Howard Hawks, the quintessential Hollywood director known for his mastery of many genres, will be the subject of a complete retrospective at Museum of the Moving Image from September 7 through November 10, 2013. The Museum will present 39 features. All of the films will be shown in 35mm—many in stunning restorations—except for Red Line 7000, which will be shown in 16mm.

“We are excited to present this complete Hawks retrospective, the first one in New York since the Museum’s complete show in 1994,” said Chief Curator David Schwartz, who organized the series. “Although Hawks worked in a variety of genres, including screwball comedy, gangster films, Westerns, and musicals, his films have a remarkable thematic coherence. They are about how people define themselves by their actions under pressure.”

The Complete Howard Hawks includes all of the director’s existing films. Highlights include the silents Fig Leaves (1927), Hawks’s earliest extant film; A Girl in Every Port, starring a pre-Pabst Louise Brooks; the rarely shown desert romance Fazil (1928); and other early works presented with live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

Classic Hawks films to be shown in rare archival prints include Scarface (1932), the seminal gangster film starring Paul Muni that defined the genre for years to come; I Was a Male War Bride (1949), with Ann Sheridan and Cary Grant in one of the director’s personal favorites; the beloved screwball comedy Twentieth Century, starring Carole Lombard and John Barrymore; El Dorado (1966), the Rio Bravo remake featuring John Wayne with James Caan and Robert Mitchum; and Rio Lobo (1970), another Rio Bravo coda and Hawks’s final film. The films Barbary Coast (1935) and the World War I drama The Road to Glory (1936) will also be presented in archival 35mm prints.

The Museum retrospective will also feature new 35mm prints of The Crowd Roars (1932), a bracing racing drama made for “pure fun,” and The Dawn Patrol (1930), Hawks’s first talkie and also the first of his films to focus on aviators. All special print conditions are noted in the schedule below.

Tickets for screenings are included with Museum admission ($12 adults / $9 senior citizens and students) / $6 children) and free for Museum members. To find out about membership and to join, visit movingimage.us/support/membership or call 718 777 6877.

Howard Hawks (1896–1977) moved easily between drama and comedy with a style that was always lucid, energetic, and direct. Hawks worked in relative anonymity until the 1950s and ‘60s, when auteurist critics discerned a directorial signature that gave depth and coherence to his extremely diverse films. In his influential book Howard Hawks (1968), Robin Wood wrote, “If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be Rio Bravo.”

Cinema is a medium of action, in which everything must be expressed on the surface, in concrete physical terms. In Hawks’s film, behavior is everything. An instinctive existentialist, Hawks depicts a universe where groups of men and women battle the abyss by sticking to a precise code of conduct and behavior, where professionalism under pressure is the ultimate virtue. No great Hollywood director has ever shown less interest in such institutions as government, family, and marriage. And Hawks displayed a healthy disregard for gender roles. Resolutely unpretentious, Hawks said, “I try to tell my story as simply as possible, with the camera at eye level.” Hawks left the theorizing to the critics, such as Eric Rohmer, who wrote in Cahiers du Cinema in 1953, “The best Westerns are those signed by a great name. I say this because I love film, because I believe it is not the fruit of chance, but of art and men’s genius, because I think one cannot really love any film if one does not really love the ones by Howard Hawks.”