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He is approaching 75, but Howard Hawks still fits the old Ben Hecht description of him as ‘a drawling fashion plate, apurr with melodrama.’
On the stage of the Carnegie Theater for the Chicago Film Festival last November, a month before the premiere of his Rio Lobo, he was the image of the consummate professional. He was wearing rimless dark glasses, and kept them on even when the audience, through an electrician’s error, was left in darkness. As he sat there in the spotlight, asking for light, it seemed oddly appropriate – recalling Robin Wood’s words about ‘the eternal darkness… against which the Hawksian stoicism shines.’
Mare of Easttown is showing on Sky Atlantic and streaming on Now TV.
In prestige TV thrillerland, regional richness brings rewards. Not just the depth and texture that a rooted story lends, but, you know, Emmys. So thereâs no place like home for writer and Pennsylvania native Brad Ingelsby, whose bleak, absorbing and sharply detailed thriller about a beleaguered small-town cop is packed with the Rust Belt realism he brought to Scott Cooperâs 2013 feature Out of the Furnace.
In a refreshing change from the time-hopping second-hand Southern gothic of True Detective (2014-19), or the blackly comic Midwest crime families in Fargo (2014-), his immersive series, sensitively directed by Craig Zobel (Compliance, 2012; Z for Zachariah, 2015), focuses on present-day problems.