“To be a good director you’ve got to be a bastard. I’m a bastard and I know it.” – Henry Hathaway
You have your John Fords, your Howard Hawkses, your Sam Peckinpahs and your Budd Boettichers. You also have your Clint Eastwoods, your Raoul Walshs and your Anthony Manns. And let’s not forget Burt Kennedy, Walter Hill, Andrew McLaglen and Samuel Fuller.
Somewhere among the pool of filmmakers who showed how the west was won, is the director who actually called the shots behind much of How the West Was Won, the 1962 big-screen, all-star sagebrush epic.
Yes, directors George Marshall and John Ford also helmed segments of the movie (and Richard Thorpe chipped in with some uncredited work), but it was Henry Hathaway who was behind the impressive The Rivers, The Plains and The Outlaws sequences.
Hathaway doesn’t seem to get enough credit for his career, which spanned from the silent days to the mid-1970s. He was a sometimes contentious, no-nonsense fellow whose success came not only with westerns—including several with John Wayne—but also with top-notch thrillers and film noirs.
The son of an actor and Belgian aristocrat, Hathaway started in silents. Young Hathaway apprenticed with Victor Fleming and Josef von Sternberg, and made a strong mark while toiling on the 1925 version of Ben-Hur, for which he served as second unit director, shooting parts of the classic chariot race.
For his directorial debut, Hathaway got a cowboy assignment: Heritage of the Desert, a 1932 Paramount effort based on a Zane Grey story, and featuring Randolph Scott in his first starring role. The film paved the road for many horse operas that came down Hathaway’s trail over the next several decades.
But as a filmmaker, Hathaway was tested by assignments for different genres. There was the 1935 classic adventure The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, with Gary Cooper and Franchot Tone playing British soldiers defending the crown against natives in India; Go West, Young Man, a Hollywood satire with Mae West and Randolph Scott; and the crime saga Johnny Apollo with Tyrone Power. He passed the tests with flying colors.
In the 1940s and into the 1950s, Hathaway tackled several film noirs and turned out some impressive work. The Oscar-winning The House on 92nd Street (1945) offered suspense and surprises as it chronicled the efforts of a recent college graduate (Bill Dietrich) to get the goods on American enemies when he joins the FBI. Hathaway shot the film in semi-documentary style on location in New York City, paving the way for Night and the City and other gritty, location-lensed pictures.
Other Hathaway-helmed noirs to note are The Dark Corner (1946), with Lucille Ball as a secretary helping out private investigator boss Mark Stevens when he gets in hot water; Kiss of Death (1947), with Victor Mature as a crook who turns in his fellow thieves only to final his psychotic former partner (Richard Widmark in an infamous screen debut) on his trail; Call Northside 777 (1948), showcasing a real-life Chicago backdrop, and positing James Stewart as a newspaper reporter out to prove the innocence of a man wrongly imprisoned for murder; and Niagara (1953), the Technicolor thriller with Marilyn Monroe as the sexually charged adulterous younger wife of stressed-out Joseph Cotten. Their strained union ultimately turns deadly, raising the suspicions of neighboring honeymooners Jean Peters and Max Showalter.
Despite these impressive credentials, most of the Sacramento-born director’s notoriety derives from his work with westerns. Hathaway, after all, made several notable films on the resume of John Wayne, including the near-classic The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), the shot-in-Europe Circus World (1964), North to Alaska (1960), and True Grit (1969), which garnered “Duke” his Oscar for Best Actor for the role of feisty one-eyed lawman Rooster Cogburn.
Wayne, however, was not the only icon Hathaway steered to success. Hathaway called the shots for Steve McQueen in Nevada Smith (1957), the follow-up to Harold Robbins’ The Carpetbaggers; Robert Mitchum and Dean Martin in Five Card Stud (1968); Sophia Loren (with Wayne) in Legend of the Lost (1957); Kirk Douglas in The Racers (1955); and Gregory Peck in Shootout (1971).
There was, of course, “Coop” (in Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Peter Ibbetson, and others), of whom Hathaway said: “Gary Cooper was the first actor to believe you didn’t have to mug to act, if you thought of what you were doing, it showed — and he proved he was right.”
Hathaway continued to be prolific into his seventies; his last film was the obscure 1974 blaxploitation flick Super Dude (aka Hangup). He was 86 when he succumbed to a heart attack in 1985.
Never one to mince words, Hathaway rarely held back. He reportedly didn’t get along with Dennis Hopper while shooting 1959’s From Hell to Texas. Hathaway forced him to do 85 takes for one scene and stated “You’ll never work in this town again,” which led to Hopper’s spotty employment over the next ten years. Apparently, Hathaway and Hopper eventually made amends later because the actor had roles in The Sons of Katie Elder and True Grit.
Regarding his ups and downs in Hollywood, Hathaway pulled no punches.
On directing a film starring Kim Novak, Hathaway opined: “I worked one day with her and I quit.”
On working with Rod Steiger on the 1960 heist film Seven Thieves starring Edward G. Robinson: “Christ, it was supposed to be a fun film, and Rod Steiger is far, far from having a sense of humor.”
And on the subject of women directors, Hathaway had this opinion: “When I went to work in Universal Studios in 1914, there were five women directors. Lois Weber made the biggest pictures. John Ford and I alternated as prop men for this great director. If women haven’t got a good directing job now, it’s their own fault.”
Ladies, they didn’t call him “bastard” for nothing.