Carole Lombard Day

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For John Huston on what would have been his 100th birthday

The Independent:

Film studies: He won a few and lost plenty - but Huston kept on gambling

By David Thomson

Published: 13 August 2006

On 5 August, 2006, John Huston would have been 100. It was good to hear a tribute to him on America's National Public Radio, done by Pat Dowell And it was proper that the tribute included not just his father (Walter's riotous laughter at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre), but his daughter's sly innuendos in Prizzi's Honor. One of the things John Huston did was guide both his father and his daughter to Supporting Oscars in those two films. Yet, in the broadcast, Anjelica testified to how there had been not just a fondness in her father but a wild, dangerous anger, too. He did everything he could in life but still seemed put out that there were things he had missed.

To read about his early years is to see the extraordinary frontier life that was still possible in 1906. He had been born in a small town in Missouri that his grandfather said he won in a poker game. After that, John travelled with his parents as they roamed the country doing theatre. Aged 12, he was so sick he needed a year in a clinic, and then when he came out he left high school to be a boxer. He was the lightweight champion of California. He was an officer in the Mexican cavalry. He started writing and influence got him a job in Hollywood.

He was not a careful man. He killed someone in a driving accident. He was a gambler all his life. He painted and he collected Mexican art and there would be trouble later about things smuggled out of that country.

He was a beaten up-looking guy, but women adored him. He was married officially five times, but there were many other liaisons and kids he took care of. He was a Major in the war when he served in Europe and the Pacific and made astonishing documentaries about shell-shocked troops. And at the very end of his life, when he had emphysema so badly he had to carry oxygen around with him, he smoked cigars and made a film from James Joyce's "The Dead" - he recreated Dublin with Irish actors flown in specially in a small studio north of Los Angeles. He was a great pretender.

He started to write scripts in the 1930s, and he was said to have done wonders on these films, not always with credit, but making sure they worked: Jezebel (the Bette Davis hit), High Sierra (a turning point in Bogart's career), The Killers (that beautiful film noir from the Hemingway short story, where the movie begins with the story of the hoods in the diner and then goes back in time).

And, in 1941, he seized a chance to direct a story that had failed twice already as a movie: Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. He filmed the book very faithfully, and he cast it to perfection: with Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre and the newcomer Sydney Greenstreet, it has some of the great talking set-pieces in American film.

He worked for another 46 years, travelling all over the world, never grieving if a picture didn't work, so relaxed that he sometimes let others edit, shoot or direct his films. It was the least neurotic career of any great director. And to prove that, you can easily name a dozen films that are not very good: In This Our Life, We Were Strangers, Moulin Rouge, The Barbarian and the Geisha, The List of Adrian Messenger, The Bible, Sinful Davey, A Walk With Love and Death, The Kremlin Letter, The Mackintosh Man, Victory, Annie. And if you asked him, he'd likely agree and say yes, one was a dreadful pity - he really wanted Moulin Rouge to work, because he loved Toulouse-Lautrec. But he took it for granted that the movie business was daft enough to get in the way of good intentions. You just had to move on. It was an attitude that could seem casual and, when it was applied to women, I think it sometimes looked cruel.

On the other hand, who was mad enough to make a film of Moby Dick off the coast of Ireland, and get maybe halfway towards the grandeur of Melville? Who made Fat City, the best picture ever done about the shabby business of boxing? He did The Asphalt Jungle as one of the first films where you sided with the crooks and wanted them to get away with the jewel robbery. And when the mastermind, the Dutchman (Sam Jaffe) stayed behind 30 seconds to watch a pretty girl dance to a juke box, and was caught, you could hear Huston sigh and chuckle. He did The African Queen in Africa in a filthy river so the leeches were lining up to work. He waited half his life to get a chance to do The Man Who Would Be King, and then when he thought it was too late, along came opportunity in the form of Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Long before anyone had heard of camp or pastiche in films, he did Beat the Devil a satire on films such as The Maltese Falcon.

And don't forget Key Largo, with that scene where the gross Edward G Robinson just whispers in Lauren Bacall's ear and she looks like a terrified mare. Don't forget Wise Blood, The Red Badge of Courage and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, three of the strangest films you'd ever wish to see. There may not be one masterpiece in the crowd - and I'm not sure that Huston believed in masterpieces. Because you lived for the game and you knew that you lost as much as you'd won. "So what do you do it for?" someone might have asked. That question was asked of his character Noah Cross, in Chinatown.

Now there's a great film and his is the central performance, the standard of evil that knows shame. And Cross answers, "For the future!" in the spirit of someone who had lived in a very raw America once where towns, kingdoms and even wives changed hands at the poker table. And gamblers must never yield to sentiment, neither hope nor regret.

d.thomson@ independent.co.uk

On 5 August, 2006, John Huston would have been 100. It was good to hear a tribute to him on America's National Public Radio, done by Pat Dowell And it was proper that the tribute included not just his father (Walter's riotous laughter at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre), but his daughter's sly innuendos in Prizzi's Honor. One of the things John Huston did was guide both his father and his daughter to Supporting Oscars in those two films. Yet, in the broadcast, Anjelica testified to how there had been not just a fondness in her father but a wild, dangerous anger, too. He did everything he could in life but still seemed put out that there were things he had missed.

To read about his early years is to see the extraordinary frontier life that was still possible in 1906. He had been born in a small town in Missouri that his grandfather said he won in a poker game. After that, John travelled with his parents as they roamed the country doing theatre. Aged 12, he was so sick he needed a year in a clinic, and then when he came out he left high school to be a boxer. He was the lightweight champion of California. He was an officer in the Mexican cavalry. He started writing and influence got him a job in Hollywood.

He was not a careful man. He killed someone in a driving accident. He was a gambler all his life. He painted and he collected Mexican art and there would be trouble later about things smuggled out of that country.

He was a beaten up-looking guy, but women adored him. He was married officially five times, but there were many other liaisons and kids he took care of. He was a Major in the war when he served in Europe and the Pacific and made astonishing documentaries about shell-shocked troops. And at the very end of his life, when he had emphysema so badly he had to carry oxygen around with him, he smoked cigars and made a film from James Joyce's "The Dead" - he recreated Dublin with Irish actors flown in specially in a small studio north of Los Angeles. He was a great pretender.

He started to write scripts in the 1930s, and he was said to have done wonders on these films, not always with credit, but making sure they worked: Jezebel (the Bette Davis hit), High Sierra (a turning point in Bogart's career), The Killers (that beautiful film noir from the Hemingway short story, where the movie begins with the story of the hoods in the diner and then goes back in time).

And, in 1941, he seized a chance to direct a story that had failed twice already as a movie: Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. He filmed the book very faithfully, and he cast it to perfection: with Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre and the newcomer Sydney Greenstreet, it has some of the great talking set-pieces in American film.

He worked for another 46 years, travelling all over the world, never grieving if a picture didn't work, so relaxed that he sometimes let others edit, shoot or direct his films. It was the least neurotic career of any great director. And to prove that, you can easily name a dozen films that are not very good: In This Our Life, We Were Strangers, Moulin Rouge, The Barbarian and the Geisha, The List of Adrian Messenger, The Bible, Sinful Davey, A Walk With Love and Death, The Kremlin Letter, The Mackintosh Man, Victory, Annie. And if you asked him, he'd likely agree and say yes, one was a dreadful pity - he really wanted Moulin Rouge to work, because he loved Toulouse-Lautrec. But he took it for granted that the movie business was daft enough to get in the way of good intentions. You just had to move on. It was an attitude that could seem casual and, when it was applied to women, I think it sometimes looked cruel.
On the other hand, who was mad enough to make a film of Moby Dick off the coast of Ireland, and get maybe halfway towards the grandeur of Melville? Who made Fat City, the best picture ever done about the shabby business of boxing? He did The Asphalt Jungle as one of the first films where you sided with the crooks and wanted them to get away with the jewel robbery. And when the mastermind, the Dutchman (Sam Jaffe) stayed behind 30 seconds to watch a pretty girl dance to a juke box, and was caught, you could hear Huston sigh and chuckle. He did The African Queen in Africa in a filthy river so the leeches were lining up to work. He waited half his life to get a chance to do The Man Who Would Be King, and then when he thought it was too late, along came opportunity in the form of Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Long before anyone had heard of camp or pastiche in films, he did Beat the Devil a satire on films such as The Maltese Falcon.

And don't forget Key Largo, with that scene where the gross Edward G Robinson just whispers in Lauren Bacall's ear and she looks like a terrified mare. Don't forget Wise Blood, The Red Badge of Courage and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, three of the strangest films you'd ever wish to see. There may not be one masterpiece in the crowd - and I'm not sure that Huston believed in masterpieces. Because you lived for the game and you knew that you lost as much as you'd won. "So what do you do it for?" someone might have asked. That question was asked of his character Noah Cross, in Chinatown.

Now there's a great film and his is the central performance, the standard of evil that knows shame. And Cross answers, "For the future!" in the spirit of someone who had lived in a very raw America once where towns, kingdoms and even wives changed hands at the poker table. And gamblers must never yield to sentiment, neither hope nor regret.

"Hollywood Escapes"

This might be a fun book for those interested in filming locations. It also has some history of filming locations in Southern California.

Hollywood

Aug. 04, 2006
'Hollywood Escapes' brings locations to fore
By Gregg Kilday

Film production is moving abroad. California still enjoys a slight advantage over other states, but it's becoming increasingly difficult for it to compete with the blandishments of foreign countries. A report on runaway production, released this week by the Center for Entertainment Industry Data and Research, found that the number of feature films shot in California declined from 62 in 1998 to 46 last year.

Such wasn't always the case. When Southern California served as ground zero for film production, Southland locations stood in for everything from the Tahiti of 1935's "Mutiny on the Bounty" (shot in Shark Harbor on Catalina Island) to the Korea of "MASH" (Malibu Creek State Park) and, more recently, the Iraqi desert of "Jarhead" (the Imperial Sand Dunes near the Arizona-Mexico border). Those reminders come from the newly published "Hollywood Escapes," written by Harry Medved and Bruce Akiyama and published by St. Martin's Griffin.

Although "Escapes" is a travel guide built around visits to the locations for dozens of classic films, it also promotes the rich tradition of location filming in Southern California. Proceeding from the premise that outdoor adventurers and location scouts have a lot in common -- they're both looking for dramatic vistas -- the book serves as an interactive movie history of the area. "There's a grand tradition of people coming here to work in the movies and then showing off the diversity of the landscape," Medved says.

Local location filming dates back to 1907, when a Chicago film company shot a short version of "The Count of Monte Cristo." "No one knows exactly where in Southern California it was shot," Medved says, though his best guess is White Lady Cove in La Jolla.

In their sleuthing, the co-authors -- who spent five years working on the volume -- discovered several correctives to common myths about famous movie locations.

The idyllic community of Ojai likes to trade on its association as the supposed setting for Shangri-La in the 1937 "Lost Horizon," but "Escapes" reports that only a four-second overview of the Ojai Valley appears in the film. The scene where Ronald Colman encounters Jane Wyatt riding a white horse was shot miles away at Tahquitz Falls in Palm Springs.

Similarly, the book debunks a local tradition that holds that the famous leaning palm trees that form the tell-tale "W" at the end of "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" were filmed at Palisades Park. Medved speculates that notion arose because in the preceding scene cop Spencer Tracy is seen atop the California Incline in Santa Monica, watching a pileup of the treasure hunters on Pacific Coast Highway. But Medved tracked down the palm trees in question to Portuguese Point in Palos Verdes.

And while it's popularly assumed that the Hollywood Reservoir is where part of the mystery unravels in "Chinatown" -- the historical figure of William Mulholland, who inspired the film's plot, built that reservoir -- the scene actually was filmed at the Stone Canyon Reservoir.

Armed with the lore he has collected, Medved is about to embark on a series of walking tours to point out his finds: The first, organized in association with the Location Managers Guild of America, which assisted the authors on the book, will concentrate on the Santa Monica area and is open to the public. It will kick off at 4 p.m. Sunday, August 13 at Vidiots in Santa Monica, following a book signing and film clips beginning at 2:30 p.m.

But for more adventurous explorers, "Escapes" offers plenty of other trips off the beaten path, including directions for re-creating the ill-fated road trip in the 1986 thriller "The Hitcher" -- a trek that begins in Death Valley and travels Route 66 to the East Mojave Desert. It does warn, however: "Remember, never pick up hitchhikers."

New York State of Mind

From the Reeler Blog (Scroll to July 31) - a list of real New York films:

Yikes! At any rate, The Reeler knows at least one person who is just fine with Willmore's pick, but for me, at least, the whole thing has proven more thought-provoking than anything else. Sweet Smell of Success is easily the greatest New York film ever made, but "New York state of mind"? Does it emerge from J.J. Hunsecker's proclamation, "I love this filthy city?" Or from Ray Milland crashing at the Yorkville clock in The Lost Weekend? Or from the bulging-eyed street drummer in Taxi Driver? The vicious teen beatings in Dead End and Kids? Ahmad's grueling work routine in Man Push Cart? The mournful light captured by Chris Terrio and Jim Denault in Heights? Woody Allen chasing Mia Farrow to the Carnegie Deli on Thanksgiving in Broadway Danny Rose? Popeye Doyle chasing Charnier through Brooklyn in The French Connection? Jules Dassin reclaiming location New York in The Naked City? Al Pacino's Sonny dictating his last will and testament to the bank teller in Dog Day Afternoon? Tony Manero's strut down Fourth Avenue in Saturday Night Fever? Loretta and Ronny's Lincoln Center date in Moonstruck? Taggers spray-painting subway cars as old women look on in The Warriors? Wren watching her clothes fall to the street in the Lower East Side war zone of Smithereens? Or God knows what hundreds of moments we can cull from the work of (in totally random order, as fast as I can type) Philip Hartman, Amos Poe, Jennie Livingston, Lodge Kerrigan, Abel Ferrara, Spike Lee, Jonas Mekas, Don Siegel, Merian C. Cooper, Peter Jackson, Dito Montiel, James Toback, Paul Mazursky, Stanley Donen, Billy Wilder, Peter Sollett, Nicole Holofcener, Ryan Fleck, Joe Mankiewicz, Bennett Miller, Ed Burns, Mel Brooks, Julien Duvivier, Mike Nichols, John Schlesinger, Roman Polanski or Alfred Hitchcock? Or--gasp!--Wes Anderson?

Man. Tough call--and probably a thankless question--right there.

as opposed to the IFC's Allison Willmore, who picked Wes Anderson's The Royal Tannenbaums [!!!] as most typical in response to a question from Green Cine - "What film puts you in a New York frame of mind?"