Howard Hawks's Man's Favorite Sport 1964

The most interesting feature of the film [Man's Favorite Sport] in relation to Hawks's past work is the character's development....If at the end of the film the hero is still (now literally) drifting, it is from choice, not mere misadventure.
--Robin Wood, Howard Hawks (Doubleday, 1968)

I have continued to look for movies that ages eight to seventy-three can enjoy together and failed again with Man's Favorite Sport, a comedy with Rock Hudson that had originally been written with Cary Grant in mind (aside: when I was a kid and never allowed to go to the movies I confused Cary Grant, Rock Hudson and Gregory Peck, which I find hard to believe today).  Nobody thought Man's Favorite Sport funny enough and Susan thought it an unsuccessful rehash of Bringing Up Baby (1939).  It is in many ways an old-fashioned film, which is not all bad.  One can even see the repeat of the restaurant scene from the earlier film, where Grant walks behind Hepburn to cover up the rip in the back of her dress, as an improvement, with Rock Hudson and Maria Perschy running into Hudson's fiancée with his tie caught in Perschy's zipper.  The film is full of sexual symbolism --such as a live fish wriggling in Hudson's pants --reflecting Hudson's insecure role of a fishing expert who had never been fishing and is forced to enter a fishing tournament.

There is no doubt that Hawks himself was somewhat adrift in post-studio Hollywood without a stable of character actors and always looking for new female talent that he could make into stars, as he did with Lauren Bacall. To a certain extent he succeeds with Paula Prentiss in Man's Favorite Sport but the rest of the cast is older men and younger unknown females..  And the Mancini/Mercer title song --"Man's Favorite Sport is Girls" -- has little to do with the film but, as Todd McCarthy points out in his biography of Hawks (Grove Press,1997) "Hawks commissioned the photographer Don Ornitz to create an elaborate title sequence for which he shot six thousand Playboyesque color photos of thirty-three unknown models in various athletic pursuits."