The director Howard Hawks (1896-1977) is, by mainstream critical consensus, seated alongside John Ford in the pantheon of American-born auteurs. In a career that produced nearly 50 films in as many years, Hawks made significant, defining contributions to screwball comedies, gangster and detective movies, Westerns, war films, musicals, and science fiction.

Humphrey Bogart met Lauren Bacall on Hawks’s watch. Only in Hawks’s pictures was John Wayne able to rival the quality of the on-screen goods he delivered for John Ford. And filmmakers from Jean-Luc Godard to Walter Hill, Michael Mann to John Carpenter will gush with the least provocation on the subject of the sturdy yet supple male-male camaraderie and the sexy, capable, level-gazing heroines (latterly dubbed “Hawksian women”) that define the director’s oeuvre.

Starting tomorrow, Anthology Film Archives will examine the final decades of work produced by this essential American popular artist. “Late Hawks,” which will run between tomorrow and Sunday, and then between next Wednesday and next Sunday, is an ingeniously curated selection of movies directed and in many cases also produced by Hawks, from his 1948 Western opus, “Red River,” to 1970’s “Rio Lobo,” the most threadbare of the two unofficial remakes of his equally paradigmatic 1959 classic, “Rio Bravo.”

Alfred Hitchcock, an equally lionized filmmaker who was one year Hawks’s junior, made no secret of his disinterest in the actual process of shooting films. Minutely planned, carefully cast, and for the most part shot in strict adherence to the script, a finished Hitchcock picture closely resembled what its director had decreed in the myriad production meetings, casting sessions, and script conferences that preceded the first day of shooting. While Hawks took an active and invariably definitive role in the preparation of his film properties in every department, on set he cultivated a looser collaborative approach than Hitchcock’s, one in which the director constantly rewrote scenes and empowered his casts and crews to devise solutions and improvements to better justify the given day’s work.

Where Hitchcock sought to execute a grocery list of carefully pre-visualized camera angles, whose number and variety were dictated by the master of suspense’s genius for montage, Hawks only “took” (in the nearly dead parlance of his day) as many shots as was necessary to satisfy him that a given scene worked at a character level. This loose-limbed approach yielded an easy-to-watch brand of egalitarian comedy-drama that was delivered by flesh-and-blood characters rather than by complicated camera moves or cutting room ingenuity. No matter how familiar the plot contrivance, character “type,” or star power, Hawks never failed to deliver a story about people.

When Hawks liked the timing of a scene and the actor’s work in it, an angle or two was all that was necessary to shoot before moving on. When things weren’t working, or, worse, when the director felt a cast member wasn’t giving him what the given scene called for, Hawks would keep shooting from as many angles as it took for him to be satisfied he had editing room ammunition to cut an extended, ill-performed scene down to size. The paradoxical thing, in “Red River,” about the marvelous exchange of close-ups in Joanne Dru and John Wayne’s characteristically blunt-edged and honest emotional face-off around a campfire, for instance, is that the scene’s intricate, evolving visual scheme is a tribute to its director’s impatience with Dru — not an exercising of any high-handed film grammar agenda.

Five of the eight films in “Late Hawks” are Westerns. Each of these contains considerable evidence of Hawks’s tremendous gift for non-flashy, highly effective moments of action and violence. The wordless prologue to “Rio Bravo,” in which a fallen dipsomaniac gunslinger’s (Dean Martin) humiliating reach into a spittoon is counter-balanced by a gun butt to his tormentor’s face courtesy of Sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne), is a stunner. Likewise a climactic gunfight, complete with a point-of-view plunge from a bell tower, in “El Dorado” (1966), and an expertly staged wreck in “Rio Lobo” (1970).

“That stuff’s hard to do,” Hawks once warned Peter Bogdanovich on the subject of shooting and staging the gunfights, chases, fistfights, animal rampages, and other small but highly effective moments of mayhem that pepper Hawks’s later work. But the director made it look easy. The criminally underseen “Hatari!” (1962) is arguably the apotheosis of the director’s equal comfort with ruthlessly ingratiating character work and two-fisted cinematic roughhousing. By mating a lopsided romance between Wayne as a “bring ’em back alive” big-game hunter and Elsa Martinelli as the dauntingly self-possessed object of his affection with a crackerjack series of jeep chases and real-life wild animal capture stunts, “Hatari!” is 157 minutes of pure, sweet, unapologetically cornball cinematic ambrosia. Like the other films in Anthology’s series, it represents a giant of American movies at the height of his powers, armed with an uncanny command of the mechanics of story and unencumbered by anything to prove.

“Late Hawks” will run tomorrow through Sunday, and next Wednesday through next Sunday (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181).