John Huston: Essays on a Restless Director

233 Pages·2010·0.94 MB·English

by  Tony Tracy

JOHN HUSTON

J H
OHN USTON
Essays on a Restless Director
Edited by TONY TRACY
and RODDY FLYNN
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
Frontispiece: John Huston at home in St. Clerans, County
Galway, Ireland, in 1970 (photograph by Joe Dillon)
Acknowledgments: The editors gratefully acknowledge the
support of Rod Stoneman (Director, Huston School of Film &
Digital Media, JUI Galway) in the realization of this project
(and the conference from which it grew) and the kindness of
Maura Dillon in providing previously unpublished photographs
of John Huston taken by her late husband Joe. We are also
grateful for the generosity of the contributors and interviewees.
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
John Huston : essays on a restless director / edited by Tony Tracy
and Roddy Flynn.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-5853-0
softcover : 50# alkaline paper
¡. Huston, John, 1906–1987—Criticism and interpretation.
I. Tracy, Tony. II. Flynn, Roddy.
PN1998.3.H87J655 2010
791.4302'33092—dc22 2010010357
British Library cataloguing data are available
©2010 Tony Tracy and Roddy Flynn. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, i ncluding photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without p ermission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover: John Huston, ¡964 (MGM/Photofest);
background ©20¡0 Shutterstock
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640
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Table of Contents
Introduction
TONY TRACY and RODDY FLYNN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
“Let’s Just See If It Matters”: An Interview with Anjelica Huston
TONY TRACY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Strange but Close Partners: Huston, Romantic Comedy
and The African Queen
PABLO ECHART. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
The Ideological Adventure of The Man Who Would Be King
JULIE F. CODELL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
The Way We Were and White Hunter, Black Heart: Huston in
Fiction and Reel Life
PATRICK MCGILLIGAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Huston’s Mexico
RICHARD VELA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
The Discreet Charm of Huston and Buñuel: Notes on a
Cinematic Odd Couple
NEIL SINYARD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Huston and the American South: The Night of the Iguana
and Wise Blood
GARY D. RHODES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Re-V isioning the Western: Landscape and Gender in The Misfits
GEORGIANA BANITA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
Ethical Commitment and Political Dissidence: Huston, HUAC,
Hollywood and Key Largo
REYNOLD HUMPHRIES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
King Adapter: Huston’s Famous and Infamous Adaptations
of Literary Classics
PAGE LAWS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
v
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Melodramatic Conscience of In This Our Life
VICTORIA AMADOR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
The Irish Accent of The Dead
MICHAEL PATRICK GILLESPIE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
A Walk with Love and Death: From the Jacquerie of 1358 to
the Turbulence of 1968
PETER G. CHRISTENSEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
The Western, The Westerner, The Westernest: William Wyler,
Menippean Satire and John Huston’s The Life and Times of
Judge Roy Bean
LESLEY BRILL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
John Huston and an Irish Film Industry
RODDY FLYNN and DIOG O’CONNELL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Recollections of Huston: A Conversation with
Wieland Schulz- Keil
TONY TRACY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
About the Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Introduction
TONY TRACY and RODDY FLYNN
“A picture is made. You put a frame around it
and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it.”
When John Marcellus Huston died in August 1987 at the age of 81, the
obituaries focused as much on the man as on his films. His H emingway-e sque
existence offered plenty of colourful material for journalists: he had been a
noted boxer, trained as a painter and received a commission in the Mexican
cavalry. He had married five times, enjoyed numerous liaisons, raised four
children and adopted a fifth. Several of those children followed him into a
career in cinema, as Huston himself had followed his own father.
Yet if, more than 100 years after his birth and 20 years after his death,
John Huston remains an enigmatic and compelling figure, it is primarily
because of his cinematic legacy, first as a writer, occasionally as an actor but,
in the main, as a director. His output in this last role offers students of cin-
ema endless scope for exploration not least because his career spanned virtu-
ally every conceivable genre: his early noirs, gangster films and melodramas
were followed not just by westerns, spy thrillers, screwball comedies and period
films but also musicals, epics, horror films and even one (perhaps best for-
gotten) sports film. This diversity was possible because Huston was too rest-
less to fully commit to the studio game—famously describing Hollywood as
“a cage”—and his lengthy self-imposed exiles in Ireland and Mexico were
strategies for maintaining a deliberate distance from the orthodoxies of mind
and action in a company town. This distance probably harmed him profes-
sionally and perhaps critically in the short term but it also ensured a longer
career than many of his peers and left us with a number of l ate-c areer gems
in films like Fat City (1972), Prizzi’s Honor(1985) and The Dead (1987). How-
ever, this widely noted variety—from his early work as a contract writer for
Warners through his genre films for the studios to his late “small” films—also
presents an audacious challenge to those who, in thrall to auteurism and its
privileging of personal patterns, seek to identify thematic or stylistic consis-
1
2 INTRODUCTION
tencies over nearly half a century of filmmaking. Huston himself repeatedly
repudiated such intertextual inclinations. Elsewhere he commented:
It’s a curious thing that so many people ascribe to me a distinct style. Believe
me I am not conscious of any such thing ... I do not think any filmmaker
should—though many do—consciously strive to maintain a permanent style
in all his films [Laurot 1956: 17].
Indeed, at the moment when auteurism began to circulate as a critical con-
cept in the mid–1950s, he dismissed the idea of a “personal, permanent style”
as too limiting: “This could only be possible if [a director] made the same
picture over and over again” (17). Thirty years after that comment he was still
breaking new artistic ground.
Nevertheless there persists a strong urge to understand Huston’s films
collectively; to interpret them as an oeuvre. Andrew Sarris’ famously caustic
description of him as “coasting on his reputation as a wronged individualist
with an alibi for every bad movie” was surely less a dismissal of his talents
than frustration that such a talented figure had not produced a more sus-
tained, coherent body of work from which an auteurist critic could map a
larger underlying purpose. Arguably this desire owed as much to the person-
ality of the man as his films. By the time of his death Huston’s public per-
sona and reputation was, among filmmakers of his generation, rivaled only
by Orson Welles (they died within two years of one another). Like Welles,
this knowledge about him, from frequent TV appearances and intermittent
film roles, was mostly gleaned from Huston’s status as a public figure; a dimen-
sion obliquely referred to in Daniel Day Lewis’ performance in There Will Be
Blood (2008) which, in its blending of a Hustonesque caricature and the Rose-
bud theme of corrupted innocence, interpolated these n ear-m ystical figures
of American cinema. (They were linked professionally, too, through Huston’s
role in Welles’ film maudit, The Other Side of the Wind, and inversely by
Welles’ role in Moby Dick.) Unsurprisingly, critics have been drawn to spec-
ulate whether such largeness of personality gave rise to an equal largeness of
purpose.
Geoff Andrews has suggested that because Huston “favoured working
from literary sources, [he] seldom made films that seemed at all personal ...
often he seemed content to shoot character actors in exotic locations, unsure
as to the thematic substance, weight or tone of his material” (Andrews 1999:
99). At face value it’s a criticism worthy of reflection and its attention to Hus-
ton’s reliance on adaptations seems to have merit. It may be true that Hus-
ton does not have as distinctive an auteurial voice as, say Hitchcock or Ford
(who described him in less polite terms as a “phony”), but what fundamen-
tally fascinated Huston was not movies per se—that is, form—but the human
Introduction (TRACY and FLYNN) 3
condition; a subject as quixotic, unpredictable and varied as his films. And
literature offered a road map for exploring that condition. When he encoun-
tered James Joyce’s Ulysses at the age of 21 he later said: “After reading it,
doors fell open” (Grobel 1989: 121). While his filmography includes such pulp
adaptations as The Mackintosh Man (1973), he frequently took on canonical
texts which undertook profoundly complex explorations of the nature of the
human species: Moby Dick (1956), Wise Blood (1979), The Dead and even,
most audaciously, The Bible (1966). Contrary to Andrews’ assertion, he worked
towards an exploration of the human predicament from an intensely personal,
if nonetheless multifaceted, perspective.
It is never less than remarkable to reflect on the longevity of Huston’s
career, to remember that he directed films which stand with the best of them
in each decade from the 1940s to the 1980s. But the length of his working
life also reminds us that he was a resolutely t wentieth-c entury figure and his
films reflect the philosophical and intellectual currents of that extraordinary
period of transformation. What ties the best of his disparate oeuvre as direc-
tor together—from Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(1948), The Misfits (1961), Freud (1962), The Man Who Would be King (1975),
Fat City, The Dead—is not simply genre or Hollywood history or particular
actors or styles—although all are important tools of analysis. His films stretch
the limits of definition because they almost always—in ways obvious and
opaque—engage with the big themes of that fractious century: faith, mean-
ing, truth, freedom, psychology, colonialism, war and capitalism. This inter-
est in the grand narratives of his era relates back to his attempt to understand
the human condition via the persistent respect for, and interest in, the indi-
vidual which his films evince; a theme which links his unassailable and essen-
tial A merican-n ess with his interest in older cultures. (He was a noted collector
of pre–Columbian art, for example.) It is the dialectic of the modern indi-
vidual and human nature that engages Huston, centering on a wry and inher-
ently existential view of freedom and its limitations. If there is an emblematic
Huston film, it might not be the better- known Bogart films or Asphalt Jun-
gle but Freud: The Secret Passion. Co- written—at least initially—with the
existentialist philosopher J ean-P aul Sartre, Freud concerns the early expedi-
tions of the Viennese adventurer of the mind who sought to explain the human
condition as a dark and barely understood tension between forces known and
repressed. For Freud, as for Huston, the dictate of the ancients to know thy-
self was as imperative as it was foolhardy. Analysis is not a matter of resolv-
ing the conscious and unconscious but bringing them more clearly into the
light. Huston revelled in that contradiction but was never dismayed by it.
In the essays that follow we find critical analysis which points up this