John Huston

[therewillbeblus]

Under the Volcano was massively disappointing because it had the makings of a great performance from Albert Finney, potentially his best, but as the film went on, it too felt emptier and emptier.

I don’t like the film either, but I’ve always found it to be repelling by design, deliberately depriving us of any cinematic flairs of catharsis beyond that emptiness you describe, due to the stark portrait of alcoholism. The choices that contribute to making it feel “emptier and emptier” emulate the slip into complete submission, so I consider it to be an objectively great film at unflinchingly tackling the hopeless side of addiction via narrative form, but I probably like it less than anyone I’ve met- partly because it’s not an enjoyable film and partly because I rarely have an interest in films on addiction that are whittled down to one-way tickets to hell.

In my early days on this forum, I wrote up a long piece on Wise Blood after finally reading the novel and revisiting the film, but lost it (or self-consciously deleted it, either are possible). Unfortunately I’d need to reread the book to adequately describe why I think the film adaptation is so strong, but even its detractors should check out Flannery O’Connor’s book. It’s better, and has a lot more subtext unable to come through in the film, yet this information greatly helps appreciate the adaptation. If I remember correctly, even though a ton of stuff is omitted but the film, it’s still a meticulously faithful adaptation to everything except the missing pieces- and the awareness of those elements reveal blind spots on the finished Huston work.

[domino harvey]

O'Connor in many of her celebrated short stories is highly skilled at presenting the grotesque, whereas I think Huston has a prurient interest with such things that comes out in films like this. So I can believe it. Though it's pretty low on my reading list based on the film regardless!

[JSC]

I think Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is an underrated film. It has it's flaws, but it's also an anomaly for large scale 1950s productions, a film with basically two characters, a minimal score, and largely episodic in structure. Reportedly Robert Mitchum's favorite of his own performances.

[Mr Sausage]

What bizarre critical principle says that a great artist isn’t defined by their capacity to produce art that’s great, but their incapacity to produce any that’s bad?

Being able to produce even a handful of terrific art is a rare, difficult, and laudable thing, and what a shame to see a pair of cranks devalue that work and its maker by pointing out everything that isn’t on the same level.

This is auteurism at its worst. Can you imagine the absurdities of applying it outside film? William Wordsworth had a great decade at the beginning of the 19th century where he helped change the face of English poetry and then spent the remainder of his long life writing middling-to-bad poetry. So he’s out then. Only people ignorant of his whole career would call him great, the morons. Why, if you took out all the immortal and revolutionary poetry, he’d be no better than a poet who’d never wrote immortal and revolutionary poetry. So Wordsworth is clearly no better than Robert Southey, says this not at all circular reasoning.

And let’s not get started in Coleridge, that drug addled depressive. Delete his 7 or 8 immortal poems and he’s just some philosopher with a small poetry habit.

Or let’s take the second best poet in English, John Milton. Remove Paradise Lost, Comus, and three or four shorter poems and is he really any better than, oh, Abraham Cowley? Just the writer of a heap of undistinguished short verse, a forgettable minor epic, and an alright verse drama. Great poet? Only fools ignorant of his whole career could blah blah blah.

And Melville? Bulwer-Lytton more like it without that whale book. Only fucking ignoramuses barely above semi-literate could blah blah blah.

What kind of critics don’t celebrate the miracle that someone managed to make great art at all, given the odds against it, in favour of counting up someone’s career in a kind of ledger, like a pair of old ladies competing to maximize their coupon purchases? Also, the ‘an artist seems bad if you pretend their good stuff doesn’t exist’ argument is so...just...goddamn...ughhhhh.

[domino harvey]

I think Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is an underrated film. It has it's flaws, but it's also an anomaly for large scale 1950s productions, a film with basically two characters, a minimal score, and largely episodic in structure. Reportedly Robert Mitchum's favorite of his own performances.

I like it too, it might make the lower depths of my own dozen. Not an amazing film, but a sweet non-romance that resists the Hollywood impulse to have Deborah Kerr ignore who she is in that moment

[JSC]

I like it too, it might make the lower depths of my own dozen. Not an amazing film, but a sweet non-romance that resists the Hollywood impulse to have Deborah Kerr ignore who she is in that moment

For some reason I find the film strangely fascinating. I've heard it compared unfavorably to The African Queen, (a burgeoning romance set against high adventure in exotic locales), but for most of the film it does manage to avoid a lot of those cliches.

[knives]

I think it is better then African Queen, though I imagine most would ignore my opinion as I consider Huston one of the ten best Hollywood directors of all time and perhaps the best dramatic one even with all of his bumps.

[beamish14]

Does Huston's original screenplay for The Red Badge of Courage still exist? I wish there were more available visuals on the massive
amount of material that was excised. If so, it would be nice to finally have it published.

Regarding Heaven Knows... I'm a huge fan of it. It's amazing how much silence there is in it. Makes an amazing double bill with
Boorman's Hell in the Pacific

[bert96]

I saw "The Dead" a year ago and always wondered why there isn't a good DVD/Bluray release of the film. The Lionsgate DVD is out of print since years and worldwide there is no Bluray release in sight, although the film would be worthy of a Criterion release.

[ando]

I saw "The Dead" a year ago and always wondered why there isn't a good DVD/Bluray release of the film. The Lionsgate DVD is out of print since years and worldwide there is no Bluray release in sight, although the film would be worthy of a Criterion release.

Quite, particularly that lat bit. It’s currently a free streamer on tubi. I just read the Joyce short story and rewatched the Huston film. It’s an admirable treatment. And one my new favorite Dan O’Herlihy turns.

[ando]

1979 City Lights Interview

[domino harvey]

Tried to give Maltese Falcon another go and I’m sorry this is still not a good movie. Huston films everything like what we come to know as TV blocking and the low rent sets (which it feels like we can never escape, only jumping from one to another and back again like frogs on the lily pad) feel oddly small and claustrophobic, but not in any meaningful way. Huston shoots like he’s in the audience for the show, and doesn’t show any signs of his eventual visual styling. Indeed, this movie is literally a bottle episode where we’re told this daring thing happened and that exciting event occurred while we’re looking at a desk or a side table lamp for ten minutes. Thrilling!

[crimlaw]

Can’t wait for it to join the collection.

[FrauBlucher]

Domino, I tend to agree with you. I never understood the adoration for it. The bad guys seem silly to me. Like a bunch of goofy misfits. This lacks any of the noir dread in any way, from style to set pieces, that makes noir the great genre it is. I will say some of the dialogue is memorable but for me not enough to make this a classic in my eyes

[crimlaw]

Absurdist masterpiece.

My favorite ‘silly villain’ and ‘goofy misfits’ movie.

[Lowry_Sam]

I will third that opinion. I still have yet to see the Roy del Ruth version, but the remake is widely held as better. While I regard it better than most of the police procedurals that get lopped in with noir as there is some very noir dialogue in it, I only rate it a 7/10 as much of the plot is fairly flat. It also gets lopped in with the covert homosexual noirs, but it's so lame in comparison to films like Strangers On A Train, The Sniper or Murder By Contract in that regard.

[therewillbeblus]

When I watched it a few years back, I found myself intrigued by how the ending is so often misinterpreted as Bogart taking a moral stance with his famous line. If you listen to his speech, he quickly mutes that rationale with a slew of selfish reasons for his actions, which plays even more woefully fatalistic for Bogart attempting to give a "good" reason only to forfeit to trash after failing to convince himself. However, the way Huston plays the scene out makes me wonder if he even intended that with his writing

[Mr Sausage]

I had the exact same reaction, blus. The way Spade casts off Bergid plays much like how he gets rid of his mistress, wife of his former partner, when she becomes inconvenient. The ending is not the tragic choice of justice over love, ideals over feelings; it’s the final inability of a man to justify his own brutal selfishness, a selfishness so plain it renders the film’s most verbally nimble player an incoherent mumbler at the exact point an explanation is most needed. When Spade sarcastically calls the falcon “the thing dreams are made of”, you hear a man who knows intimately the hollowness at the bottom of pursuit. For men like Gutmann and Cairo there is at least the chase, and that offers a form of hope to keep them going and in good spirits. Whatever Spade walks down those stairs to meet is considerably emptier and more miserable. A black, black movie. I really like it.

[crimlaw]

Despite its ‘flat plot’ and ‘covert homosexuality’, I still find the movie wildly entertaining.

However, admittedly, not Huston’s best noir. That honor is reserved for The Asphalt Jungle.

[hearthesilence]

I like it but I don't think it's really a great movie either. I posted this six years earlier in this thread, and I still feel the same:

The Maltese Falcon looks like a film that was superbly done in pre-production: the casting is truly inspired and all the physical elements are perfect. But every time I watch it, it feels very apparent that this is Huston's directorial debut, and not in a way that opens him up to make inspired and unconventional choices [once he's on set or in the editing room].

[knives]

It’s definitely intended as quite silly and amoral. On the commentary to Brick Rian Johnson gives a good breakdown of the book and movie as one of mediocrity posing as grandeur.

[FrauBlucher]

A quick blurb on the Maltese Falcon from Eddie Muller's top 25 all-time list. Which he has at number 6. Full list here

Okay, it's talky, set-bound and not all that exceptional to look at. But it's the most brilliantly self-contained detective story ever written, perfectly cast. It never gets stale.

[domino harvey]

I mean, it’s definitely not perfectly cast considering Mary Astor sticks way out. Do people really buy her in this role?

[FrauBlucher]

Agree again. Not a fit for the femme fatale

[Never Cursed]

I mean, it’s definitely not perfectly cast considering Mary Astor sticks way out. Do people really buy her in this role?

Absolutely not. She's one of the worst high-profile casting decisions I can think of in a studio Hollywood movie (and some of the others, like Frank Sinatra in Guys and Dolls, have their own weird positive quirks). It doesn't surprise me to read on the film's Wikipedia page that something like 50% of the leading women working in Hollywood passed on the role before Astor took it.