AT the end of each year, newspaper and magazines can't resist making lists.

In the early 1960s, the magazine that nourished and schooled the leading directors of the French Nouvelle Vague, Cahiers Du Cinema, was no different.

When, at the end of 1963, the call came to rising cineaste and critic Jean-Luc Godard to concoct his "Ten Best American Sound Films" for a bumper Christmas edition (yes, even the Cahiers!) all the predictable names so beloved of the French New Wave turned up.

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo was way up there, with John Ford's The Searchers nestling on a ledge a little below; Orson Welles hustled in with The Lady From Shanghai; films by Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, Nicolas Ray and Charles Chaplin all made it to the winner's enclosure. At the summit of Godard's list, however, was a film, Scarface, by a director, Howard Hawks, to whom Godard referred as "the greatest American artist".

Godard was not the first (Hawks had been the toast of the Cahiers since the mid-1950s) or the last to champion the films of Hawks (try composing a top 10 without them) but it is through the adoption of this most unlikely of auteurs by directors and writers such as Godard, Truffaut and Rivette that the centenary of Hawks's birth is being celebrated as thoroughly as it now is.

Although several new Hawks books have been published, perhaps the greatest measure of continued interest in the director is the mammoth two-part retrospective of his films - with new prints and a rarely-seen alternative version of The Big Sleep - which is about to tour the world, stopping off over the next three months at the IFC.

One thing that inevitably gives Hawks the status he enjoys in she centenary of his birth is his assurance across almost the entire range of movie genres. Between 1930 and his death in 1977 (one day after Chaplin), Hawks directed more famous Hollywood films than quite seems possible for one man.

His works ranged from gangster greats such as Scarface (which he produced with Howard Hughes) to his racing car movies, The Crowd Roars and Red Line 7000, to effortless metropolitan comedies such as His Girl Friday, to existential Westerns such as Red River, to his monuments to Bogart and Bacall, The Big Sleep and To Have And Have Not.

Hawks lived a life every bit as varied as his film career would suggest. Born in May, 1896 in Goshen, Indiana, young Hawks had two brothers (one of whom, a film director, was killed making an air combat movie) and two sisters, one of whom died of tuberculosis, the other of food poisoning. He first began working in the film industry during his summer holidays from Cornell, working as a prop man with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.

Hawks spent time as an air force pilot, and a couple more years racing, crashing and building cars before joining, in 1922, Paramount's story department, where he worked on around 60 films. He directed his first film, the silent movie The Road of Glory, in 1926 and didn't stop working until a couple of years before his death. The director himself told his prime chronicler Joseph McBride that he had had "a hell of a life"; and it seems like a gentle understatement.

It is impossible not to see the variety of Hawks's experience as having flavoured the kind of movies he made. Where a contemporary director like Tarantino likes to celebrate the fact that most of his experience comes through watching old movies, Hawks was from an age in which intertextuality, for all he knew, might have been some fancy Viennese term for sex. This, of course, is hardly to say Hawks was a dumb director, at least as far as Francois Truffaut - who called him "one of the most intellectual film-makers in America" - was concerned.

Nevertheless, when Hawks films a scene of a man dying, he looks not to the swelling shelves of the local video store, but into the darker passages of his past. When "improvising" a scene (he hated that term, he took it for granted that what a director did was improvise, deal with storytelling problems on a practical level) for Only Angels Have Wings, Hawks had only to think back to his time as a pilot and his memory of watching an aviator with a broken neck struggle to win the dignity of his final moments, he told McBride.

The critic Molly Haskell has said that Hawks's way of storytelling is informed by a belief that "men are more expressive rolling a cigarette than saving the world." (Hawks, indeed, did sturdy PR work for the tobacco industry: remember that the world's introduction of Lauren Bacall, in Hawks's To Have And Have Not, is built around "Slim's" desire for a smoke.)

But if nurturing a realism rooted in personal experience was one of Hawks's strengths, he displayed an immense talent for entertaining audiences in any number of different, more visceral, ways. If the roller coaster is the model of contemporary films such as Mission Impossible or The Rock, Hawks's work equally seems part of a fairground, albeit one of the mind.

The Sternwood's mansion in The Big Sleep, where the old general sits allowing Marlowe to take his pleasures for him (at the time this activity was described as vicarious pleasure, whereas now it might be called virtual) or Eddie Geiger's Laurel Canyon hideaway, or the hotel at the centre of To Have And Have Not, all these seem to offer stations on a particularly immersive ghost train ride. These are, you can't help thinking, exactly the sort of locations which Enterprise crew members might choose to visit during a holodeck session.

IF the audience's taste was running to something a little more verbal, Hawks oblige again. Pauline Kael called Hawks's Bringing Up Baby "The American movies' closest equivalent to Restoration Comedy and it is not hard to see why. The film is frothing with double entendres, (the plot, after all, revolves around Hepburn's hungry pussy cat and Grant's big bone!) full of metaphors stretched to a point just short of excruciating, and unrepentantly saucy. Grant and Hepburn bicker about balls, bump and grind their curvy automobiles and end up tearing each other's clothes off, all within the first few minutes of the film. Sid James and Barbara Windsor would hardly have got away with it.

Recently, however, some darker things have begun to be said about Hawks. Not, of course, about his films, which remain canons of discrete direction, inventive scripting and imaginative storytelling. Hawks's life seems to have embodied far fewer virtues. David Thomson updates his eulogy on Hawks's films by adding "the more one learns about his life, the clearer it is that he was a chronic liar, a compartmentaliser, a secretive rouge and stealthy dandy and a ruinous womaniser."

This is certainly bad news, not because Howard Hawks ever painted himself as any kind of saint, but because the man sounds like a great character for a film that only one director could make. And he's dead now.