Romantic capitalism produces fine entertainment

Rating: 7/10 (17 February 2005)

Marty Scorsese is a Hollywood director with a sense of history who knows how to make very watchable middlebrow commercial pictures. Here he tells the story of one of American capitalism's more romantic heroes in an entertaining and spectacular fashion while not overlooking the demons which drove him. Although this is a big budget production with some stunning aerial scenes it is essentially a character study of a true American eccentric.
I'm not sure many mothers would like their sons to grow up like Howard Hughes but his Mom as depicted here certainly left him with a deep fear of germs. It is a curious feature of the story that despite being obsessed by germs Howard was happy to risk infection by sleeping with countless women and to risk his life flying experimental planes with great daring and gusto. Having lost both parents by the time he was 20, Hughes inherited a prosperous medium sized business which manufactured drilling bits for the oil industry and proceeded to build a huge ramshackle empire, including a film studio, an aircraft manufacturer and TWA, once America's largest domestic and second-largest international airline. He started out by nearly going broke making the World War I aviation epic "Hell's Angels", got interested in aircraft design, and constructed some pretty way-out craft, including the Hercules flying boat or "Spruce Goose" (framed from timber, aluminium being unavailable), then the largest plane ever to fly. It seems, incidentally that all this was funded by the US taxpayer and the lil' old Hughes Tool Company of Houston, Texas, which was the only part of Hughes's empire to consistently make money.
And then there were the women. Wow. If ever there was a man who lived out his teenage fantasies it was Howard. He is shown here as an adroit seducer who meets his match in Katharine Hepburn, though they break up after she meets the love of her life, Spencer Tracy. One of the best scenes in the film is a lunch at the Hepburn family estate where Howard is confronted with the whole nutty Hepburn family, all of whom seem to have mastered the art of making outsiders uncomfortable. Then there is the beautiful Ava Gardner, who never seems to let Howard get too close, Jane Russell, the lady whose bra Howard famously designed for "The Outlaw" (who, still living, is mentioned only), and many others, some dangerously young, though it has to be said that Howard seems to have retained a mental age of 15 or so for most of his life.
There are many fine performances in the film. Leonardo Di Caprico is a plausible, if very edgy Howard, and actually starts to look like him in the later Senate inquiry scenes (for a moment I thought they had slotted Sam Neil into the part). Cate Blanchett, burlier than the real Kate, powers her way through the part of Katherine Hepburn, tomboy. I really enjoyed Alan Alda, almost unrecognisable from his "Mash" days, as one of the villains, Senator Ralph Owen Brewster. Alec Baldwin as Juan Trippe, President of Pan American Airlines, and the other major villain, puts in an avuncular performance which relies a lot on his infectious grin, but it does not seem out of place. On the other hand Kate Beckinsale is a bit too perfectly dressed and too much in control as Ava Gardner  perhaps Marty is suggesting her as a mother figure in contrast to Cate's tomboy sister. Ian Holm was wasted in his minor role as the Prof and Jude Law was superfluous as Errol Flynn.
It's a good story, though at 170 minutes the film is a bit on the long side, and I'm not going to take Scorsese to task for his historical inaccuracies. I wonder however whether the early signs of madness were so evident. Noah Dietrich, the very able executive portrayed by John C Reilly in the film was first employed by Hughes in 1925 and remained no. 2 in Hughes's empire until the late 1950s. In his 1977 memoirs, as I recall, Dietrich says Hughes really only started to fall apart in that decade, particularly after the failure of his marriage to Jean Peters, which falls outside the time frame of this picture. Scorsese for dramatic purposes has to give us a foretaste of what is to come, but it does have the effect of making Hughes seem nuttier than he actually was at the time. Still, this is all-round good entertainment which I'm sure is all Marty intended.
Finally, a special mention for the set designers who, it seems, managed to turn the lobby of the Southwestern University Law School into a fair representation of the fashionable 30s' nightspot, the "Coconut Grove".