The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (204 page)

She was in
Art School Confidential
(06, Terry Zwigoff);
Material Girls
(06, Martha Coolidge);
The Darjeeling Limited
(07, Anderson); on TV in
Medium; Choke
(08, Clark Gregg);
Spirit of the Forest
(08, David Rubin).

John Huston
(1906–87), b. Nevada, Missouri
1941:
The Maltese Falcon
. 1942:
In This Our Life; Across the Pacific
. 1943:
Report from the Aleutians
(d). 1944:
The Battle of San Pietro
(d). 1945:
Let There Be Light
(d.) 1947:
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. 1948:
Key Largo
. 1949:
We Were Strangers
. 1950:
The Asphalt Jungle
. 1951:
The Red Badge of Courage
. 1952:
The African Queen
. 1953:
Moulin Rouge
. 1954:
Beat the Devil
. 1956:
Moby Dick
. 1957:
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison
. 1958:
The Barbarian and the Geisha; The Roots of Heaven
. 1960:
The Unforgiven; The Misfits
. 1962:
Freud: The Secret Passion
. 1963:
The List of Adrian Messenger
. 1964:
Night of the Iguana
. 1966:
The Bible
. 1967:
Casino Royale
(an episode);
Reflections in a Golden Eye
. 1969:
Sinful Davey; A Walk With Love and Death
. 1970:
The Kremlin Letter
. 1971:
Fat City
. 1972:
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
. 1973:
The Mackintosh Man
. 1975:
The Man Who Would Be King
. 1979:
Wise Blood
. 1980:
Victory
. 1982:
Annie
. 1984:
Under the Volcano
. 1985:
Prizzi’s Honor
. 1987:
The Dead
.

Huston was always ready to be presented as the movie director who told manly, energetic stories, and liked to end them on a wry chuckle. He was himself a writer, a painter, a boxer, a horseman, a wanderer, a gambler, an adventurer, and a womanizer. More than most, he relished the game of getting a movie set up and the gamble of out-daring and intimidating the studios. His best pictures reflect those tastes and that attitude and had an expansive, airy readiness for ironic endings, fatal bad luck, and the laughter that knows men are born to fail.

He was assisted in this broad, fetching act by his own rough-hewn face, his gambler’s insolence, and his courtly eloquence. He was a character, at least as large as those in his films; there are also stories of a hard, mean streak that did not stop short of cruelty. Roaming all over the world, he could seem Hemingwayesque, though he possessed a serene confidence denied to the writer. And he was such a character that eventually people thought to use him in front of the camera. For he always had his act: that’s what makes Peter Viertel’s novel,
White Hunter, Black Heart
, so fascinating and so frightening. Viertel (who worked on several Huston ventures, including
The African Queen
) loved and admired the man; but he knew the malign devil who was dangerous to be with.

That’s what makes Huston’s Noah Cross in
Chinatown
(74, Roman Polanski) one of his greatest gifts to the screen: a man of the West, a pioneer and maker of cities, a realist, a killer, and a man of unflawed confidence and selfishness—a terrible, charismatic paradox, a bastard and an aristocrat.

The act and the legend keep getting in the way of the movies he made. His troubles with MGM over
The Red Badge of Courage
had been publicized by Lillian Ross in her book
Picture
and accepted as a fable of individual enterprise thwarted by the stupid system. But
Red Badge
remains as a series of gracious battle scenes, a noble aspiration, but a folly and a mess. Much later, Huston was reported as devoted to the point of his own extinction, surviving on oxygen, as he shot
The Dead
(in California). No doubt about the courage or the gambling perseverance. But that movie is muddled and a travesty of the Joyce story, for all the care and delicacy in art direction and the array of Dublin players.

Yes, Huston was always ambitious to exceed the set limits of American genres, and surely he loved distant and difficult locations (not only for the films, but for the chance of adventure they provided). Yes, he was a born storyteller, and someone who easily got bored with his own movies if the story proved slack or misbegotten. How often? Well, if Huston was a grand or good director, we have to reconcile ourselves to the banality and sheer boredom of, at least,
Across the Pacific; We Were Strangers; The Barbarian and the Geisha; Freud: The Secret Passion; The List of Adrian Messenger; The Bible; Sinful Davey; A Walk With Love and Death
(the first movie chance for his daughter, Anjelica, yet an ordeal for her, too—a warning even?);
The Kremlin Letter; The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean; The Mackintosh Man; Victory; Phobia;
and
Annie
.

Then there are the famous or alleged successes that crack apart on investigation because of arty pretension (
Moulin Rouge
and
Under the Volcano
, for instance) or because of the starstruck kindness of critics.
The Maltese Falcon
was a striking debut, and it did put Lorre and Greenstreet together, as well as allowing Mary Astor to be Brigid O’Shaughnessy. But it’s overrated, talky, slow, and often clumsy in its shooting. Bogart goes in and out of moods in uncertainty, and Mary Astor’s Brigid cannot help but illustrate Huston’s misogyny.
The African Queen
is a beloved film for many, yet is it about real people or the chutzpah of brave casting and actors’ schtick?
Prizzi’s Honor
has several droll passages, and in casting his daughter as Mae Rose, Huston pulled off a coup and helped heal old wounds. But the picture is so lugubriously slow, and Nicholson seems so unsure about the mood to play it in—just like Bogart years before (Huston was not known for directing actors—he cast them and watched how the cards played). Nor did Huston see that Richard Condon’s novel might have translated better to the screen if Mae Rose had been at its center.

But Huston never quite trusted women as characters. He married a lot—Evelyn Keyes and the model/dancer Ricki Soma were two of his wives—and there were many affairs. But in the movies women are sometimes nowhere to be seen (Red
Badge, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Moby Dick
, and most of
The Man Who Would be King
—and wouldn’t Huston have preferred a
Misfits
without Monroe?). Elsewhere they are exotic adornments, prizes for the men, or emblems of treachery as witness Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Monroe in
The Asphalt Jungle
(an unwitting doll), and Lily Langtry in
Roy Bean
. There are so few films in which women matter. As for love stories,
The African Queen
is the best that Huston could do—and that, really, is just another version of
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison
, the intriguing but truly safe (because impossible) mismatch, so that love and sex need not be explored. There is no real female challenge to the male 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
, Lauren Bacall in
Key Largo
, Elizabeth Taylor in
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, and Dominique Sanda in
The Mackintosh Man
.

Huston had begun in movies as a screenwriter:
A House Divided
(31, William Wyler);
Law and Order
(32, Edward L. Cahn);
Murders in the Rue Morgue
(32, Robert Florey);
Death Drives Through
(35, Cahn);
Rhodes of Africa
(36, Berthold Viertel);
Jezebel
(38, Wyler);
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse
(38, Anatole Litvak);
Juarez
(39, William Dieterle);
Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet
(40, Dieterle);
High Sierra
(41, Raoul Walsh); and
Sergeant York
(41, Howard Hawks). Later on, he had a hand in the scripts for
The Killers
(46, Robert Siodmak);
The Stranger
(46, Orson Welles); and
Three Strangers
(46, Jean Negulesco). And as a director, he was usually involved in reworking the scripts he shot.

But Huston showed his allegiance to the golden age in that he preferred to work from proven books and plays. Indeed, sometimes he showed a Selznick-like urge to cover the respectable literary waterfront: Melville, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, Arthur Miller, Kipling, C. S. Forester, B. Traven … and so on (it’s a surprise that Huston ducked out of the Selznick
A Farewell to Arms
). There is hardly an original in Huston’s career. Yet the diverse materials are shaped to his vision, as well as to his shortcomings.

So I am not a big fan. Still, there are Huston films that are hard to deny:
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
is so happy with its own story it has a chipper fatalism, Walter Huston and Bogart are fine, and you feel you’re in Mexico;
The Asphalt Jungle
is a taut thriller, a model story of a brilliant plan and its certain disaster full of Huston’s strengths—story atmosphere and lively supporting actors: Calhern, Hayden, and Sam Jaffe;
Beat the Devil
is startlingly loose and free, and very funny—it gets better as time passes—and who else would have dared do it?;
Fat City
is close to a great film, dark, sordid, despairing, and deeply provincial, free from Huston’s besetting cynicism, and with fine performances from Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges; and
The Man Who Would Be King
would have pleased Kipling himself. Then there is
Moby Dick
, a big failure in its day, forced into some awkward process shots, yet beautiful in its windblanched coloring, true to Melville and with Gregory Peck far better than one might have expected.

That’s a rich handful to go with
Chinatown
, the links to father Walter and daughter Anjelica (very honest actors), the sheer dazzle of his own legend, and the wonder of just how he got away with being thought of for so long as a great director.

He also acted more: good in
The Cardinal
(63, Otto Preminger) and
The Wind and the Lion
(75, John Milius), but variously wasted, foolish, and shameless in
The Bible
(as Noah);
De Sade
(69, Cy Endfield and Roger Corman);
Man in the Wilderness
(71, Richard C. Sarafian);
Sherlock Holmes in New York
(76, Boris Sagal);
Angela
(77, Sagal);
The Great Battle
(78, Umberto Lenzi);
The Visitor
(79, Giuli Parasisi);
Jaguar Lives!
(79, Ernest Pintoff);
Winter Kills
(79, William Richert);
Head On
(80, Michael Grant); narrating
Cannery Row
(82, David S. Ward); and
Lovesick
(83, Marshall Brickman).

Walter Huston
(Walter Houghston) (1884–1950), b. Toronto, Canada
Huston lacked the raw material of a star: he was not beautiful; he was forty-six before he made his first film; he never entirely gave up Broadway for Hollywood. Above all, he was never ingratiating: indeed, some of his earlier films—
The Criminal Code
(31, Howard Hawks), for instance—are startling for their unaffected understatement. Huston is one of those actors who seem to hide most of their feelings and thoughts. As a cinematic method it has no equal and Huston—although as years went by he succumbed more readily to overplaying—is a constantly interesting actor.

He trained as an engineer, but gave that up for vaudeville and then the legitimate theatre. When sound came, he was one of the many stage actors invited to Hollywood; in this case to Paramount for
Gentlemen of the Press
(29, Millard Webb) and
The Lady Lies
(29, Hobart Henley). He made a big impact as the villain in
The Virginian
(29, Victor Fleming) and then showed his versatility in the title role of
Abraham Lincoln
(30, D. W. Griffith); a romance,
The Virtuous Sin
(30, George Cukor and Louis Gasnier); the prison governor in
The Criminal Code
. At Warners, he made
Star Witness
(31, William Wellman);
The Ruling Voice
(31, Rowland V. Lee); and
The Woman from Monte Carlo
(32, Michael Curtiz). He also played in William Wyler’s
A House Divided
(31), a reworking of
Desire Under the Elms
, which Huston had done on the stage.

This was his busiest period and he managed to dominate every film he made: as Wyatt Earp in
Law and Order
(32, Edward L. Cahn); a policeman in
Beast of the City
(32, Charles Brabin); a drunk in
The Wet Parade
(32, Fleming); the banker in Capra’s
American Madness
(32); and Reverend Davidson, opposite Joan Crawford’s Sadie Thompson, in
Rain
(32, Lewis Milestone). But he was not a star and the quality of his movies began to fluctuate:
Hell Below
(32, Jack Conway); the president in
Gabriel Over the White House
(33, Gregory La Cava);
The Prizefighter and the Lady
(33, W. S. Van Dyke); going to prison in
Ann Vickers
(33, John Cromwell); and
Storm at Daybreak
(33, Richard Boleslavsky).

He played Sinclair Lewis’s
Dodsworth
(36, Wyler) on stage, and then on film, and gave a beautiful portrait of an ordinary, truthful man of wealth and power. He went to England to play
Rhodes of Africa
(36, Berthold Viertel) and
The Tunnel
(36, Maurice Elvey), but had few offers of further work and only made
Of Human Hearts
(38, Clarence Brown) and
The Light that Failed
(39, Wellman) in the next four years. With the war, he found more work, although almost exclusively in character parts:
All That Money Can Buy
(41, William Dieterle); staggering into Spade’s room with the bundle and then expiring in
The Maltese Falcon
(41, the first film directed by his son, John);
Swamp Water
(41, Jean Renoir);
The Shanghai Gesture
(41, Josef von Sternberg); the father in
Yankee Doodle Dandy
(42, Curtiz); the ambassador in
Mission to Moscow
(43, Curtiz);
The North Star
(43, Milestone); deliciously funny as Pat Garrett in
The Outlaw
(the Howard Hughes/Howard Hawks melange, shot in 1940, released in 1946, and better than most critics claim);
Dragonseed
(44, Conway);
And Then There Were None
(45, René Clair);
Dragonwyck
(46, Joseph Mankiewicz); the preacher in
Duel in the Sun
(46, King Vidor).