John
Huston’s “Beat the Devil,” the Humphrey Bogart vehicle once advertised as a
decade ahead of its time, is now an official senior citizen, having opened in
New York 65 years ago this month.
One of
the first Hollywood productions to be hailed as a cult film, this parodic
thriller about a bumbling scheme to loot Africa’s uranium mines was an outlier
in the successful Huston-Bogart collaborations. With Huston directing from a
script doctored by Truman Capote, the film was initially promoted as a romantic
adventure in the tradition of “Casablanca.” On its release in 1954, however,
“Beat the Devil” baffled audiences, who didn’t get the in-jokes and plot twists
and turns.
Bogart
stars as a middle-aged fixer hired by a ragtag group of crooks who become entangled
with a seemingly innocent British couple (Jennifer Jones and Edward Underdown).
Given the movie’s shaggy-dog quest, Huston evidently imagined “Beat the Devil”
as another “Maltese Falcon,” his first film, even casting Peter Lorre, a
featured player in “Maltese Falcon,” for good luck, with the portly Robert
Morley standing in for Sydney Greenstreet, a seeker of the falcon. Visiting the
town of Ravello on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, where “Beat the Devil” was being
filmed, a New York Times reporter noted that Huston was harking back to another
one of his Bogart triumphs, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
The gale
of laughter that ends “Beat the Devil” does recall “Sierra Madre,” but this
time the joke was on Huston. “A potential treat emerged as a wet firecracker in
some sixty-eight neighborhood theaters yesterday where United Artists unveiled
its singularly unorthodox ‘Beat the Devil,’” the Times review said, comparing
the movie unfavorably to its source, a potboiler of a novel pseudonymously
written by the left-wing journalist Claud Cockburn.
Huston,
a friend of Cockburn’s, prodded Bogart to buy the rights and put money into the
film. Vexing the Production Code censors with its relaxed take on criminal
behavior and tolerance of spouse-swapping, the movie played down the novel’s
anti-imperialist bent but maintained its worldly attitude — something for which
Capote took credit.
Jones
was cast as Bogart’s dizzy adulterous love interest. Consequently, the
actress’s real-life husband, the powerful producer David O. Selznick, watched
over the film, bringing on Capote, who had recently worked on a Selznick
production, to fix the script. Although the late scenes set in North Africa are
likely Capote’s doing, his influence has been exaggerated. Many of the movie’s most
memorable dialogue involving Bogart’s cutting witticisms and Jones’s contrived
innocence can be found in Cockburn’s novel.
“Beat
the Devil” is a film whose supposed shortcomings are actually its appealing
qualities. Introduced wearing a floridly patterned robe with matching ascot,
Bogart is less formidable than the tough guys he played in the 1940s,
marginalized by a colorful parade of character actors including the
unexpectedly droll Gina Lollobrigida, appearing in her first major
English-language film.
Thanks
to Bogart’s perplexed underplaying and the anticlimactic ending, “Beat the
Devil” was misunderstood in much the way that Elaine May’s not dissimilar
anti-thriller “Ishtar” would be in 1987. Overshadowed by its much-mythologized
back story — Capote and Huston claimed that the movie was more-or-less made up
as they went along — the project lived in infamy. “Bogie sent me a copy of an
advertisement an exhibitor had taken out in a newspaper saying this was the
worst picture he had ever had in his theater,” Huston would recall. “Beat the
Devil” disappeared from view, a notorious flop that rarely, if ever, was shown
on television. Then in February 1964, it reopened in a Greenwich Village movie
house and proved so successful that it enjoyed an uptown move-over and revival
showings in other cities.
“The
film that was ten years ahead of its time is ten years old … (It’s time!),” a
newspaper ad proclaimed. Yet “Beat the Devil” was very much of its time — not
just because it was a star vehicle produced by the star rather than by a
studio.
For one
thing, the movie was released during a thaw in the Cold War, among a flurry of
films that made light of international tensions. For another, it rode the wave
of a growing popularity of Italian movies. Besides Lollobrigida, who was
praised by Bogart as a woman who “makes Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley
Temple,” the cast included Italian character actors. (Indeed, the mood
anticipated Italian comedies like Mario Monicelli’s “Big Deal on Madonna
Street.”) The Times’s on-set report notes the proximity of Roberto Rossellini’s
current production, “Voyage to Italy.” In his account of “Beat the Devil,”
Huston credits himself with Rossellini’s strategy of giving his actors their
lines moments before a scene was shot.
What had
changed? The Bogart cult that began in Cambridge, Mass., in the late 1950s had
gained traction. (Peter Bogdanovich published his report “Bogie in Excelsis” in
the September 1964 issue of Esquire.) “Sick comedy” and “black humor” entered
the mainstream. James Bond’s gleeful irreverence took hold; “Dr. Strangelove”
opened less than a month before “Beat the Devil” was reissued. The ’60s were
underway! “Camp” was a buzz word, although Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,”
which appeared in the fall of 1964, slagged “Beat the Devil” as a movie so
desperate to be campy that it was “continually losing the beat.”
In the
mid-1970s, around the time the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” cult was attracting
attention, Huston gave an interview maintaining that people had seen “Beat the
Devil” multiple times, knew the dialogue by heart and would recite the lines
along with the actors. I find that hard to imagine — but no more so than that
critics and audiences in 1954 failed to appreciate “Beat the Devil” for the
charming jape that is.
‘Beat
the Devil,’ the Bogart Flop That Spawned a Cult. By J. Hoberman. The New York Times, March 29, 2019.
Imagine
you are a renowned Hollywood director, around 37-years-old, famous for your
hard-edged, economical but stunning, cinematography. You’ve had a string of
hits. Yeah, you’ve had some misses too, but your reputation is solid. You’re
that rare combination of insider success and outsider sensibility. You have a
painterly eye and a fondness for ne’er-do-wells that somehow play very well on
the silver screen. Your films have wit but they are not humorous. Fed up with
the political climate of the early '50s United States, you exiled yourself to
Ireland and now find yourself in Italy with a stellar cast for a new film but a
rather unsatisfactory script. Perhaps part of the problem is that it's a bit
too much like things you’ve already done. But what can you do?
Now
imagine you are a young hotshot novelist, around 28-years-old, and you have
already been lauded as the “hope of modern literature” by no less a luminary
than Somerset Maugham. Your writing has a lyrical quality that's bitingly
undercut by a sort of incisive charm. You have just finished your second novel,
the successor to the runaway hit that was your first. You were living in Italy,
sent the manuscript to your publisher, and then headed to Rome for a visit. For
a brief moment, you found yourself at loose ends.
Now
imagine you are a celebrated Hollywood actor, around 54-years-old, seemingly
past your prime as a leading man and yet you still manage to have success after
success at the box office. In fact, you are an icon in your own time. You are
booked to work with a director whom you trust implicitly. After all, you were
primarily a B-movie actor before he came along and he has delivered unto you
four solid hits, including two of the films that have made you one of cinema’s
most recognizable stars. You believe in him so much that you are not only
starring in his film -- you are also backing it financially.
The
director was John Huston, the writer Truman Capote, and the actor Humphrey
Bogart. These three men came together for one of the most bizarre films in
Huston’s or Bogart’s output: Beat the Devil (1953). It's based on the novel of
the same name by the British journalist Claud Cockburn, under the pseudonym
James Helvick. The novel was ripe for a film noir treatment and that's just
what the original screenwriters Peter Viertel and Tony Veiller (both
accomplished artists) were preparing. They never met with Huston’s approval,
however, and so they quit.
Huston
had the cast, including Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Jennifer Jones, Peter Lorre,
and Robert Morley, but he had no workable script. So he approached Capote who
agreed to write the new script on the fly. Not wanting to cause the cast to
lose confidence, Huston never told the actors (aside from Bogart, who was,
remember, helping to fund the project) that Capote was basically improvising
the scenes from day to day. He devised a number of strategies to delay
production to give Capote time to write; for example, he insisted on rather
complicated camera set-ups that required hours of preparation, anything to
vouchsafe Capote just a few more moments to consult with his ragamuffin muse.
Beyond
that, the film was beset by setbacks, accidents, and the unforeseen. As was
typical of a Huston production, the cast and crew partied regularly; drinking,
gambling, and carousing were the order of the day -- for most days. Other
luminaries, not involved in the film at all (such as Orson Welles and Ingrid
Bergman), randomly appeared to partake in all the fun.
One
night Huston took his drink outside to go for a late-night jaunt, only to
tumble over a cliff and suffer a 40-foot drop (he not only survived but was
mostly unscathed). Bogart was in a car accident, busting out several of his
teeth. He couldn’t at first figure out how to enunciate properly so some of his
dialogue was actually performed by a young and unknown Peter Sellers. Capote
had the habit of calling his pet crow Lola, who was residing in Rome at the
time, on the telephone. When the bird mysteriously fell silent, Capote rushed
to its side, fearing for its wellbeing.
The
resultant film is, to say the least, a bizarre confection. The film has been
called the first “camp” film and one can easily see the justification of the
label. Beat the Devil begins loosely in the manner of a film noir, as much The
Third Man (1949) as The Maltese Falcon (1941), and throughout its running time
the camera plays it straight. Those characteristic Huston framed shots are
there, the stark angles, the alarming closeness of the figures. The opening
shots, featuring a married British couple (played by Edward Underdown and
Jennifer Jones) trailed by a ragtag group of young and hungry street urchins
through the streets of an Italian port town, are a study in contrast. Jones’s
brilliant white dress, blindingly resplendent, seems cruelly garish in
comparison to the muddied faces of the starving children. This could easily be
the opening of a serious examination of poverty, desperation, and indifference.
The dialogue, however,
blows it all apart. Jones’s character, much to the mildly communicated horror
of her husband, insists on repeatedly spitting because her Spanish governess
had told her as a child that one should spit curses before someone spits them
at you to prevent the efficacy of the latter. Whenever she tells a lie (and she
tells plenty) she prefaces it with the phrase, “In point of fact.” Great
consternation arises over the peregrinations of a hot water bottle. A ship
captain remains in a seemingly permanent drunken stupor. An Arab official is
bribed by promises that he might one day meet Rita Hayworth.
The film
strikes one as a disconnect between the noir visuals and the camp soundtrack.
It's a workable noir plot saddled with dialogue that's so tongue-in-cheek that
it would seem to have caused disfiguration. Or it's deliciously outré writing
saddled with a standard noir plot. It all depends on one’s predispositions. No
matter what, however, those predispositions will be challenged, undermined,
pilloried, and ridiculed.
Bogart
hated Beat the Devil and claimed that only “phonies” found any joy in it. You
can’t blame him; the film had an abominable showing at the box office and
Bogart was out a good deal of money. Huston, however, told a bemused Jones that
she would be more remembered for this film than for 1943's The Song of
Bernadette (although that might have been tongue-in-cheek as well).
Beat the Devil has managed to gain a reputation, especially among those looking
for a curiosity that stands out from the typical output of that era. Roger
Ebert claimed it was one of the great films of history. Of course, he didn’t
see the original version. The film as Ebert knew it had a few scenes cut, but
most egregiously, it had a rather silly voice-over that, in my opinion, ruined
the humor of the film. The original has now been restored and if you are to see
the film, see it in this form.
Without that voice-over, the film is immeasurably improved. The weird
tension between the cinematography and plot on the one hand and the script and
the casualness of much of the acting on the other is at long last revealed to
its most striking effect. It may or may not be one of the great films from the
'50s but it's certainly one of the most eccentric.
John
Huston and Truman Capote’s Bizarre Confection, 'Beat the Devil' By Chadwick
Jenkins. Pop Matters , February 15, 2017.
John
Huston, the American director, writer and actor, was prolific, various and
uneven. As a director, he worked in just about every known film genre except
animation. If one discounts the films that, through miscalculation on his part
or mutilation by a studio, turned out to be mediocre, there remains a huge body
of superb and enduring work.
After
several years in Hollywood as a screenwriter, Huston got to write and direct
his first feature: Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 detective novel, The Maltese Falcon
(1941). “In years to come,” wrote Lawrence Grobel in his definitive Houston
biography, “the French would credit the movie with starting a new genre called
film noir—dark, urban, brutal, disturbing, misogynistic stories focusing on
private eyes. James Agee and Pauline Kael would continue to praise it as ‘The
best private-eye melodrama ever made’ and ‘The most high-style thriller ever
made in America.” During World War II,
Houston made three significant documentaries: Report from the Aleutians (1942),
San Pietro (1944), and Let There Be Light (1945) (more about them below). In
his first four years back in Hollywood after the war, he made four films that
are each regarded as classics: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), for
which he and his father received Oscars (John for best director and best
screenplay; Walter for best supporting actor); the films noirs Key Largo (1948)
and The Asphalt Jungle (1950); and the romantic epic The African Queen (1951),
for which Humphrey Bogart received his only best actor Oscar.
The
Asphalt Jungle, wrote Philip Kemp, “was the progenitor of a long cycle of
‘caper movies,’ in which a crime (here a million-dollar jewel theft) is
successfully carried out by sympathetically depicted criminals, only to fail
through subsequent ill-chance or internal dissension. Huston was breaking new
ground in presenting crime as an occupation as any other…” . Marilyn Monroe,
with whom Huston would later work on The Misfits, had her first important role
in that film.
Late in
his life, he made three superb independently financed films based on important
works of 20th century fiction: Wise Blood (1979), Under the Volcano (1984) and
The Dead (1987). Those films were made at a time when his failing health made
him uninsurable, so none of the major studios was willing to risk a big budget
on him. His penultimate film, the black comedy Prizzi’s Honor (1985), starring
Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner, and Huston’s daughter Angelica, got made only because
producer John Foreman (who had produced three earlier Huston films: The Life
and Times of Judge Roy Bean, 1972; The Mackintosh Man, 1973; and The Man Who
Would be King, 1975) managed to have an insurable stand-by director.
Anjelica
Huston received a best supporting actress Oscar for Prizzi’s Honor, making John
Huston the only filmmaker to direct both his father and his child in Academy
Award-winning performances. In between and along the way, were films that were
terrific and films that were flops not only financially, but critically. One,
even Huston, himself, loathed: The Unforgiven (1960), a western that even a
great cast (Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepurn, Audie Murphy, Charles Bickford and
Lilian Gish) couldn’t save. Huston found it “bombastic and over-inflated.” .
Sometimes the fault was his; just as often, it was the studios making a sodden
mess out of a film that might very well have worked had they just left it
alone.
MGM, for
example, cut Huston’s two-hour The Red Badge of Courage to 69 minutes and added
a narrator to tell the audiences everything the shortened film couldn’t
possibly show. Huston’s final version of Reflections in a Golden Eye was
suffused with a golden glow throughout; the color was one of the characters in
the film. Warner Brothers released it in blazing Technicolour instead. And John Wayne, without Huston’s consent or
participation, insisted on reshooting and reordering scenes in The Barbarian
and the Geisha so he looked better and had far more lines.
War
In 1942,
as he was about to finish shooting Across the Pacific, starring his pal
Humphrey Bogart, Huston got orders telling him to report to the Army
immediately. The director recalled:
‘The story involved a Japanese plan to
pull a “Pearl Harbor” on the Panama Canal. Bogart had been captured by the
Japanese—led by master spy Sydney Greenstreet—and was being held prisoner in a
house near the Canal. I proceeded to make things as difficult as possible for
my successor. I had Bogie tied to a chair, and installed about three times as
many Japanese soldiers as were needed to keep him prisoner. There were guards
at every window brandishing machine guns. I made it so that there was no way in
God’s green world that Bogart could logically escape. I shot the scene, then
called Jack Warner and said, “Jack, I’m on my way. I’m in the Army. Bogie will
know how to get out.”
Huston’s
replacement, Vincent Sherman, had “one of the Japanese soldiers in the room go
berserk. Bogie escaped in the confusion, with the comment, ‘I’m not easily
trapped, you know!’ I’m afraid, from that moment on, the picture lacked
credibility.” The gags stopped after
that. Huston did some minor film work for the army, then directed and narrated
three documentaries: Report from the Aleutians (1942), about fighter and bomber
pilots fighting the Japanese and the weather in Alaska; San Pietro (1944,
released to the public in 1945, sometimes listed as Battle for San Pietro),
about the liberation of one small Italian town; and Let There Be Light (1945),
about soldiers stateside trying to cope with what is now generally referred to
as PTSD.
During
the Aleutians work, Huston went up with fighters and with bombers. He wrote,
about one of his flights:
“Zeros attacked us. I was trying to
photograph over the shoulder of the waist gunner. Presently my camera wound
down, and I lowered it to rewind. The waist gunner wasn’t there. I looked down
and saw him lying dead at my feet. The belly gunner motioned me to take over
his gun while he took the waist gun, which was the most important defensively.
In order to facilitate his firing, he had to stand with one foot on the body of
the waist gunner. “
“The war
in the Aleutians,” Huston writes, “was…bitter and costly, with disproportionate
casualties because it was waged by aircraft in literally the worst flying
weather in the world.” 9. (An Eskimo elder I talked with in Nome in 1998 spoke
of the young pilots he watched take off from Aleutian airbases during that war.
He still, he told me, had thoughts of them, dead deep in the cold water. “I’d
watch them go out and I’d count them; then I’d watch them come back and I’d
count them.” He pointed to the air with his index finger, as if he were
counting the planes. “There’s a lot of dead men out there.” He nodded toward
the sea.)
The army
was displeased because so much of the film portrayed dull routine. Must of the
airmen’s lives in the Aleutians of course was dull routine. Only a fraction of
anyone’s time was spent on actual bombing runs or in dogfights with Japanese
Zeros. But they released the film anyway. Like all Department of Defense films
of the time, there were no individual credits, so the film’s nomination for the
1943 Academy Award in documentary went to the United States Army Pictorial
Service.
There
are conflicting versions about how San Pietro was made. Huston, in his
autobiography and elsewhere, seems to claim he was there for all of it. Peter
Maslowski, in his 1993 book Armed With Cameras: The American Military
Photographers of World War II, argues
otherwise. He says that when Huston and his crew reached San Pietro the battle
was pretty much over, so some of the scenes were reenacted.
What to
make of this? If Huston wasn’t there for the battle, someone obviously was.
Some of the scenes may have been reenacted, but not all or even most of them.
In any case, Huston and his crew made a film that remains one of the most
powerful documentaries of World War II. It shows, among other things, one of
the most important aspects of war: for historians and generals, wars and battles
are big things, taking place in complex contexts. For the people on the ground
(or in the cockpit), war is this day, in this place.
In the
mid-1980s, at the screening room of film historian James Card, I watched San
Pietro with a man who had been in that battle. “I’ve always liked this film,”
he said. I asked why. “Because that’s how it was.” For the War Department,
Huston’s film was too much like it was:
“Sure enough, by the time I got back to my
desk, furious complaints had started coming in. The War Department wanted no
party of the film. I was told by one of its spokesmen that it was “anti-war.” I
pompously replied that if I ever made a picture that was pro-war, I hoped
someone would take me out and shoot me. The guy looked at me as if he were
considering just that.
The film
was classified SECRET and filed away, to ensure it would not be viewed by
enlisted men. The Army argued that the film would be demoralizing to men who
were going into combat for the first time.
Yet San
Pietro grained a certain amount of notoriety within the military establishment,
and perhaps for that reason General of the Army George C. Marshall asked to see
it. His official comment upon viewing the film was that “this picture should be
seen by every American soldier in training. It will not discourage but rather
will prepare them for the initial shock of combat.” With that, the whole scene
changed. The sheep fell into line. Everyone praised the picture. I was
decorated and promoted to major.”
Let
There Be Light, a 58-minute documentary filmed in 1945 at Mason General
Hospital in Brentwood, New York. The film depicts combat veterans being treated
for what was then called “battle fatigue” or “shell shock.”
In an
interview, Huston stated that he was commissioned to make the film because at
the time, returning soldiers with nervous and emotional problems were not
getting jobs. “And there was no more disgrace to this discharge than if the man
had been a physical casualty–had lost an arm or a leg.” …The film was withheld
from general release by the War Department, ostensibly because the rights of
the men in the film had been violated, even though they had signed releases,
according to Huston. … “It was banned, I believe, because the War Department
felt it was too strong medicine.” Huston requested and received permission from
Army public relations to show the picture at MOMA in the summer of 1946.
Moments before the program was scheduled to start, however, the print was
confiscated.
The film
was not shown public until January 16, 1981. What frightened the War Department
so? Americans had plenty of experience seeing screen depictions of men in war,
but there were no screen depictions of the invisible and enduring scars of war
before Let There Be Light. That was a secret the War Department, and later the
Department of Defense, preferred not be told. What changed? It wasn’t just
lobbying by MPAA president Jack Valenti. Rather, by that time what had never
been spoken of by veterans of World War II and the Korean Conflict had been brought
to public attention by Vietnam veterans. The condition had a new
name—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—but it was exactly the same thing. And by
1980, the Defense Department had lost control of that ugly secret.
Two of
Huston’s later films would be specifically indebted to his wartime experience:
Freud, and The Red Badge of Courage. The latter, to go by all accounts, fell
afoul of the preview audiences and the studio because it cut too close to the
bone. It was a film about fear and coming to terms with fear and that just
wasn’t movie-movie enough for the random audiences who hadn’t a clue what they
were about to see, or the studio moguls who couldn’t see beyond that kind of
audience. No one will ever know what fate John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage
might have had if had it been marketed for the film it was: that film does not
exist. All that exists is the 69-minute studio version.
Literary
relations
Huston’s
mother was a journalist who often took him on her travels; his father was in
vaudeville, later in legitimate theater. When he was three, his parents
separated, after which he shuttled between them. In both milieux, language,
performance and art were constantly in the air. Huston names as one of his
formative experiences the period in his late teens, beginning in 1924, when he
was with his father when Walter was acting in the Provincetown Players’
presentation of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms.
“At
first I wanted to become a painter,” he told interviewer Dan Ford, “but meeting
O’Neill in New York, when my father was doing Desire Under the Elms, first drew
me to the theater. I think I learned more about films from O’Neill than
anyone—what a scene consisted of and so forth. By the time I came to Hollywood
as a writer I was conscious that I wanted to direct. Working with such greats
as Wyler and Howard Hawks only served to reinforce it. It was not easy to jump
from writer to director in those days. There was just one other man who had
made the jump [Preston Sturges], and I wasn’t able to do it until much later,
of course.”
Houston’s
autobiography, An Open Book, lists few actors among his close friends and
visitors to his Irish Estate, St. Clerans. Rather it is e.e. cummings, Robert
Capa, George Gershwin, Carson McCullers, Gene Kelly, Irwin Shaw, Art Buchwald.
One Christmas, he got his friend John Steinbeck to dress up as Santa for the
party at St. Clerans.
His last
film, an adaptation of James Joyce’s poignant story, “The Dead,” at first seems
to center on a jolly family Christmas dinner, but what it is really about is a
marriage that on the surface is doing well enough but which, in fact, suffers
an unbreachable chasm lodged in distant memory neither member of that marriage
can address: one can only remember it, the other can only not be part of it.
The last image of the story is the husband, who has just understood all of
this, standing on a Dublin balcony watching snow fall and feeling at one with
the countless dead that snow gently covers, as far as the eye can see and
beyond.
It is
one of the most subtle and poignant short stories in twentieth-century English
literature. It should, by all the usual markers, be unfilmable. Huston filmed
it. His daughter Angelica starred in that film, and his son Danny was in it.
During the making, Huston was on oxygen because of his emphysema. He died soon
after it was finished. A man with his life-long love of literature could not
have been unaware of the connections between that story and his own. The Dead
is at once a love letter to his family and his own obituary.
Huston’s
primer
The six
pages of chapter 35 of An Open Book 14 have a tone and address different from
any other chapter in the book. There are hardly any stories there. It is
Huston’s primer on filmmaking, his rules of the road. It is virtually
unremarked in reviews of the book, but it is the clearest and most succinct
statement of his practice he or anyone else ever made. He discusses camera
placement, cutting, shooting, working with actors, and chance. In it, he says
many of the things he says in a score of interviews, but he says them better in
chapter 35, and they are grounded in a context of his, not an interviewer’s
choosing. The first paragraph is perhaps the most succinct challenge to
auteurism by a working director:
“I read without discipline, averaging
three to four books a week, and have since I was a kid, Gram used to read aloud
to me books by her favorite authors: Dickens, Tolstoy, Marie Corelli. She also
read speeches from Shakespeare to me, and had me repeat them to her. When I was
in my early teens, we’d talk about the “style” of an author. I was puzzled over
the meaning of the word. Was an author’s style his way of arranging words to
set himself apart from other writers. An invention, so to speak? Surely there
is more to style than that! One day it came to me like a revelation people
write differently because they think differently. An original idea demands a
unique approach. So that style isn’t simple a concoction of the writer, but
simply the expression of a central idea.
I’m not
aware of myself as a director having a style. I’m told that I do, but I don’t
recognize it. I see no remote similarity, for example, between The Red Badge of
Courage and Moulin Rouge. However observant the critic, I don’t think he’d be
able to tell that the same director made them both. Bergman has a style that’s
unmistakably his. He is a prime example of the auteur approach to making
pictures. I suppose it is the best approach: the director conceives the idea,
writes it, puts it on film. Because he is creating out of himself, controlling
all aspects of the wok, his films a unity and a direction. I admire directors
like Bergman, Fellini, Buñuel, whose every picture is in some way connected
with their private lives, but that’s never been my approach. I’m eclectic. I
like to draw on sources other than myself….
I have
been speaking of style, but before there can be style, there must be grammar.
There is, in fact, a grammar to picture-making. The laws are as inexorable as
they are in language, and are to be found in the shots themselves. When do we
fade-in or fade-out with a camera? When do we dissolve, pan, dolly, cut? The
rules governing these techniques are well grounded. They must, of course, be
disavowed and disobeyed from time to time, but one must be aware of their
existence, for motion pictures have a great deal in common with our own
physiological and psychological processes—more so than any other medium. It is
almost as if there were a reel of film behind our eyes. . .as though our very
thoughts were projected onto the screen.
Motion
pictures, however, are governed by a time sense different from that of real
life; different from the theater, too. The rectangle of light up there with the
shadows on it demands one’s whole attention. And what it furnishes must satisfy
that demand. When we are sitting in a room in a house, there is no single claim
on our awareness. Our attention jumps from object to object, drifts in and out
of the room. We listen to sounds coming from various points; we may even smell
something cooking. In a motion-picture theater, where our undivided attention
is given to the screen, time actually moves more slowly, and he action has to
be speeded up. Furthermore, whatever action takes place on that screen must not
violate our sense of the appropriate. We accomplish this by adhering to the
proper grammar of film-making.
For
example, a fade-in or a fade-out is akin to waking up or going to sleep. The
dissolve indicates either a lapse of time or a change of place. Or it can, in
certain instances, that things in different places are happening at the same
time. In any case, the images impinge . . . the way dreams proceed, or like the
faces you can see when you close your eyes. When we pan, the camera turns from
right to left, or vice versa, and serves one of two purposes: it follows an
individual, or it informs the viewer of the geography of the scene. You pan
from one object to another in order to establish their spatial relationship;
thereafter, you cut. We are forever cutting in real life. Look from one object
to another across the room. Notice how you involuntarily blink. That’s a cut.
You know that the spatial relationship is, there’s nothing to discover about
the geography, so you cut with your eyelids. The dolly is when the camera
doesn’t simply turn on its axis but moves horizontally or backward and forward.
It may move closer to intensify interest and pull away to come to a tableau,
thereby putting a finish-or a period—to a scene. A more common purpose is
simply to include another figure in the frame.”
After
several more pages of succinct comments about film making and film form, he
concludes:
“Given time and freedom, the actors will
fall naturally into their places, discover when and where to move, and you will
have your shot. And given all those shots, cut together, you will have your
microcosm: the past on the winding reel; the present on the screen; the future
on the unwinding reel…inevitable…unless the power goes off.
These
observations are seldom remarked upon by picture-makers. They are so true, I
suppose, that they are simply accepted without question as conventions. But
they are conventions that have meaning—even for mavericks.”
The
Huston Touch
Andrew
Sarris “dismisses Huston as ‘less than meets the eye’ because his films lack an
overarching unifying vision. For Sarris, Huston is guilty of the cardinal sin
against auteurism: he ‘displayed his material without projecting his
personality.’”
Sarris
is right: Huston’s films aren’t about his personality. Putting his personality
on the screen was something in which John Huston had no interest whatsoever.
There is no Huston visual or even narrative style; nothing on the screen marks
him as auteur, nor, as he said in that long quotation above, would he have
wanted it to. If you were to see a Huston film with no foreknowledge of it and
no credits, you’d have a hard time knowing it was a film by John Huston. What
Sarris missed or, rather, dismissed, is what Huston was doing: he wasn’t making
films to document himself; he was telling stories.
He was
the most literary of twentieth-century filmmakers. All but three of his
thirty-seven feature films are adaptations; he wrote, co-wrote, or had a
significant hand in the scripts for nearly all of them. Many films are adapted from books, short
stories, plays and other sources. But no filmmaker other than Huston has
selected so many works to be adapted and had a critical part in the adaption
itself.
These
are some of his adaptations/collaborations between his first film, The Maltese
Falcon (1941, based on the 1930 novel by Dashiell Hammett and his last (The
Dead, based on the final story in James Joyce’s Dubliners, 1914): Treasure of
the Sierra Madre (1948, based on the 1927 novel by B. Traven), Key Largo (1948,
based on the 1939 play in blank verse by Maxwell Anderson), The Asphalt Jungle
(1950, based on the 1949 novel by W.R. Burnett), The Red Badge of Courage
(1951, based in the 1894 novel by Stephen Crane), The African Queen (1951,
based on the 1935 novel by C.S. Forester), Moby Dick (1956, based on the 1851
novel by Herman Melville), The Misfits (1961, based on an original script by
Arthur Miller), The Night of the Iguana (based on the 1961 play by Tennessee
Williams), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967, based on the 1941 novel by Carson
McCullers), The Man Who Would Be King (1975, based on the 1888 story by Rudyard
Kipling), Wise Blood (1979, based on the 1952 novel by Flannery O’Connor),
Under the Volcano (1984, based on the 1947 novel by Malcolm Lowry), and
Prizzi’s Honor (1985, based on the 1982 novel by Richard Condon).
The
reason, I think auteurists like Sarris couldn’t respond to Huston is his
process began far earlier than they ordinarily started paying attention. They
were interested in the look and feel of a film; his films came out of his
responses to works of literature. Most of the time, it was years before his
responses to those works got the point where he could think about translating
them to film.
The
vision that Huston has for each of the films were, in large part, in place
before the locations are scouted or the rehearsals begin. The choices during
the shooting are an extension of that. He was, in a very real way, doubly or
triply involved in the realization of nearly all of his films. Réalisateur—one
of the French terms for director—seems particularly appropriate for him.
Filmmaking
is always a collaborative process. For Huston, that process extended in time
and sensibility. By the time he set about writing a script, or collaborating
with someone else on a script, he had been living with and imaging the original
work for years. He wasn’t simply translating a written work into a filmed work.
He had experienced a written work; his films were a visual rendition of that
experience.
Critics
who fault him for leaving this or that out or putting this or that in, or for
altering an ending, miss the point. He was not doing films that set out to
document fictions. His films were collaborations with those fictions. He was
never after a good rendition or translation of a story, book or play. He was
always unambiguous in what he was about: he wanted a good movie on the screen
in that darkened room. All that other stuff was elsewhere.
He
doesn’t simply adapt a short story or book to film. He collaborates with it:
“collaborate” because, in transporting a narrative experience to a schematic
for a film, he seems to have no compunction about altering significant parts
when those alterations make for a better screen story. The differences for him
between a read narrative and a narrative experienced on a screen were both
enormous and specific.
He made
the ending of Night of the Iguana far more upbeat than Tennessee Williams, who
was on the set, would have liked, and he changed the ending of The African
Queen entirely. [I’ve been told, more than once, that C.M. Forester saw the
film and approved of Huston’s change. I haven’t been able to confirm that in
print] He and his script collaborator, Richard Brooks, moved Maxwell Anderson’s
1930s verse play into the present: “As Brooks and I wrote it, Key Largo had a
stronger dramatic line than Maxwell Anderson’s original 1930s play, and we
brought it up to date. The high hopes and idealism of the Roosevelt years were
slipping away, and the underworld—as represented by Edward G. Robinson and his
hoods—was once again on the move, taking advantage of social apathy. We made this the theme of the film.”
Huston’s
shooting style is spare: he would often move on after a single take. 17 He
refused to shoot “master scenes,” shots that showed the space and everyone it
in; he preferred to let the camera’s eye reveal the relationships in the shot.”
18 He rarely provided editors enough alternative shots to make a movie other
than the one he had in mind: “I edit my pictures in the camera. I don’t protect
myself. I don’t take other shots of the ones that I need. One is almost forced
to edit a film the way I shoot it. I don’t believe that pictures are made in
the cutting room. They’re sometimes helped, but they’re not made.” 19 Studios
could ruin it by inappropriate cutting (as happened to the Crane film) or by
screwing up the palette (as happened with Reflections in a Golden Eye), or by
letting a star’s ego force them to shoot scenes the director would not have
shot and ordered scenes in a way the director would not have accepted (as
happened with The Barbarian and the Geisha), but other than that, his films,
however much each differed from every other film he made, were what he’d read
on the page and what he’d seen in his mind’s eye.
For him,
perhaps the most important part of his style not only his script adaptation but
the film itself. was that both should be invisible “I would say that there are
maybe half a dozen directors who really know their camera—how to move their
camera. It’s a pity that critics often do not appreciate this. On the other
hand, I think it’s OK that audiences should not be aware of this. In fact, when
the camera is in motion, in the best-directed scenes, the audiences should not
be aware of what the camera is doing. They should be following the action and
the road of the idea so closely, that they shouldn’t be aware of what’s going
on technically…. When you become aware of how things are being said, you get
separated from the idea. This doesn’t mean that an original rendering isn’t to be
sought after, but that rendering must be so close to the idea itself that you
aren’t aware of it.”
Acting
John
Huston has 54 acting credits, several of them for voice-overs, but many for
significant roles. The most notable, perhaps, is as an archbishop in Otto
Preminger’s The Cardinal (1963), and as the villainous and incestuous Noah
Cross in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), and as film director Jake Hannaford
in Orson Welles’ posthumous trainwreck of a film, The Other Side of the Wind
(2018). Huston’s first screen appearance was as an uncredited extra in William
Wyler’s The Shakedown (1929). Perhaps his most iconic, also uncredited, is the
man in Tampico in the White Suit in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).
His other appearances were as eclectic as his own oeuvre: The Lawgiver in
Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), The Abbe in De Sade (1969), M in
Casino Royale (1967), Noah in The Bible: In the Beginning… (1966), a narrator
in Cannery Row (1982), Gandalf the Grey in The Hobbit (1977), the narrator in
Freud (1962) and in his three WWII action documentaries.
He often
said that he didn’t take the acting at all seriously, that it was a far easier
way to make money than directing: all he had to do was show up, read or perform
the lines, and collect a check. Perhaps. There seems to have been little in
life that Houston didn’t address with complete seriousness and dedication:
writing and directing movies, seducing any woman who caught his eye and came
into range, riding to hounds, big game hunting, gambling. Many of the acting
jobs were, as were a few of his films, trivial pursuits, done because of his
constant need for money. But most were, as everything else in his life,
engagements taken seriously.
Huston
on the page
Huston
wrote a fine autobiography, An Open Book. It is ‘fine’ in the sense that it is
full of good stories from a great storyteller. That tells us nothing about the
truth of it. Groebel characterizes it as “a sanitized version of his life” . An
autobiography is, presumably, based on facts, but not all facts are told and
not all are told the same way. In an ideal library, the section on
autobiography would be situated between Fiction and History. In such a library,
I suspect, An Open Book would be on the fiction side and the memoir by Huston’s
daughter, Angelica, A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and
New York, would be on the historical
side).
He
describes, for example, his years at St. Clerans—the estate he owned in
Ireland—as an idyllic time at the manor, receiving guests, going on fox hunts,
and raising a family. Angelica recalls those same years as bitter-sweet: full
of childhood memories of things and events and odors and colours, and also
marked by acrimony between her parents, her father’s occasional physical
brutality to her , his frequent long absences, and his many lovers: “The
holidays were always peppered with Dad’s ex-girlfriends and ex-wives. It wasn’t
long before I realized that my father was making love to many of the women who
I thought were my friends at St. Clerans” . She mentions, among others, Edna
O’Brien, Marietta Tree, and Zoë Sallis (who would become the mother of her
half-brother, Danny).
One
event in particular figures in her account that is wholly absent from his: the
time her mother, then separated from John, came to St. Clerans and John
shouted, “Here’s my wife, who I haven’t seen for a year.” At that point, she
opened her coat and everyone could see that she was pregnant. The evening did
not end well.
John
Huston was more complex than either book suggests. Anyone reading either of
these telling autobiographies should read the other. And should keep in mind
the Italian proverb: “All stories are true, and some of them happened.”
Further
reading
Lillian
Ross’s Picture: John Huston, M.G.M., and the Making of the Red Badge of Courage
is the best description of Huston at work and the best depiction of the studio
system in vivo. Ross spent a year and a half with Huston during preparation and
shooting, with Huston and studio officials during the tryouts, and with studio
officials as they set about stripping the film of any coherence whatsoever. Her
work originally appeared in 1952 as a group of five articles in The New Yorker.
Perhaps
the single best article on Huston’s films through The Man who would be King is
Richard Jameson’s film-by-film appraisal, “John Huston,” Film Comment, May/June
1980, 25-56. Jameson is one of the few Huston critics who appreciates, and
notes, Huston’s astonishingly subtle camera movements. He is one of the few
Huston critics who writes about him in terms of film work.
Douglas
McFarland and Wesley King edited a collection of essays about Huston’s adaptations:
John Huston as Adaptor . Some of the articles, like Dale M. Pollock’s “This Has
Got to Be a Masterpiece”: John Huston’s Mangled Adaptation of The Red Badge of
Courage , are insightful and informed, but many of the essays look at the films
as texts rather than as films: they seem unaware that film narrative and print
narrative use different rhetorics. The McFarland and King book is worth a look,
but the space for a good study on Huston’s adaptations remains open.
Location
work with Huston has occasioned at least two novels and one excellent memoir.
The memoir is Katherine Hepburn’s, The Making of The African Queen: How I Went
to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind. (New York:
Knopf, Knopf, 1987). The novels are Ray Bradbury’s Green Shadows, White Whale:
A Novel of Ray Bradbury’s Adventures Making Moby Dick with John Huston in
Ireland (New York: Knopf, 1992) and Peter Viertel, White Hunter, Black Heart
(New York: Doubleday, 1953).
Robert
Emmet Long, John Huston Interviews contains 21 interviews with Huston. They’re
a mixed lot, varying with the interviewer, the publication, and Huston’s mood.
The two best pieces are perhaps Karel Reisz’s (originally in Sight and Sound,
January/March 1952, 130-132). It’s more a report on a conversation, but it is
nonetheless one of the best short pieces on Huston’s method I’ve seen. The
other fine piece is Lawrence Groebel’s Playboy interview (130-150; originally
in Playboy, September 1985,63+), which led to Groebel’s book.
Lawrence
Bergreen details the personal and working relationship between James Agee and
Huston in: James Agee: A Life. (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984), 340ff.
Allen Cohen and Harry Lawton, John Huston: A
Guide to References and Resources, annotated edition, G.K. Hall, 1997, is an
exhaustive list of material about Houston and his films.
Filmography
Huston wrote or collaborated on the screenplays for all of his films. * indicates the films for which he received a writing credit.
Prizzi’s Honor 1985
Under the Volcano 1984
Annie 1982
Victory 1981
Phobia 1980
Wise Blood (as Jhon Huston) 1979
Independence (Short) 1976
The Man Who Would Be King 1975*
The MacKintosh Man 1973
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean 1972
Fat City 1972
The Kremlin Letter 1970*
A Walk with Love and Death 1969
Sinful Davey 1969
Reflections in a Golden Eye 1967
Casino Royale (scenes at Sir James Bond’s house and castle in Scotland scenes)
1967
The Bible: In the Beginning… 1966
The Night of the Iguana 1964*
The List of Adrian Messenger 1963
Freud 1962
The Misfits 1961
The Unforgiven 1960
The Roots of Heaven 1958
The Barbarian and the Geisha 1958
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison 1957*
Moby Dick 1956*
Beat the Devil 1953*
Moulin Rouge 1952*
The African Queen 1951*
The Red Badge of Courage 1951*
The Asphalt Jungle 1959*
We Were Strangers 1949*
Key Largo 1948*
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 1948*
Let There Be Light 1946
San Pietro 1945 (sometimes listed as The Battle of San Pietro)
Report from the Aleutians 1943
Across the Pacific 1942
Winning Your Wings (Air Force recruiting film) 1942
This Our Life 1942
The Maltese Falcon 1941*
Credited as “Colour Style Creator for Moby Dick 1956
