HUSTON, John Marcellus

(b. 5 August 1906 in Nevada, Missouri; d. 28 August 1987 in Middletown, Rhode Island), film director, screenwriter, and actor whose influential career spanned six decades and whose films in the 1960s included several commercial flops as well as successes such as The Night of the Iguana (1964) and The Bible …inthe Beginning (1966).

Huston was the only child born to Walter Huston, an actor, and Rhea (Gore) Huston, a journalist. The couple divorced when Huston was six, and he lived primarily with his mother. He attended Lincoln Heights High School in Los Angeles but dropped out at the age of fifteen. Although Huston was one of the best amateur lightweight boxers in California, he opted not to pursue a career in prizefighting. During the 1920s Huston studied art in Los Angeles, lived in Mexico for two years, appeared in several off-Broadway productions, published a short story in American Mercury, and did some reporting for the (New York) Daily Telegraph.

Through his father's connections Huston secured a writing position at Universal Studios. However, he left Hollywood in 1933 when a car he was driving struck and killed a young woman. Huston was absolved by a coroner's jury, but the traumatized young man drifted around London, Paris, Chicago, and New York City. In 1937 he returned to Hollywood, preparing scripts for Jezebel (1938), Juarez (1939), and High Sierra (1941). The Maltese Falcon (1941) was Huston's directorial debut; the film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel was a financial success and became a cinema classic. In 1942 Huston joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He made three documentaries for the army while working under the director Frank Capra: Report from the Aleutians (1943), The Battle of San Pietro(1944), and Let There Be Light (1945). At the end of World War II Huston was discharged from the army with the rank of major.

Huston returned to work in Hollywood, winning Academy Awards for writing and directing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), a film in which his father received an Oscar for best supporting actor. His other major films during this period were Key Largo (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), and The African Queen (1952). Huston found the anticommunist hysteria in Hollywood to be intolerable. He helped to form the Committee for the First Amendment and, complaining of "moral rot" in the film capital, moved to Ireland in 1952, becoming an Irish citizen in 1964.

Huston's career declined in the late 1950s, as his Barbarian and the Geisha (1958) and The Roots of Heaven (1958) failed to find audiences. Huston described The Unforgiven (1960), featuring Audrey Hepburn, as the worst of his films. His productions of the 1960s tended to be financial and artistic flops. He blamed the films' lack of success on improper editing by studio executives; however, it is possible that Huston was simply out of step with the times. He was an establishment figure whose films often focused on group quests that failed or individuals who lacked self-understanding, the antithesis of the rebellious spirit of the 1960s.

Huston's identification with an older Hollywood was evident in his 1961 film The Misfits. Written by Arthur Miller as a starring vehicle for Miller's wife, Marilyn Monroe, The Misfits also features Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift in a story about a group of cowboys who round up wild horses to be slaughtered for dog food. The film was besieged with production problems, many of them resulting from Monroe and Miller's unraveling marriage. Filmgoers avoided The Misfits, while some critics found Huston's direction pretentious.

On the eve of the sexual revolution, Huston's next film, Freud (1962), appeared to be a marketable project. For the film's lead Huston selected Clift, a 1950s matinee idol. The director used his own powerful voice for the movie's omnipresent narrator. Huston began the film, "This is the story of Freud's descent into a region as black as hell, man's unconscious, and how he let in the light." Freud is presented as a Christ figure who brings a message of salvation for humanity, but he is rejected and betrayed by his disciple Breuer. Huston was proud of the film, but he insisted that clumsy post-production editing deleted "vital links" from the picture's intricate plot. Accordingly, it was not well received by filmgoers. Freud was followed by The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), which featured Huston and such established stars as Kirk Douglas, George C. Scott, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, and Frank Sinatra in well-disguised cameo appearances. Huston himself received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor in 1963 for his role as a church official in Otto Preminger's The Cardinal.

In his autobiography Huston defined a film's failure purely in commercial terms, observing, "The industry operates for profit, and a failure is a film that doesn't make money." This measure is certainly not accurate for all of Huston's work in the decade. In 1964 he adapted Tennessee Williams's play The Night of the Iguana (1961) for the screen. Filmed on location in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico (where Huston would take up residence in 1975), the movie features Richard Burton as an alcoholic former minister who is a tour guide in Mexico and becomes involved with Deborah Kerr and Ava Gardner. The film earned four Academy Award nominations, reviving Huston's reputation as a bankable commodity.

In 1966 Huston teamed with the producer Dino De Laurentiis to make The Bible … in the Beginning, based on the first twenty-two chapters of Genesis. The film, one of the most lucrative in Huston's long career, also featured the director as Noah and the voice of God. As Hollywood was responding to the growing youth culture and market of the mid-1960s, Huston's film harkd back to the biblical epics of the 1950s and an older generation of moviegoers. Huston's string of hits continued with his direction of the opening segment in the James Bond parody Casino Royale (1967).

Seeking more serious fare for his talents, Huston signed on with Warner Bros. to film Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), based upon the 1941 novel by Carson McCullers. The story focuses on repressed homosexuality, madness, and murder at a southern army base in 1948. Again using film stars of the 1950s, Huston cast Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor in the leads. Although Huston was proud of the movie, it failed at the box office. Huston concluded that the film's treatment of homosexuality was ahead of its time. He also criticized Warner Bros. for altering his use of color in the film. Huston ended the 1960s with three commercial flops: Sinful Davey (1969), A Walk with Love and Death (1969), and The Kremlin Letter (1970). He increasingly was perceived as a filmmaker out of touch with the changing times.

However, Huston resurrected his career and reputation in the 1970s with critically acclaimed cinematic adaptations of Fat City (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and Wise Blood (1979). In the 1980s he enjoyed his greatest commercial success with Annie (1982), and he was nominated for an Academy Award as best director for Prizzi's Honor (1985), a film about the Mafia for which his daughter, Anjelica, was honored with an Oscar for best supporting actress. In 1983 Huston received the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award. Huston's final film, The Dead (1987), based upon a 1914 story by James Joyce, also featured an outstanding performance by Anjelica Huston.

Huston was married five times, divorced four times, and widowed once. His wives were Dorothy Jeane Harvey (1926–1933), Lesley H. Black (1937–1944), Evelyn Keyes (1946–1950), Enrica ("Ricki") Soma (1950–1969), who was killed in a car accident and with whom Huston had a son and a daughter (Anjelica), and Celeste ("Cici") Shane (1972–1977). Huston also had a son with his longtime lover Zoe Sallis. While in Rhode Island filming Mr. North in 1987, Huston died in his sleep at the age of eighty-one from complications from emphysema. He is buried in Hollywood Memorial Cemetery in California.

Huston directed forty-one films during his career. He worked steadily during the 1960s, attaining commercial success with The Night of the Iguana and The Bible … In the Beginning, but his films appeared somewhat out of step with the antiestablishment themes of the period. While his reputation suffered in the 1960s, by his death Huston's claim to being one of America's finest filmmakers had been reestablished.

Huston's papers are held by the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. Huston's autobiography, An Open Book (1980), is less forthcoming than the title suggests. Biographical information and discussion of Huston's films may be found in Robert Benayoun, John Huston (1966); Axel Madsen, John Huston: A Biography (1978); Stuart Kaminsky, John Huston: Maker of Magic (1978); Scott Hammen, John Huston (1985); and Lawrence Grobel, The Hustons (1989). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times (both 29 Aug. 1987).

Ron Briley