John Huston

April 8, 1996

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John Huston was, without a doubt, the most talented director of his time. Born to noted stage-and-screen actor Walter Huston, on August 5, 1906, Huston started off work in Hollywood as a screenwriter for Warner Bros. He wrote such classics as Sergeant York, Jezebel and High Sierra. He debuted as a director in 1941 with the Humphrey Bogart-film noir classic, The Maltese Falcon. His success continued with films like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), for which his father Walter won a Supporting Actor Oscar. The Asphalt Jungle (1950), a suspenseful crime caper story, and in 1951, what I think is probably his most ambitous and magnificent work, The African Queen. The Red Badge of Courage (1951), based on the popular civil war novel by Stephen Crane, was the first of Huston's adaptations of famed literary classics. Moby Dick (1956) is one of the most awesome of his adapted screen works. Huston became so fanantic about co mpleting this film, that he was at one time compared to the Mad Captain Ahab of the story. After this unapreciated classic, Huston suffered a series of major setbacks for the next 20 years.

He began a partime acting career in 1963, with Otto Preminger's The Cardinal, for which he received his first acting nomination. As for his directorial efforts, Huston seemed to produce failure after failure. His most notorious flop, The Bible (1966), has been criticised by many. Leonard Maltin rated the movie as "Definitely one time you should read the book instead". Fat City (1972) was Huston's first step back into critical success. The Man who Would be King (1975) is considered one of the finest of his later years as director. After the failures of the WWII P.O.W. story Victory (1981) and the musical Annie (1982), Huston bounced back with Prizzi's Honor (1985), Huston's first major critical and financial success in over thirty years. Once again, one of his own relatives won an Oscar in a movie he directed. This time, it was his daughter Anjelica, who won for her impressive performance as the sly mafia ex-fiancee of assassin Jack Nichols on. Huston's last film The Dead was also a critical hit, but not as big a success as Prizzi. By the time of his death on August 28, 1987, Huston, with his craggy face and rich baritone voice, was one of the few directors to be recognizable to the public as most of the actors he worked with. His amazingly crafty cold-blooded role in Chinatown probably helped a bit.

My rating on a scale of 1 to 10: 10

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