Fig Leaves: Howard Hawks

One of the most notable aspects of Howard Hawks’ filmography was his constant subversions of traditional gender roles. His screwball comedies frequently saw feeble, malleable men dominated by virile, overbearing women. The Hawksian woman was essentially a female coded as a male: they had masculine/androgynous names, were tough-talking, and were accepted by the other characters as “one of the guys.” Perhaps these things are why his 1926 film Fig Leaves is so lackluster. It’s a comedy that reinforces gender roles with sickening vigor. To feed her insatiable lust for nice clothing, modern gal Eve Smith (Olive Borden) disobeys her husband Adam Smith (George O’Brien), becomes a fashion model for a homosexually-coded designer, and nearly ends their marriage. Her desires are depicted as shallow, callous, and destructively self-centered. Her failure ending in recommitment to her position as obedient wife is shown as a triumph. Curious bookending segments set in prehistoric times featuring the same actors as the biblical Adam and Eve are somewhat fascinating for their special effects—huge dinosaurs pull public transportation buses, forced perspective giant chimpanzees foil hunters, a massive snake apparently made from a garden hose and the nightmares of small children slithers its way up a staircase to tempt Eve—which seem to predict The Flintstones several decades in advance. If Fig Leaves is anything (other than a disappointment), it’s an odd curio from the later years of silent cinema.

5/10