The American Spectator

At Large

John Huston at 100

By Bill Croke on 8.15.06 @ 12:06AM

(Page 2 of 2)

When the movie premiered, most critics found Moby Dick too "literary" and "intellectual," ironic commentary considering that upon publication, Melville's great novel had failed commercially, and marked the beginning of a heartbreaking decline. Like The Red Badge of Courage before it, Moby Dick fared poorly at the box office, and for Huston inaugurated a twenty year period of mostly mediocre directorial efforts.

But for two worthy films, The Misfits (1961) and The Night of the Iguana (1964) -- the 1960s through the early '70s were a fallow period for John Huston the director. He put out a few turkeys, including The List of Adrian Messenger (1963) and The Bible (1966), the latter causing one waggish reviewer to recommend the book over the movie. Trying to put these setbacks behind him, John Huston the actor turned in noteworthy performances in The Cardinal (1963), Man in the Wilderness (1971), Chinatown (1974), and The Wind and the Lion (1975), in which he played Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of State, John Hay.

HUSTON THE DIRECTOR REGAINED his balance and in 1975 tackled Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King, the great Victorian's adventure novella about two retired British soldiers -- Daniel Dravot (Sean Connery) and Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine) -- who try to use their military expertise ("It's detriments like us that built this bloody empire") to subvert a remote Afghan mountain kingdom and steal its vast royal treasure. Because Dravot wears the symbol of the Masons around his neck, the locals believe him to be the divine reincarnation of Alexander the Great, who had conquered the region in antiquity. This masquerade is foiled when Dravot is accidentally cut and bleeds, thus casting doubt on his divinity, and leading to his death and Peachy's torture and exile. Huston was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay, and though the picture garnered none at all, The Man Who Would Be King restored his languishing reputation as a director. It is interesting to note that Huston first contemplated the Kipling classic over twenty years earlier, envisioning the roles of Danny and Peachy as played by Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart.

Flannery O'Connor's work has never translated well to the big screen, but that didn't stop Huston from doing her novel Wise Blood in 1980 . The dark Southern comedy starred Ned Beatty as the grotesque Reverend Hazel Motes of the "Church of Christ without Christ." And later Huston was as daring a filmmaker as to take on Malcolm Lowry's difficult 1947 novel Under the Volcano (1984), the stream-of-consciousness story of the last day (November 2, 1938 -- the Mexican Day of the Dead) in the life of an alcoholic living in Mexico on the eve of World War II. Geoffrey Firmin (Albert Finney) is the washed-up British ex-Consul of Cuernavaca. His estranged wife Yvonne (Jacqueline Bisset) returns to Mexico accompanied by Geoffrey's younger brother Hugh (Anthony Andrews), who is in love with Yvonne. Huston dropped Lowry's intricate Joycean-like narrative to tell the story straight, albeit retaining much of the novel's more subjectively terrifying Lost Weekend-type aspects. Under the Volcano may have been Huston's most brilliant failure, but you have to applaud him for trying

The director next returned to film noir -- though in a lighthearted way -- with Prizzi's Honor (1985). The adaptation of Richard Condon's lively novel of New York mobsters starred Jack Nicholson as Charlie Partanna and Kathleen Turner as Irene Walker, contract killers and lovers who, through amusing twists of plot find that they have contracts on each other. Angelica Huston (as Maerose Prizzi, who lusts after Charlie) won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. John Huston is the only director in Hollywood history to have directed both his father and his daughter in Oscar-winning roles.

Huston's love of all things Irish (he became an Irish citizen in 1964) is reflected in his final film, The Dead (1987). James Joyce's best short story (from Dubliners) was the germ of his masterpiece Ulysses, and was for Huston a project he had contemplated for years. The story -- set in Dublin on a snowy night in 1904 -- examines the marriage of Greta and Gabriel Conroy, and how Greta (Angelica Huston) secretly longs for her dead lover Michael Furey. It is admirable as a period piece, perfectly evoking fin de siecle Ireland with nothing more than a softly-lit dinner party around a large table in an elegant Georgian home, the apotheosis of the Irish bourgeoisie.

The irony of The Dead for John Huston was his own upcoming mortality. He directed the picture in a wheelchair while hooked up to an oxygen tank to relieve the emphysema that was slowly killing him after a lifetime of cigarettes and cigars. A sad ending, and yet a life-affirming one for a man who worked joyfully to the end, and who lived up to a description of him once offered by a friend: "John was parade all by himself."

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