Huston, John (1906-1987)

The multi-faceted John Huston entered modern cinema history in 1941 when he wrote the screenplay for The Maltese Falcon, also making his directorial debut. The film established his reputation, began a significant working relationship with Humphrey Bogart, and pointed to his preference for mining literary sources for his material—in this case, Dashiell Hammett. In the course of a long and decidedly erratic career, Huston dealt memorably with human greed in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1947), winning Oscars for his screenplay and direction, and Key Largo (1948); plaudits greeted The Asphalt Jungle (1950), often considered his best film, and he entranced audiences by pairing Katharine Hepburn's missionary and Humphrey Bogart's booze-drenched river trader as companions in adversity in The African Queen (1952)—an idea beguilingly echoed by Deborah Kerr's nun marooned on a wartime Pacific island with Robert Mitchum's marine in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957). (The African Queen was voted one of the 100 best American films of the century by the AFI in 1998.) Huston acted frequently from the 1960s on, and, while many look fondly on his genial Noah in The Bible, which he directed in 1966, it is his tycoon in Polanski's Chinatown (1974), oozing cruelty and corruption, that is burnt in the collective memory.

As a director, Huston's films reflected his wide interests and, like the man, often present a rough exterior beneath which hovers tenderness, or even romantic idealism. Most of his heroes are either fiercely independent or social misfits, or both: the artist Toulouse-Lautrec, played by Jose Ferrer in Moulin Rouge (1953), Gregory Peck's Captain Ahab (Moby Dick, 1956), the eponymous Freud (a tortured and miscast Montgomery Clift, 1962), Stacy Keach's disinte-grating prizefighter in Fat City (1971, one of Huston's quality films in a period of failures). His best work reflects a sense of irony and a sharp attention to character, focused in a decisive narrative style, as in The Man Who Would be King (1975), adapted from Kipling and one of his last real successes. Some of the films are off-beat and tend to misfire, though the imagery of elephants and the accompanying doom-laden message of Roots of Heaven (1958) is interesting, and while comedy barely features in his oeuvre, he ventured successfully into parody with the spoof adventure-thriller Beat the Devil (1954, Bogart again).

Although a five-times married womanizer in life, with a handful of exceptions, women are largely peripheral to Huston's heavily masculine on-screen world. As David Thomson accurately observes, "There is no real female challenge to the smoke-room atmosphere of the films. But there is a list of female onlookers as wan and powerless as Jacqueline Bisset in Under the Volcano, Elizabeth Taylor in Reflections in a Golden Eye and Dominique Sanda in The Mackintosh Man. " One might add a dozen others, but the casting of his daughter Anjelica in Prizzi's Honor (1987), one of his last and most entertaining films, helped her to an Oscar.

Huston's failures, ranging from the pretentiously arty such as Under the Volcano (1984) through the tedious, the slapdash and the irredeemably dreadful (e.g. The List of Adrian Messenger, 1963) are numerous, and seriously tarnish his reputation. In truth, it is almost impossible to define the particular gift, characteristic, or achievement that led to his enduring position as a Hollywood—indeed, an American—legend, and perhaps it is to the man himself that history must look for the answer. It was not only his huge frame and powerfully craggy face that made him larger than life, but his hell-raising extroversion and colorful exploits, coupled with courage and an adventurous nature (as well as a mean streak). He was born in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906, the son of the distinguished actor Walter Huston, and later himself fathered sons, Tony and Danny, who became a screenwriter and a film director, respectively. He had a peripatetic childhood, traveling the vaudeville circuit with his father and the horse-racing circuit with his mother (they divorced when John was seven), left school at 14 to become a boxer and, at 19, embarked on a short-lived career as a stage actor in New York, also marrying the first of his wives.

For the next 12 years or so, Huston led an unsettled life that embraced a period as an officer with the Mexican cavalry, small parts in a few films, and reporting for the New York Graphic. A fruitless stint as a contract scriptwriter in Hollywood followed before he took off for a nomadic and often poverty-stricken existence in London and Paris, where he studied painting. Back in Hollywood by 1937, he settled in as a writer at Warner Bros., applying himself seriously to his work, which included collaborations on such films as Jezebel (1938), Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940), High Sierra, and Sergeant York (both 1941).

Professionally, the sheer length, breadth, and range of Huston's filmography astonishes: in a career that began in 1929 with an acting role in The Shakedown, and ended with his directing of The Dead in 1987, he accrued almost 90 credits in his various capacities as screenwriter, director, and/or actor. He joined the army in 1942 and made three of the most acclaimed documentaries ever to emerge from the conflict of World War II. The most searing of these, Let There Be Light (1945), dealing with the treatment and rehabilitation of shell-shocked soldiers, was banned by the War Department because of its sensitive subject, and was first shown publicly in 1980.

In 1947, along with William Wyler and others, Huston formed the Committee for the First Amendment to counteract the HUAC Hollywood witchhunt. The following year, with the expiration of his Warners contract, he formed Horizon Pictures with independent producer Sam Spiegel, and in 1952, unable any longer to tolerate the McCarthyite atmosphere, he bought a vast country estate in Ireland. He resided there for 20 years with his family, living the hunting-shooting-fishing life of a squire between films. In 1972, he moved to Mexico, married and divorced for the last time, and made nine more films, including his only musical, Annie (1982).

In 1987, increasingly ill with emphysema and keeping himself alive with an oxygen tank and sheer will, John Huston directed The Dead. Adapted from James Joyce by his son Tony and starring his daughter Anjelica, this delicate and elegiac piece marked the exit of one of American cinema's great warriors.

—Robyn Karney

Further Reading:

Finler, Joel W. The Movie Directors Story. New York, Crescent Books, 1986.

Grobel, Lawrence. The Hustons. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989.

Huston, John. An Open Book. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1980.

Thomson, David. A Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1994.