3 (or 4) Versions of Howard Hughes

Hughes as Narcissist - Robert Downey, Jr. in Iron Man

Jon Favreau’s Iron Man (2008) has been universally praised for what it is, a well done but fundamentally generic superhero film. It’s also a pretty good Howard Hughes film. What makes it work on both levels is the inspired casting of Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark, a multi-millionaire/industrialist/inventor clearly based on Hughes.

Downey plays Hughes/Stark as a charming narcissist, a man admired and envied by the public - like the real Hughes - for his wealth, his engineering accomplishments, his willingness to test his inventions personally (the real Hughes test-piloted the aircraft he designed), and his playboy lifestyle. The narcissism of the pre-Iron Man Tony Stark manifests itself in the way he sees other people, i.e., he hardly sees them at all beyond their immediate use to him as workers to be exploited, investors to be conned, or women to be fucked.

That is, until he is captured by Afghan terrorists (Vietnamese Communists in Stan Lee’s original comic story) and a fellow prisoner, Yinsen (Shaun Taub), literally and metaphorically gives him a heart – literally in the sense that the glowing battery Yinsen installs in Tony’s chest (above) keeps shrapnel from entering his heart and killing him, and metaphorically in the sense that Yinsen’s selfless actions inspire Tony to become a genuine armor-clad hero.

The metamorphosis of Tony Stark from heel to superhero reflects the ambivalence the American cinema has always felt toward its capitalist entrepeneurs (see, if you haven’t already, There Will Be Blood). Iron Man gives us a classic good capitalist/bad capitalist dichotomy with Downey as good guy capitalist Tony Stark aka "Iron Man" battling a bald, bearded Jeff Bridges as bad guy capitalist Obadiah Stane aka "Iron Monger."

I can't help seeing the casting of Jeff Bridges here as a nod to Francis Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) in which Bridges plays the good capitalist, Tucker, and the bad capitalist is Hughes himself, played as a deranged genius by Dean Stockwell.

Hughes as Obsessive-Compulsive - Leonardo DiCaprio in The Aviator

Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004) attempts to capture the many contradictory aspects of Howard Hughes within a single film and succeeds, more or less. We get Hughes the movie producer/director escorting Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow to the premiere of his Hells Angels (above), Hughes the womanizer romancing Cate Blanchett as Kate Hepburn, and Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner, and Hughes the fearless test pilot memorably crashing a plane into a residential neighborhood of Beverly Hills (a helluva montage sequence).

Best of all, we get DiCaprio as Hughes the obsessive-compulsive recluse, collecting his urine in bottles, watching that image of Jane Russell in The Outlaw projected over and over again in a continuous loop, overseeing and endlessly redoing every detail of his aircraft designs while muttering to himself, "The way of the future, the way of the future, the way of the future ...."

Hughes as Paranoid Control Freak - Robert Ryan in Caught

Max Ophuls’ Caught (1949) looks at Hughes from the outside, specifically, from the point of view of a small-town girl (Barbara Bel Geddes) who marries him, thinking that his money will buy her happiness and finding, to no one’s surprise but her own, that it doesn’t.

Caught is one of two brilliant underseen film noirs directed by Ophuls in the late 1940s. (The other is 1949's The Reckless Moment.) The unusually intelligent screenplay is by Arthur Laurents, who also wrote Hitchcock’s Rope and Wise’s West Side Story. Caught’s noirness mostly emanates from Ryan’s characterization of Hughes - fictionalized as Smith Ohlrig (as in "oil rig") - presented here as a neurotic monster, a man who keeps his wife a virtual prisoner, and who is psychotically jealous of any other straight male with whom she has contact. Even more disturbing, this is a man who cannot ever be told he is wrong. He marries Leonora (Bel Geddes) simply because his psychiatrist tells him he cannot.

Just as Ophuls used a pair of diamond earrings to chart the spiritual growth of his heroine in Madame de... (1953), in Caught, Ophuls uses a mink coat to illustrate the character arc of Leonora. The coat first appears as an image in a catalog ogled by Leonora and her girlfriend in the film’s opening sequence. When Leonora becomes a Los Angeles model, she gets to wear a mink, but doesn’t get to own one until she marries Ohlrig. The coat then becomes a symbol of her material imprisonment, which she abandons simultaneously with her abandonment of Ohlrig. Similarly (and Freudianly?), Ophuls associates Ohlrig with balls, the kind used in pool and other games, that an agitated Ohlrig rolls obsessively back and forth. Later, when it looks like Leonora is going to leave him, Ohlrig suffers a psychosomatic heart attack, and collapses under a pinball machine (above).

I’d always assumed Caught was produced at RKO - Hughes’ own studio - mainly, because it looks like an RKO production. Caught was, in fact, an independent production, but it has the RKO noir atmosphere and, in Robert Ryan, one of RKO’s best known and most talented leading men. Barbara Bel Geddes had worked for RKO - until Hughes fired her. Ophuls was also a former Hughes/RKO employee, fired after working for a short time on Hughes’ Vendetta. So Ophuls, Ryan, and Bel Geddes had all known Hughes personally. Even more surprising, Hughes apparently coached his friend Ryan on how to play Ohlrig, which is kind of like Charles Foster Kane finishing the negative review of Susan Alexander Kane begun by his friend Jed Leland - a connection I’ll bet film buff Hughes recognized and appreciated.