in His Girl Friday at around 240 words per minute. The screwball comedy it remade, The Front Page, was already fast; Hawks took the gender dynamic and flipped it, casting Rosalind Russell as the newspaper reporter and Cary Grant as her ex-husband editor who will do anything to keep her from remarrying. What results is a film about two people who are absolutely terrible for each other and absolutely right for each other, argued at a speed that leaves you slightly breathless. No film has topped it for sheer velocity of wit.