from The Film Buff’s Calendar: A mere five hundred words are inadequate to describe the spectacular life and career of film director JOHN HUSTON, whose birthday is today. The son of legendary stage actor Walter Huston, he was born in 1906, a sickly child in the classic mold who was treated for heart and kidney problems. His teen years and early manhood often seemed to be an overcompensation for having spent his childhood in bed, Huston undertaking an extended quest to find himself, first as a prize fighter, then a painter, a stint as an actor, a trip to what would become his beloved Mexico, where he was an honorary army cavalryman, before finally settling on the profession of writer. Throughout the 1930s, Huston vacillated between screenwriting in Hollywood and literary pursuits, publishing short stories and essays in magazines such as H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury. Both his continual search for meaning and his background in literature would become defining elements of his 46 years as a filmmaker. He’d already worked on some of the best scripts of the 30s when Warner Brothers gave him the chance to direct, in part to keep him on their writing staff. He chose to adapt Dashiell Hammett’s seminal thriller “The Maltese Falcon” (1941), which had already been made by the studio twice in ten years, with only modest success. But Huston’s approach was to respect the source material, rarely common practice in the film industry, often lifting Hammett’s dialogue word for word. The result was a smash hit, one of the great directing debuts in film history (in the same year as “Citizen Kane,” no less), and the film that finally catapulted Huston’s friend Humphrey Bogart to stardom. His movies were nearly always literary adaptations that followed their sources closely, and all involved a variation on the eternal quest narrative, dissecting human nature through a vain search for wealth, or for spiritual/intellectual enlightenment. Among the best: “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948), “The Asphalt Jungle” (1950), “The African Queen” (1951), “Moulin Rouge” (1952, a biopic about Toulouse-Lautrec), “Moby Dick” (1956), “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison” (1957), “The Night of the Iguana” (1964), “Fat City” (1972), “The Man Who Would Be King” (1975), ”Wise Blood” (1979), and his final film, “The Dead” (1987), based on James Joyce’s celebrated short story. He also had a second career as an actor in his later years, giving some marvelous character performances, most especially as Noah Cross, the embodiment of human evil in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (1974). A beloved, Hemingwayesque figure in Hollywood, Huston continued to experiment with the adventurer’s existence throughout his life, traveling the world big game hunting, and marrying five times while he was at it. He received 15 Oscar nominations over the course of his career, winning two for writing and directing “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” and he’s the only person to direct a family member to an Oscar win, which he did twice: his father Walter (for “Treasure”) and his daughter Anjelica, thirty-seven years later, for the satirical mob drama “Prizzi’s Honor” (1985). He published an autobiography in 1980 called “An Open Book.” Son Danny is an accomplished character actor, as is grandson Jack Huston, who is superb as the damaged war veteran Richard Harrow on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire.” [The great Walter Huston in his son’s masterpiece, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”: movieclips/9Qdxp-the-treasure-of-the-sierra-madre-movie-dumber-than-the-dumbest-jackass/]
Posted on: Mon, 05 Aug 2013 11:42:37 +0000
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