“My recipe for making movies has always been to give an audience two or three really top-notch scenes in every film and to try not to annoy them the rest of the time. If you can do that you will have made an entertaining picture.”  ~ Howard Hawks

In 1936 Sam Goldwyn bought the rights to Edna Ferber’s successful novel and roped in Howard Hawks, who had provided the hit film Barbary Coast for him the year prior, to direct the project. Hawks called in the brilliant Jules Furthman to bring the script up to speed and Gregg Toland to shoot it but he failed to get Spencer Tracy for the lead role of Barney Glasgow, incredibly a character based on C. W. Howard, Hawk’s own grandfather! He settled on character actor Edward Arnold for the role and on Walter Brennan for his best friend, in a role that he won the first of three Academy Awards. Rising star Frances Farmer was preferred over Miriam Hopkins for the dual role of mother and daughter and provided Hawks with note perfect performances in both parts.

Barney Glasgow (Edward Arnold) is a no nonsense logging boss who drives his teams to the limit to meet quotas. His best friend is Swan Bostrom (Walter Brennan), a Swede who joins him in getting the work done and partying hard to celebrate. Barney falls in love with saloon singer Lotta Morgan (Frances Farmer) after a bar room brawl but leaves her to marry a woman he doesn’t love to progress his career and make him a wealthy man. Swan marries Lotta and 25 years later an unhappy Barney returns to visit his friend after Lotta had died where he meets Swan’s daughter, also named Lotta (Frances Farmer). She is the image of her mother and the older Barney is immediately smitten and brings Swan and his family back to work for his successful paper mill business. Barney’s son falls in love with Lotta and father and son are soon at loggerheads.

Hawks was notoriously controlling and used to running his own race when directing various properties, in an era where the producer held the whip hand in film production. Sam Goldwyn was equally controlling but the pair managed to have a hit film in Barbary Coast and in Hollywood money ruled the game. Goldwyn, famously was temporarily out of action, operated on and hospitalised and in that time Hawks took the opportunity to shift the emphasis of the story, from Edna Ferber’s declared intentions that the film be about ‘the rape of America by the wholesale robber barons of the day’ to a love triangle. Hawks worked with Jules Furthman to rewrite the script giving less time to the son character and more to the comedic Swan, both played by actors who were in Barbary Coast in Joel McCrea and Walter Brennan respectively. Once Goldwyn recovered and got back to work he was furious with Hawks and demanded changes that Hawks refused – Goldwyn sacked the director and had William Wyler complete the picture.

The picture, as it is, remains a seriously good piece of work, part Ferber, part Goldwyn and part Hawks (Wyler always disowned it despite the co-credit) and is a fascinating window into a lost world. Ferber was a Pulitzer Prize winning author and set her gaze upon the greed and avarice in the logging and paper mills of Wisconsin in the late 1880s, where unrestrained timber harvesting and a refusal to replant for future generations fed the endless appetite for newsprint (and the books that Ferber wrote) in industrial America. Rudolph Maté shot the amazing opening sequences of men felling trees and sending them down river (directed on location in Idaho by Hawks pal Richard Rosson) and they are startling by any measure. It set the tone for the rugged work that was required and the tough men who did it – Edward Arnold fit the bill as a big, two-fisted type, but skinny Walter Brennan did not, which was one of the Goldwyn v Hawks sticking points. Brennan has made a splash on Barbary Coast with his comedy chops and Hawks reprised that scene stealing energy with Brennan’s Swan, again against the character as Ferber had framed him. A key Hawksian signature was often the love story between two men, and here there is the strong bond of love found in the friendship between Barney and Swan – made more tragic by Barney’s betrayal of his friends love by pursuing his daughter.

Edward Arnold is nobody’s idea of a leading man but he makes Barney a full character, equally unappealing and yet charismatic. Hawks understood Barney’s story arc, from hard scrabble logger to industrial kingpin, and was not about to make a character based on his beloved grandfather a one dimensional robber baron. Hawks was an educated patrician, raised in wealth and privilege, but he gets into the mud with Barney’s origin story and doesn’t shy away from portraying the venality, duplicity and greed that is at the heart of Barney’s world view. Ferber investigates the link between the public man who has no guilt about taking anything he sees fit in the pursuit of profit and the private man who puts career advantage in front of personal feelings. If Barney is prepared to abandon the woman he loves for a loveless marriage to gain a business partner, then what boundaries does he have in his business behaviour and is there a price to be paid? This is Ferber’s central question and part of the friction is provided by Richard Glasgow’s idealistic notion of looking after future generations – something Barney is blind too in family as well as business.

Barney’s narcissistic traits are fully on display, and you get the feeling that Hawks does not entirely regard this as a bad thing. It may be that Hawks decided to show the man in full – that progress needs vain and driven men like Barney – but society needs its leaders to be agile enough to respond to matters of equity and to be cognisant of the damage they may cause in the wake of pursuing profit. Barney’s vile nature is counterpointed by his gregarious nature which covers his lack of self-awareness and blood raw avarice. Richard is the voice of reason and the dispute with his father is echoed by their pursuit of the same woman, and this is Ferber’s concern, to shine a light on the rapacious practices of times past and see the torch pass to a new enlightened generation. Joel McCrea is fine in the support role but the only actor that has the capacity to match his screen presence is Frances Farmer.

Frances Farmer was a star on the rise at Paramount when she was loaned out to Goldwyn. Miriam Hopkins had starred in Barbary Coast and been recently nominated for an Academy Award but Hawks initially wanted young actress Andrea Leeds for the dual role, but she was ultimately cast as Barney’s daughter and Frances Farmer was tapped for the parts. Farmer was a smart, beautiful and capable woman and she does superbly in both roles, keeping both separate and distinct with subtle vocal and physical mannerisms. She also delivers the coup de grace to Barney’s deluded designs on her after she catches her kissing Richard and a fist fight starts between father and son – Richard gets the upper hand and she stops him saying, ‘Leave him alone, he’s an old man.’ It’s a greater blow than any fist can accomplish and Ferber’s way of making robber baron’s redundant as the future charges in. Farmer is superb and should have been nominated for her work and had a stellar career instead of tragically succumbing to issues around alcoholism and mental health.

Come And Get It is a fine if overlooked slice of 1930s Hollywood Americana and is an example of the studio system doing what it did best. Howard Hawks was an independent maverick who was able to suit himself as he hopped between studios and projects and yet was still able to construct films that bore his fingerprints in some way or another. Come and Get It has a strong woman character and a love bond between two men – things that constantly recur in Hawks films, and the morality of the situations play second fiddle to the character behaviour or emotions that he explores. Classic Hollywood fare and well worth your time, Hawks fan or no.