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.
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.
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 .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.
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.
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.