The Fearless Filmmaker John Huston
JOHN HUSTON was born in the little town of Nevada, Missouri in 1906. He liked to say, ‘My grandfather won the town in a poker game’ but not all of John Huston’s stories were true. Gifted and courageous, always taking risks, Huston embraced the world, had a richly various love life, worked closely with fabled actors like Humphrey Bogart, and made some terrific movies.
Ten of the best John Huston movies are:
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Key Largo (1948)
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
The African Queen (1951)
The Misfits (1961)
Fat City (1972)
The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
Under the Volcano (1984) and
The Dead (1987)
The movies are especially admirable because Huston often worked with very fine novels, not pulp, and a firm old rule in Hollywood is that the finer the novel, the harder it is to bring to the screen. A brilliant authorial voice, superb word choice and an elevated tone are very hard to match in visual terms. But Huston refused to be intimidated and found the visual story in each of these works.
Huston had a strange, unhealthy childhood. His father, Walter Huston, loved acting and would not give it up for the sake of his family, even as an obscure actor in vaudeville.
John Huston’s mother, Rhea Gore, was a journalist who hated the itinerant actor’s life and, after four years, stormed out of the marriage.
Against very long odds, Walter Huston became first a successful song-and-dance man, then a fine stage actor on Broadway and finally, in 1929, a success in Hollywood. So John grew up with the knowledge that his father was a risktaker, and that the gambles were paying off — but without his father around.
John grew very close to his mother — perhaps too close. Rhea was highly intelligent, overbearing, a skillful writer and a bitterly frustrated woman. There was very little routine at home. Things were upset, people were moody. Plans abruptly changed.
Rhea married again, to a vice president of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and she and John moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota. Just as John was getting used to life there, at the age of 11, doctors told him and Rhea that John was dying. He was very skinny with an enlarged heart, and failing kidneys. The doctors said that dry, high-altitude living would help, and total bed rest, and a starvation diet.
So the family moved from Saint Paul to Arizona where John lay in bed for months until one night he couldn’t stand it any more. He got out of bed, snuck out of the house, and dove into a canal whose floodgates were open. He almost drowned — but had an ecstatic experience. From then on, he was a firm believer in the creative power of adrenaline and danger. The symptoms of an enlarged heart and bad kidneys slowly receded.
Huston was easily bored, and determined not to be — always trying new things, seeking out danger. He chose Abraham Lincoln High School in Los Angeles chiefly for its celebrated boxing program. He left high school at 15 — but read three or four books a week all his life, educating himself on the run.
He went into lightweight boxing, fighting up and down the California coast, often under fake names. He won 23 out of his 25 fights, but got his nose badly broken in one of them, and for the rest of his life had an oddly collapsed profile.
John Huston thought of being a painter. He loved to sketch and paint, and studied for a time at the Art Students League in Los Angeles.
He tried acting at the Provincetown Playhouse. After mastoid surgery, Walter Huston gave him $500 and sent him to Mexico to recover. John had a great time in Mexico, became an equestrian competitor there and an honorary lieutenant in the Mexican cavalry, and vowed never to lose touch with Mexico.
He spent the years 1924 and 1925 largely in the theater world of Greenwich Village, New York. In the late ‘20’s, Huston published two boxing stories in H.L. Mencken’s magazine American Mercury. From 1929–1931, he worked for the newspaper the Graphic but was fired in 1931 for confusing the name of a murderer with the name of his victim.
His first marriage fell apart. He started binge drinking and had two drunken car wrecks. On September 27, 1933, while driving on Sunset Boulevard, he hit and killed an actress and dancer named Tosca Roulien who ran out into the road in front of his car. Huston had to appear before a grand jury and a coroner’s jury but the final decision was that Mrs. Roulien had darted into the road and was reponsible for her own death.
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With the press hounding him about the fatal accident, he moved to Europe and began screenwriting in London, and painting in Paris. Dissatisfied with his paintings, he returned to Hollywood, fascinated by the film medium, believing that film could evoke the human thought process better even than personal letters.
He already had experience acting, drawing and painting; he had great reserves of energy and imagination, and he knew how to motivate people. He was fun to be with; his presence alone suggested adventure. He also had the air of someone important, a man you’d be wise to listen to. He’d directed plays. From 1938–1941, he co-wrote screenplays for first-rate films, including “Jezebel” and “High Sierra” and “Sergeant York.”
After all that training and preparation, in 1941, Huston convinced Jack Warner to let him direct a film for Warner Brothers. He got “The Maltese Falcon,” which was not considered an important property. Films had been made of the Dashiell Hammett book twice before, neither time successfully. This didn’t faze Huston. When Warner Brothers wanted to change the luck by calling this one “The Gent From Frisco,” Huston refused.
He always called casting the crucial part of a film. Huston cast Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, the cynical, hard-boiled, womanizing but ultimately moral private eye. Huston told Mary Astor, playing the femme fatale, to give her lines a hesitant, pleading sound while keeping her eyes cold and candid.
The script kept quite close to the novel, William Wyler went over Huston’s sketches and advised him how to stage the scenes and place the cameras. Warner Brothers gave him the gifted cinematographer Arthur Edeson, who was a year away from filming “Casablanca.” Producer Henry Blanke reminded Huston: ‘There are no minor scenes in a movie. Treat each scene like the crucial scene.’
Huston shot the film in eight weeks for just $300,000. Arthur Edeson skillfully used light, shadow and off-kilter camera angles to convey the seedy world Sam Spade patrolled. The Maltese Falcon became a classic of film noir and a turning point in Humphrey Bogart’s career.
During World War Two, John Huston collected art and directed war documentaries in the Aleutians and in Italy. His 1946 documentary “Let There Be Light” was such a sobering view of traumatized soldiers in a psychiatric hospital that the U.S. military banned it for years.
In the late 1940’s, Huston watched the anti-communists in Congress crank up their witch hunts, and he stood up for free speech. In 1947, he was a founder of the Committee for the First Amendment. He wanted no censorship, no blacklists, and no posturing, meddling Congressmen.
The journalist Lillian Ross saw Huston in this period and was struck by his “deeply creased, leathery face, high cheekbones and slanting reddish-brown eyes.” She noted that he was hearty in manner but had watchful eyes; made a dramatic entrance; was well-known in Hollywood yet somehow mysterious; made even simple statements sound rich with melodrama; and called crime “a left-handed form of human endeavor.” She also noted that Huston was making 4,000 dollars a week — and was often broke.
“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948) was another John Huston film. Bogart played the greedy, two-bit gold prospector Fred C. Dobbs. During the filming of ‘Sierra Madre,’ Huston and Bogart had their only nasty run-in. They were down in Mexico, because Huston loved Mexico and loved to film on location. Bogart, eager to get back to California for a boat race, kept asking Huston when the filming would be done. Finally, Bogart made one crack too many about the length of the shoot, and Huston took Bogart’s nose in his fingers and twisted it.
Lauren Bacall said “John, you’re hurting him!” And Huston said “I meant to.” Sometimes he felt he had to prove that he took no guff from actors, even from ones he liked.
In 1951, he made “The African Queen,” from a James Agee screenplay, with Bogart and Katherine Hepburn co-starring. Hepburn’s disliked John Huston at first. Huston showed up late for meetings, walked and talked slowly, and didn’t seem to know what he wanted. His shambling quality annoyed Hepburn. Huston would have a drink in his hand, tell some long, pointless story, and Kate felt like snapping: “Get on with it!”
She felt Huston was terribly inattentive, that he’d cast her just for her name, face and voice. When she told him she’d heard there were no good rivers in Kenya for shooting a film, Huston said “That’s very interesting, dear,” as if she were foolish and not to be counted on in a pinch — the very opposite of Rosie, the character he’d cast her to play.
But when they started making the picture, Hepburn saw that Huston was much more sure of himself, fascinated by the Victorian clothes the wardrobe department had found for Rosie, the grotesque ladies underwear. Kate admired how smoothly this odd man accepted oddity in others. He had a tremendous intensity and capacity when engaged, and an amazing memory for everything anyone said. Kate thought “Maybe that’s why John Huston gets stinking drunk — to turn off that brain of his, to be able to forget.’
John Huston found time to review and approve some script changes and Huston quickly knew which of Kate’s suggestions were driven by good sense and which by anxiety. Huston, she realized, under all of his hesitations, masculine poses and self-destructive urges, was a genuine intellect. He guffawed and showed off tobacco-stained teeth but he’d read a great deal and it had penetrated.
Hepburn treasured the memory of making “The African Queen,” and talked about it for the rest of her life. She loved to recall a bit of direction John Huston gave her. He said when Rosie was in trouble, she should smile — not a full smile, but a put-on smile, a society smile, the kind you put on when you don’t want the world to see that you’re starting to panic. And the way John Huston said it, and the moment he chose to say it, made her realize how very gifted he was at directing.
When Humphrey Bogart died, Huston gave Bogart a poignant eulogy. He spoke of Bogart’s “sheer, animal courage” in his last days, and remarked that Bogart had been an aggressive pike in the fishpond of Hollywood, keeping the “sluggish carp” engaged, prodding them to do their best work.
Huston was bemused by film censors; he liked to point out that censors can inadvertently improve a scene. In “The Asphalt Jungle,” a corrupt lawyer played by Louis Calhern was supposed to write a brief cogent note to his wife, then kill himself. ‘Oh, no,’ said the censors. ‘In a Hollywood movie, a man in his right mind can’t kill himself.’ So Huston changed it so that Calhern tries several times to write a suicide note, crumples each one up, distraught, then kills himself. The censors were satisfied, and Huston liked the scene better.
Huston starred in the great 1974 Roman Polanski noir “Chinatown,” as Noah Cross, a very rich and evil man. Huston relished playing this monster. Polanski gave him the part without an audition. He’d seen Huston’s broken nose, heard his gravelly voice, and knew Huston would embrace the evil in the character instead of shying away.
At the age of 81, John Huston died suddenly of pneumonia, in August of 1987, in Middletown, Rhode Island, while directing a cameo that would have been part of his son Danny’s film, “Mr. North.”
This quiet film set seemed far too mild a setting for the death of this man who’d drank and gambled, risked drowning, had his face rearranged in a boxing ring, married five times, lived like a lord in Ireland and Mexico, starred as a villain in a great noir film, shot a tiger from the back of an elephant, smoked 20 cigars a day, and directed 40 films, of which at least a quarter became classics.
