Summary

John Marcellus Huston († August 28, 1987 in Middletown, Rhode Island) was a U.S. film director, screenwriter and actor who held Irish citizenship since 1964. Huston, who worked on some of the greatest American film classics in his nearly sixty-year career, became a style-setting filmmaker of American cinema. Among his best-known directorial efforts are the Humphrey Bogart films The Trail of the Hawk, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and African Queen. He is considered by many to be an exemplary director of film noir; "in fact, since D. W. Griffith, there has hardly been a U.S. director who has contributed as much to the invention and renewal of cinema as John Huston."

Childhood and youth

His ancestors are of Scottish and Irish origin. Supposedly, his small birthplace was won by his grandfather in a poker game. His father was the famous character actor Walter Huston, and his mother was Rhea Gore, a sports reporter who roamed the country in search of stories. Walter Huston took his only child to the vaudeville stage at the age of three. After his parents divorced, the boy had to go on tour with his father every six months and accompany his mother on reporting trips, mostly to horse races.

John Huston was a frail and fragile child. Because of heart enlargement and kidney disease, there was not much hope that the boy would reach adulthood. But he recovered when his mother moved with him from Texas to California. He dropped out of school at 14, went to military school for a short time at 15, then became a boxer and won the California amateur lightweight championships - his characteristic depressed nose was a product of that time.

Wandering years

At the age of 18, Huston married Dorothy Harvey. That same year, at the instigation of his father, he made his first appearance as an actor, in an off-Broadway play called The Triumph of the Egg. In 1925, he made his Broadway debut. Huston, however, felt constrained by both his marriage and acting and gave up both. He went to Mexico with the U.S. Army and became an honorary officer in the Mexican Cavalry.

After some time he returned to the USA. His mother pulled strings and Huston was able to work as a reporter in New York. But his stories were adventurously poorly researched, so he was fired. Again and again he sent short stories to various newspapers and magazines. He was hired by Samuel Goldwyn as a screenwriter, wrote dialogue for films by William Wyler and his own first screenplay, Law and Order, which was successfully filmed.

On September 25, 1933, he ran over Brazilian dancer Tosca Roulien on Sunset Boulevard, killing her. His father asked MGM's powerful boss Louis B. Mayer to use his influence with the police, and in fact the promille content of John Huston's blood was not checked. Huston was acquitted of any responsibility. Traumatized, he fled Hollywood and traveled to London and Paris, where he studied painting and drawing; he became homeless there and had to beg for food.

Success in Hollywood

Huston tried to put his life in order. He married a second time, wrote and produced some Broadway plays, played Abraham Lincoln in a theater production (his father had also portrayed the president in a film by D. W. Griffith a few years earlier) and sent Warner Brothers some scripts. They were impressed by his talent and hired Huston to work on prestige projects such as Jezebel - The Wicked Lady (Jezebel), Wuthering Heights (Wuthering Heights), Juarez, Paul Ehrlich - A Life for Research (Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet), Decision in the Sierra (High Sierra) and Sergeant York. Huston received his first two Oscar nominations.

In 1941 he got the chance to make his own film. As a screenwriter and director, he adapted Dashiell Hammett's crime novel The Maltese Falcon for the screen for the third time. The film The Trail of the Falcon was an overwhelming success; it made a star out of Humphrey Bogart and is now considered a prime example of film noir as well as one of the greatest detective films.

Huston's following films were the melodrama I Want to Live My Life (In This Our Life) with Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland and the romantic war film Adventures in Panama (Across the Pacific), which starred three of the stars from his first film, Bogart, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet. During World War II, Huston served as a lieutenant and made a number of documentaries for the U.S. government. These include the controversial film Let There Be Light (1946), which was kept under wraps by the U.S. government because of its disturbingly realistic depiction of the problems of war veterans.

Huston divorced for the second time and married actress Evelyn Keyes, who had a supporting role in Gone With the Wind, but the marriage lasted barely a year. That same year, he staged Jean-Paul Sartre's play Closed Society (Huis clos) on Broadway. The production was a financial failure, but won the New York Drama Critics Award for best foreign language play.

He enjoyed a major success in 1948 with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. This character study about greed for wealth earned Huston two Oscars (director and screenplay) and his father Walter Huston the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. At the beginning of the film, John Huston makes a cameo appearance as a tourist, but he would not be seen as an actor again for another 15 years. The restless Huston now remained faithful to the film business and wrote and directed fundamental works of American film history in the next few years: Gangster in Key Largo (Key Largo), Asphalt Jungle (The Asphalt Jungle), The Red Badge of Courage (The Red Badge of Courage), African Queen, Moulin Rouge and Moby Dick.

Along with William Wyler, Humphrey Bogart, Gene Kelly, Danny Kaye and others, the feisty Democratic Party supporter founded the Committee for the First Amendment in 1947 to fight Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist Un-American Activities Committee. Protesting Hollywood's blacklisting and occupational bans, Huston moved to St. Clerans in Ireland and took Irish citizenship with his fourth wife, ballet dancer Enrica Soma. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1964. Two children were born of the marriage, the future screenwriter and director Tony (* 1950) and the actress Anjelica Huston (* 1951). As an estate owner in Connemara, he was able to live out his Irish roots and family ties. Meanwhile, to finance his expensive lifestyle, he had to continue to accept many filming assignments.

Middle and late years

Huston's films of the 1960s and 1970s were no longer greeted with such unanimous critical acclaim, yet they were mostly box office successes and solidified his reputation as an innovative, often controversial filmmaker. Of particular note are Misfits (The Misfits), Freud, The Night of the Iguana, Fat City, That Was Roy Bean and The Man Who Would Be King.

In 1963, Huston returned to acting with a supporting role in Otto Preminger's epic film Der Kardinal (The Cardinal) and was rewarded with a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. From then on, he kept playing distinctive supporting roles; his best came in Die Bibel (The Bible: In the Beginning...) as Noah and voice of both God the Father and the Serpent in Paradise, as The Lawgiver in Die Schlacht um den Planet der Affen (Battle for the Planet of the Apes). In Roman Polański's Chinatown, Huston played the father Noah Cross, who had an incestuous relationship with his daughter Evelyn Cross Mulwray. The name of the film character is a reference to Huston's role in his own Bible movie.

His wife separated from Huston in 1962, when the son Danny Huston (also a film actor and director) was born to him by an actress. A divorce never took place. Enrica Soma died in a car accident in 1969 and Huston adopted her child from a later union. Huston moved to Mexico in 1972, where he married his fifth wife, Celeste Shane. The marriage was divorced in 1977.

After a series of unsuccessful and artistically disappointing films, Huston ended his life's work with three films that critics unanimously rank among his best:

Huston continued to work on film projects until shortly before his death, despite emphysema (the result of cigarette smoking). Huston filmed successfully in his last years with his daughter Anjelica and his sons Tony and Danny. Anjelica Huston received a supporting actor Oscar for her performance in The Honor of the Prizzis. In the films Mister Corbett's Ghost and Mr. North - Darling of the Gods, the roles were reversed; the director was Danny Huston, the father was an actor.

Clint Eastwood's White Hunter, Black Heart from 1990 was an ambivalent memorial to Huston. Based on a key novel by Peter Viertel, the film depicts the chaotic filming of African Queen. Eastwood played Huston as an egomaniacal character who subordinates film work to elephant hunting.

A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame commemorates John Huston.

Topics

Huston's films almost always center on men in conflict situations; often these heroes succumb or achieve dubious victories. "His protagonists often represent extremes. They are either ignorant, ridiculous, and doomed by their lack of knowledge of themselves, or intelligent, arrogant, but likewise doomed by their lack of knowledge of themselves. Between these extremes is the cool, intelligent protagonist who will sacrifice everything for self-knowledge and independence. Huston's greatest respect is for the man who maintains his dignity despite pain and failure." Even in Huston's first film as director, The Maltese Falcon, private detective Sam Spade solves the case but loses the woman he loves because he feels morally obligated to turn her in to the police as his partner's murderer.

The well-read Huston found such characters in well-known works of world literature, which he brought to the screen without ever creating brittle films that academically retell the original. He shot entertainingly and excitingly, without betraying or distorting the pretensions of the adapted works. In the process, Huston brought originals by such diverse authors as Stephen Crane, Romain Gary, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, Carson McCullers, Herman Melville, Arthur Miller, B. Traven and Tennessee Williams to the screen.

Innovations

With The Track of the Falcon (The Maltese Falcon), Huston established a new genre in American cinema, film noir. A number of essential features of the genre are already developed in this film:

Huston became famous for his no-frills approach to filmmaking. From his first directorial effort, he worked with a meticulously drawn storyboard, using it to precisely determine image composition and camera movements. He shot in actual story order and preferred real locations to create authenticity. Actors were chosen based on whether they were seasoned professionals who had to be given as few cues as possible to minimize reshooting. Huston was known for usually staying under the estimated budget. He produced as finished cut versions as possible in post-production, on the one hand to come close to his ideal of clear, straightforward, realistic storytelling, and on the other hand to make it difficult for studios to re-cut his films after the fact.

With his eight-time cinematographer Oswald Morris, Huston revolutionized the Technicolor process at a time when experimentation was frowned upon and studios were primarily interested in brilliant, radiant colors. Huston gave Morris, who was still completely unknown in Hollywood, a free hand in 1952, and he photographed Moulin Rouge through smoke and colored light, so that the film was reminiscent of the colorfulness of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's posters. At Moby Dick, both went one step further; the film was developed so that its images were reminiscent of old, washed-out 19th-century copperplate engravings.

Controversies

Huston was a contentious man, an often authoritarian director (John Wayne once knocked Huston out of anger at the latter's behavior on the set), and an artist with clear liberal convictions, which he also expressed, without fear of criticism or censorship, in his films. In his film noir Asphalt Jungle (The Asphalt Jungle), he has a policeman say, "Criminals aren't so different from us, crime is just a special form of life's struggle." In the days of Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunt, this was a remarkable sentence.

His realistic, often pessimistic view of the world and human relationships brought him into conflict with the goal of producing good-selling, positive family entertainment that Louis B. Mayer was aiming for. Two of the films on which the two clashed were The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Mayer objected to the death of the main character) and The Red Badge of Courage (Mayer complained that the film lacked a relaxing romantic component). In fact, Huston was always in trouble with his studios, who had some of his films edited after the fact to make them friendlier and more marketable. David O. Selznick even fired John Huston as director of In Another Country (A Farewell to Arms) and replaced him with Charles Vidor.

Huston did not become more conciliatory in his old age: With Wise Blood, Huston delivered a biting satire on religious fundamentalism in his late years. In Prizzi's Honor, he attacked police corruption and links between law enforcement and the Mafia with cynical humor.

Huston was a staunch opponent of war. He said, "If I ever make a movie that glorifies war, I want somebody to shoot me." Already in his U.S. government-ordered documentaries The Battle for San Pietro (San Pietro) and Let There Be Light, he showed the cruelty of war and post-war more realistically than his client would have liked. The US Army refused to show The Battle for San Pietro uncut to its soldiers because it feared for combat morale. The subject matter of post-traumatic stress syndrome of former soldiers in Let There Be Light was such a taboo-breaker that the film was kept under lock and key by the U.S. government for thirty years. Huston's Stephen Crane adaptation The Red Badge of Courage contained such harrowing war scenes that the film was recut by the studio and shortened by 20 minutes.

In films such as The Roots of Heaven, Huston addressed man's problematic interaction with nature long before there was any real environmental discussion; however, he himself was a big-game hunter in Africa. In films such as The Misfits and The Night of the Iguana, he rejected the optimism usually found in the film business and painted a bleak picture of man's claim to omnipotence over nature.

Huston was interested in borderline areas and as a result was one of the first directors in Hollywood to openly address homosexuality in film without condemning it from the outset. In his film Spiegelbild im goldenen Auge (Reflections in a Golden Eye), understanding is aroused for the gay main character, who is tormented by the game of hiding in public.

A one-hour biopic documentary by director Marie Brunet-Debaines, John Huston - Film Artist and Free Spirit, premiered in France in 2021 and was also broadcast in German language version on Arte in the same year.

Sources

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