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Saturday Evening Movie Thread 10/07/2023 [TheJamesMadison]

John Huston

I found John Huston's filmography to be really frustrating. Don't get me wrong, he made some classics, but he also made more than his fair share of duds. However, what frustrated me most was this collection of perfectly fine, okay movies that could have used just a bit more in a rewrite to elevate them into something special. I felt this acutely because I had recently finished watching the work of William Wyler, and Wyler never fell into that.

I bring up Wyler because Huston actually started his filmmaking career under Wyler writing two of his early sound films (The Storm and A House Divided, which starred Huston's father Walter), and he also wrote Jezebel, the film on which Huston received his first directing work, directing the second-unit and filming the duel sequence. Huston essentially mentored under Wyler, and you can see that obviously through the visual compositions early in his career where his mimicry of Wyler's complex blocking is evident and obvious, even on a small set like Sam Spade's apartment in The Maltese Falcon.

And for about a decade, Huston seemed to be on a similar path to Wyler: making his own movies within the studio system and saying what he wanted to say. That peaked with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a movie for Warner Brothers that went wildly overbudget, made little money, and won Walter Huston his supporting acting Oscar at the Academy Awards. There was something about Huston that seemed to have great promise, but two experiences seem to have ended up breaking that side of him that pushed films to their utmost: The Red Badge of Courage and Beat the Devil.

For a detailed description of everything that went wrong with The Red Badge of Courage, I highly recommend Lillian Ross's journalistic document of a book on the production, editing, and drama around the re-edits (that Huston largely skipped out of), Picture, but I think that ultimate failure was something that Huston was able to brush off for a time. It was his effort to recreate the success of The African Queen with Beat the Devil, both Humphrey Bogart starring adventure stories, and that failure caused a real change in him. It was like he saw no point in trying to push things as far as he could as an artist. It became just about getting he wanted from the experience of any one production.

Whole Effort

That's not to say that everything he made after Beat the Devil is bad, or anything. A lot of it is perfectly fine, but the fire seemed to be out of him. The final blow must have been the forced casting of Gregory Peck in Moby Dick, a choice he objected to but which was the only way he could get funding for the film. Why bother? seemed to become his modus operandi, and he started a series of films where it really felt like he was taking them because of the combination of exotic locations and movie stars signed on. Like, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, filmed in Trinidad and starring Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum (a good little film, if I do say so myself), or The Barbarian and the Geisha, filmed in Japan and starring John Wayne (they reportedly got into a fist fight that Wayne won, and the movie's kind of blandly unbelievable), or The Roots of Heaven starring Trevor Howard and filmed in Africa (it's a bad film and Huston himself said that it was evidence that bad shoots make bad pictures).

Was there nothing to these films that attracted him to them beyond the filming location and stars? I don't think so. We'll get to his thematic focus later, but there is a throughline in his work that is evident in most of his films, even those he's obviously just showing up to set and pointing the camera for. However, the lack of effort is so obvious that, contemporaneously, the film critic for The New York Times, Vincent Canby, coined the term the "tired period" to refer to Huston's output from roughly 1958 to 1972 (I'd classify Fat City as being part of the period, but most people seem to agree that that's outside of it and marks its ending).

It becomes amazingly obvious that Huston had simply given up on making cinematic art with The Misfits. I don't say that because I dislike the film (I like it quite a bit), but the effort and care in the narrative, from a script by Arthur Miller he was writing while divorcing Marilyn Monroe, who stars in the film, is so evident in The Misfits but so completely absent from the previous few films (as well as the proceeding next couple). Huston was becoming that kind of film director who was no better than the scripts he worked on (scripts he stopped actually writing in 1957 with Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison and wouldn't do again until he adapted Tennessee Williams on The Night of the Iguana in 1964 and then not again until The Kremlin Letter in 1970), and that's a real change from the guy who wrote and directed The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Key Largo. He really did seem to be disengaging.

I don't think he really reengaged on a complete level until 1975 with his long awaited adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King, a film he obviously had more love and joy in the making of than any other film in more than two decades. His final years are more of a return to his form of effectively filming the script he's given leading to handsome productions adapting Flannery O'Connor or a Broadway musical or James Joyce. Some are better than others (one is great), but that disconnect reasserts itself and only goes away until his final film, The Dead.

More


Okay, I've complained enough. Let's talk about what John Huston was trying to say as an artist.

John Huston had one big theme that runs through most of his films, and it's men who want more than what the world can give them. Huston was an atheist with large appetites, and many of his characters, especially in films he wrote but evident in most everything else, look out into the world and try to feed an emptiness in their soul by trying to claim as much of it as they can. There's Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre who would have been a rich man if he had left that gold mine a week earlier, but he couldn't say no to more gold. There's Peachy and Daniel in The Man Who Would Be King feeling like they're being stifled in India, so they go off to become kings of Kafiristan with Daniel deciding that king isn't enough, he must become a god. There's Ahab in Moby Dick deciding that revenge against a dumb beast is his obsession and must drive men to do his bidding to kill the white whale when he could have been happy with great harvests of whale oil. There's Davey in Sinful Davey who must become as great an outlaw as his purported father, no matter the cost or how much he acquires for himself (he's delightfully inept, and I didn't hate the movie). There's the pair of lovers in war-torn 13th century France in A Walk with Love and Death who, in the face of privation and death, need to fill each other's souls with themselves, finding the worldly answers not good enough. There's Hazel Motes in Wise Blood who sees the hypocrisy of someone like the blind preacher Asa Hawks, viewing the emptiness of the Jesus that the preach and don't seem to believe, but trying to create a new Church without Jesus, eventually blinding himself and embracing some kind of Southern Gothic sainthood to assuage his soul.

I can point out more examples, but the emptiness of the world and man's yearning for more is prevalent throughout his work. Early there are examples of those men who can find the right balance of materialism with their souls (Walter Huston's character in Sierra Madre feels like a stand in for John since he finds that perfect balance with women and is so happy), but they kind of fade away as Huston got older. He seemed like a man searching for meaning in a world without God and never really finding it. The Dead, the adaptation of James Joyce's story from his collection Dubliners, is a remarkably apt endpoint for Huston's output because it is one final search for meaning from a man displaced from his time and country in the face of death and change.

Frustrations


I think it's evident why I start my post about Huston with my frustrations: there was a lot to dig into his work, and yet he just didn't commit for long stretches of his career. Scripts that just needed one more rewrite to get them from okay to good or from good but shaky to really good never got that attention. Huston, after the collapse of the studio system, largely worked with independent producers, and he was seemingly brought on because of his strong technical skills, ability to command a film set, and name. He knew he was working on limited time and money, so he took his job of director from a narrow point of view, filmed what he had, and moved on to the next project.

Take The Bible: In the Beginning... as an example. Everything up to the telling of the story of Abraham is really quite good, but the Abraham story is told with such a literal mind that it just lurches from one event to the next chronologically without any real effort to make the story overall compelling. Or The Unforgiven about adult adopted siblings who fall in love but can't admit it because she's actually Indian and he's white, except that the consistency of anyone caring about people being Indian or not is not there at all, making it more confusing than compelling, while the finale is about killing dozens of people to prevent her from doing what she thinks is right. Or The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean that takes a strong script by John Milius and then adds in a host of sillier elements because Huston and Paul Newman were just having a great time on set. Huston seemed to just get lost while in production, either mindlessly filming the script or going off on tangents during production that ultimately undermined the film overall.

He also had this tendency to simply abandon projects during post-production when things got rough. The most famous example is the aforementioned The Red Badge of Courage, but there are documented examples from The Barbarian and the Geisha and Sinful Davey (I assume there are others where the stories just never got out) where Huston simply bugged out after test screenings went poorly and either the studio (Fox in the former) or independent producer (Walter Mirisch in the latter) wanted cuts, Huston refused to make the cuts, and then he just left so that the cuts got made without his input. His job was done. He delivered what was promised, and he was off to do something else. He wasn't interested in preserving his work, and that leads to a frustrating experience where we have documented evidence that William Wyler saw the first cut of The Red Badge of Courage and he called it one of the best films ever made, and that cut is simply lost now. It'll never get found, and all we have is this cut up monster to know it by.

Some Recommendations


I wouldn't go so far as to say that John Huston's filmography is as rich or deep as William Wyler's, but I do think that Huston made some hidden little gems that have been largely forgotten. Few of them are great, but they're mostly good little films that are worthy some discovery.

I want to start with The Bible: In the Beginning..., a Dino de Laurentiis production that Huston took over after the original director, Robert Bresson, asked for the entire holdings of the Rome Zoo and filmed only their footsteps on a beach. He was very much a director for hire, and I don't think the whole thing is great (the stuff around Abraham is so stuffed with detail and laid out so uncinematically and undramatically that I just found it kind of dull), but the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, and, especially, the story of Cain and Abel are capably reproduced and sometimes quite beautiful.

In This Our Life is an interesting little Southern set story of a family that kind of hates each other starring Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland. It's a lesser version of The Little Foxes, but that's not to say that it is without its charms.

Wise Blood is the adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's first novel, and while it can't replicate the wit in her descriptions, it does have a strong core in Brad Dourif's central performance as Hazel Motes, helped by Huston's keen eye and the protection of the Fitzgerald family (Sally, O'Connor's literary executor after her death, and her two sons Michael and Benedict who co-wrote and produced the film), eyeing to keep Huston true to O'Connor's point, create this wonderfully weird little portrait of religion and sainthood in the Deep South.

And finally, The Dead, that Joyce adaptation. It's a quiet, small film with a strong cast in a handful of sets playing out over one evening at a dinner party, and working from the script by his son Tony, he captures Dublin in 1904, a man at war with his own past and his own country, and the conflict in the Irish character in ways that honors the Joyce original as well as being touching in its own right.

There are others that I feel just miss the mark (Sinful Davey really does feel like it's in need of a wider reappraisal), and that does heavily color my viewing of Huston as a whole. Still, he provided some wonderful entertainments when he was firing on all cylinders. His highs were very high, but he had his seriously low lows and a lot of milquetoasty middles.

He was...frustrating.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

The Exorcist: Believer

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Sinful Davey (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "I still wouldn't go so far as to call it good, but for 90-minutes, it lightly entertained me even if I felt like it could have been more. More insightful, funnier, or more touching, but the package as it stands now is amusing and undemanding. That's alright sometimes." [Library]

The Kremlin Letter (Rating 0.5/4) Full Review "Huston was simply out of his depth here. He had no idea how to make a thriller, and it showed." [Library]

Fat City (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Still, Huston comes out with a solidly good dual character study, and it works. There's still no real fire to Huston's filmmaking like he had in the beginning of his career, but the benefits of being a solid technician comes through here." [Library]

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "The irony is, I think, that Huston really, really tried with this. The filmmaking is more interesting than it has been since, probably, Freud: The Secret Passion ten years prior, and it really feels like Huston put himself more into this film than in anything else he had made in a decade. He also lost himself in the fun of having one of the biggest movie stars in the world and a bear on set, and he let that come through on the final film." [Library]

The Man Who Would Be King (Rating 4/4) Full Review "This is the John Huston movie I've been waiting for and wanted for the past nearly two decades of his output. I know he won't match it again, but it's nice to see him finding that right groove one more time." [Personal Collection]

Wise Blood (Rating 3/4) Full Review "That combination of Huston's technical skill, finding the right actors and letting them go, and the focused eye of the writers on set created this fascinating little film adapting O'Connor's prose into cinematic language." [The Criterion Channel]

Annie (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "However, it's handsomely produced and the songs are fun. I wouldn't go so far as to call it good, but it's pretty solid, almost enough." [Personal Collection]

The Dead (Rating 4/4) Full Review "The Dead is a touching film, a quiet exploration of a country at a crossroads, the individuals that make up the country, and those disconnected from it despite living right there. It's also one of Huston's best films." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 10/28, and it will talk about the Friday the 13th franchise.