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Maverick maestro
John
Huston had an adventurous streak that he shared with some of his most
famous characters. Driven by greed, ambition or circumstances,
protagonists of his films took great risks to get what they wanted,
only to be humbled or destroyed by forces beyond their control.
Huston, motivated by the power of art, largely escaped his characters’
fate. Most of his gambles paid off, and he bravely took all his
failures in his stride. The eclectic director made about 40 films in
46 years, beginning with the film noir classic The Maltese Falcon (1941).
Huston (pronounced Hoos-ton) had already established himself as a
screenwriter when he got a chance to direct a movie based on Dashiell
Hammett’s novel. He wanted to cast George Raft as private detective
Sam Spade but the actor refused to work with a
"first-timer". The debutant director offered the part to
Humphrey Bogart, who grabbed it withboth hands. The movie made Bogart
a big starand launched Huston as a stylish film-maker. Above all, it
inspired many a crime film of the hard-boiled kind. Maintaining a
fine balance between suspense and humour, Huston brought out the
tragicomic irony of the story about the frantic hunt for a
jewel-studded statuette. The film marked the beginning of a beautiful
friendship between Huston and Bogart, which ended only with the actor’s
death in 1957. They worked together in five more films, including gems
like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and The African
Queen (1951). The former fetched Huston two Oscars in the
direction and screenplay categories, while the latter won Bogart the
best actor award. The twosome also led a protest against the
witch-hunt of sus-pected Communists in Hollywood during the 1950s.
His obsession with perfection earned him the sobriquet
"Hard-way Huston". He never flinched from pushing himself
and his actors to the limit (or beyond). The Treasure of the Sierra
Madre, a fable about three gold prospectors, was shot in San Jose
de Purua, an isolated village about 200 km north of Mexico City.
Bogart fondly recalled Huston’s "sadomasochistic"
attitude: "If he saw a nearby mountain that could serve for
photographic purposes, that mountain was no good: too easy to reach.
If we could get to a location site without fording a couple of streams
or walking through snake-infested areas in the scorching sun, then it
wasn’t quite right." The African Queen, the story of
the unlikely romance between a boozy boatman (Bogart) and a prudish
missionary (Katherine Hepburn) during World War I, was shot in Belgian
Congo and Uganda. On the treacherous Ruiki river, the cast and crew
had a harrowing time warding off safari ants, crocodiles and Bilharzia
disease-carrying worms. In spite of (or perhaps because of) these
hardships, Huston produced an evergreen classic which ranks among the
most popular Hollywood movies of all time. The bizarre story about the
making of the film is well documented in two books — Katherine
Hepburn’s How I went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and
almost lost my mind and Peter Viertel’s White Hunter, Black
Heart (the latter was turned into a movie in 1990 by Clint
Eastwood, who himself played a Huston- like character). Working with
Huston was both a privilege and a challenge for stars as well as
newcomers. Marilyn Monroe, whom he claimed to have once
"saved" from the casting couch, got a big break in his
influential caper movie The Asphalt Jungle (1950). He directed
two of his favourite leading ladies — Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr
— in The Night of the Iguana (by his own admission, he once
tried to woo the bewitching Ava but to no avail). Huston was at his
creative best in his first decade as a director. His output during the
rest of his career was rather patchy. His brilliance was plainly
visible in Moulin Rouge (1952), Beat the Devil (1954)
and Freud (1962), but it was conspicuous by its absence in The
Barbarian and the Geisha (1958) and The Bible (1966).
During the 1970s, Huston showed he was not yet over the hill with
two superb films. Fat City (1972) featured Stacy Keach as a
once-successful boxer who tries in vain to stage a comeback (No
stranger to boxing, Huston had won the amateur lightweight title in
California as a teenager). In The Man Who Would Be King (1975),
set in colonial India but shot in Morocco, Sean Connery and Michael
Caine played two British adventurers whose grand ambition causes their
downfall. John’s father, Walter Huston (1884-1950), was a
distinguished character actor who won an Oscar in a supporting role in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Another Huston film, Prizzi’s
Honour (1985), earned John’s actress daughter Angelica an
Academy Award. The great director himself excelled before the camera
in films like The Bible (as Noah) and Chinatown (as an
incestuous tycoon named Noah Cross). A votary of artistic
independence, Huston worked within the Hollywood system but never sold
his soul to its crass commercialism. His last film, prophetically
named The Dead (1987), was completed shortly before his death
on August 28 that year. Though plagued by emphysema, which kept him
confined to a wheelchair and made him wear an oxygen mask, the
octogenarian painstakingly created his elegiac swansong. "I won’t
retire until the last nail has been hammered into my coffin,"
Huston once said. He kept his word.
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