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FFA Movie Club - DotM: John Huston (1 Viewer)

KarmaPolice

Footballguy
Month 1 Steven Spielberg
Month 2 Billy Wilder
Month 3 Martin Scorsese
Month 4 Denis Villeneuve
Month 5 George Miller
Month 6 Richard Linklater
Month 7 Ridley Scott
Month 8 Kelly Reichardt
Month 9 Akira Kurosawa
Month 10 John Carpenter

Thanks to the assist from @Don Quixote for the November idea. I had been thinking about trying David Lynch and going neo-noir as a tie-in, but I think this will create a little better discussion. I really like the multiple tie-ins for this director. Making some of the best known noirs, he helps kick off a discussion for Noirvember. If noir isn't your thing, there are plenty of options for adventure, war, and westerns. For a selfish tie-in, I have been meaning to watch a couple his movies for PTA connections.

Month 11: JOHN HUSTON
 
I ended up buying Phobia for $5 and watching that as my bridge movie between the DotMs. It was worth a watch, but nothing I'd recommend to seek out unless it's to check off all the boxes. A bit of a cheesy psycho-thriller/horror that felt 70s but had that dreamy 80s haze to it.
 
I did a mini-binge of five Huston movies in 2022.

The MacKintosh Man (1973) was an understated spy film starring Paul Newman as a British agent. Beat the Devil (1953), notorious for its chaotic shoot and on-the-fly creation by screenwriters Huston and Truman Capote. Moulin Rouge (1952) a biopic of Toulouse Lautrec starring Jose Ferrer as the painter. The List of Adrian Messenger (1963) a strange and not totally successful take on an English whodunit. The Dead (1987) Huston's final film starring his daughter and written by his son, adapted from a short story by James Joyce.

Huston was known as an economical director who composed a film in his head and avoided multiple camera setups and re-takes. He shared this attribute with old Hollywood pros and has a kindred spirit in Clint Eastwood. Huston was an actor's director who gives performers plenty of leeway and allows them to work in long uninterrupted takes. This sometimes leads to unnatural positioning of the actors in order to get them all into a single shot.

It may have just been the films I chose but Huston sometimes seemed more interested in the characters than the narrative. Huston had a writer's credit on all of the films except the one credited to his son. None of the films were propelled by plot. The MacKintosh Man was a thriller that was almost devoid of thrills. Newman's character (a British agent pretending to be an Australian prisoner) was rarely in control and more often at the mercy of events happening around him. Moulin Rouge suffered from a tragic central character in Lautrec who couldn't carry the film. What little action there was in he Dead took place years before and was told in a matter of fact way by the characters.

I think the best films were the oldest two. Beat the Devil was a good bit of fun. It's set up as a caper that never happens and draws its comedy from a great cast of character actors. Moulin Rouge was a labor of love from Huston who studied as a painter as a young man. I never really thought of him as a visual stylist but this film is a gorgeous rendition of Belle Epoque Paris. Scenes look like paintings by Lautrec and his contemporaries. The Dead is also worth watching for its final scenes alone. It's also a Christmas movie, set largely during a dinner celebrating the Epiphany in 1904 Dublin.

I struggled to stick with The List of Adrian Messenger. It was a stodgy mystery that revealed the killer to the audience early on and then filled in implausible details about his motive. Its big gimmick was a number of cameos by big Hollywood stars who were rendered unrecognizable by prosthetic makeup to be revealed only after the closing credits.

Beat the Devil is the one I'd recommend of the five. It's been in public domain for decades and is available to stream just about everywhere, albeit not with the most pristine print quality.
 
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon and The Man Who Would Be King are all tremendous with Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle and Fat City just a scooch below.
I haven’t seen Fat City. Will need to add that to the list this month.

In terms of his top movies, I’d probably put The African Queen in that scooch below tier as well.
 
I haven’t seen Fat City. Will need to add that to the list this month.

I may be overrating it but it's amazing how an established director in his mid-60s transitioned so effortlessly to the style of New Hollywood.

In terms of his top movies, I’d probably put The African Queen in that scooch below tier as well.

It's been a long time for me. I never really bonded with it but it's on Amazon Prime and maybe I can double dip with White Hunter, Black Heart.
 
I mentioned in another thread about getting Eddie Muller’s Noir Bar book last year. Thought I’d share his Huston pairing suggestions.

For The Asphalt Jungle, he suggests pairing it with The Left Hand, in honor of the line “crime is just a left-handed form of human endeavor.” It’s a twist on the Negroni. 1-1/2 oz Bourbon, 3/4 oz sweet vermouth, 3/4 oz Campari, and 3-4 dashes of chocolate bitters. Garnished with a Luxardo cherry. Can serve either up or over — I’ll probably do up in a coupe glass.

For The Maltese Falcon, his pairing is a Hammett Martini. His recipe is 2-1/4 oz of Stoli vodka, 3/4 Bacardi rum, and 1/4 oz Benedictine. Garnish with lemon peel twist. A vodka martini was Hammett’s go-to drink. And the book heavily features Bacardi as Spade’s drink of choice.

I think I have the makings of stuff for both. Will plan to drink along.
 
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I've been terrible at participating in these but my intent is to watch The Misfits and The Asphalt Jungle (I think I've seen it but don't remember for sure).

Huston also had some obviously great roles as an actor. For example, Chinatown is Nicholson's movie but it wouldn't be as great without Huston.
 
There's a western remake of The Asphalt Jungle called The Badlanders (1958) starring Alan Ladd and Ernest Borgnine. I watched it a couple of years ago but it was kind of meh. A movie of this type lives and dies on its heist scene but I thought the one in The Badlanders lacked the tension of the original.
 
Huston also had some obviously great roles as an actor. For example, Chinatown is Nicholson's movie but it wouldn't be as great without Huston.

Huston is terrific as another sinister patriarch in William Richart's 1979 assassination conspiracy movie Winter Kills. It's a weird little film that blends black comedy into a thriller structure. Huston hams it up but it makes sense in the context of the movie.
 
I started Prizzi's Honor last night which I know wasn't available for streaming when I did my Huston binge a couple of years ago.
 
Prizzi's Honor (1985)

This is a peculiar little black comedy about professional killers for the mob. It earned Huston his fourth and final Academy Award nomination for best director; 33 years after his third. It's based on the novel by Richard Condon who also co-wrote to the screenplay. Huston was a voracious reader and most of his films are literary adaptations. The plot of Prizzi's Honor is clearly more of a fictional invention of Condon's than a true crime story.

Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner star as the hitman and woman who first fall in love and then fall into a complicated set of double and triple crosses. Huston was renowned as an actors' director and he gets strong and sometimes exaggerated performances from the two leads. Their relationship wasn't totally believable for me but I accepted it in order to move the plot forward. The stars are overshadowed by two exceptional supporting performances by Oscar winner Anjelica Huston as Nicholson's former partner, and William Hickey as the elderly mafia don (I was appalled to learn Hickey was younger than I am now when he filmed this movie).

This movie reminded more of Linklater than any other previous DotM. A comedy about killers has an obvious connection to Hitman but I think the similarities run deeper than that. Neither director is a visual obsessive like Ridley Scott or George Miller. Huston and Linklater seems more interested in getting a good take from the actors and keeping the production moving along. Huston also uses lot of low camera angles and long takes but there were more closeups here than I remember from Linklater's romances. I'm not suggesting Prizzi's Honor isn't a good looking film but it's not a movie that tries to impress with flashy technique--Huston's camera is there to capture the story.

It's a fine, enjoyable movie but wasn't an all-timer for me. The comedy is more smile inducing than laugh out loud in spite of the broadness of the characters and the outlandishness of the plot. Everything seemed overly contrived to me which kept me from caring much about the crooked characters with the exception of Anjelica Huston's Maerose who was a wonderful creation.
 
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The Misfits is a bad movie made interesting by knowing what was going on behind the scenes and that Gable, Clift, and Monroe are doomed. You can tell Marilyn is wrecked. It's incredibly sad when she looks heavenward and simply says, in her trademark breathy way..."Help". :sadbanana:

I always think of what Joan Crawford said about her, "[speaking to director George Cukor after learning of Marilyn Monroe's death] You're right. She was cheap, and an exhibitionist. She was never professional, and that irritated the hell out of people. But for God's sake, she needed help. She had all these people on her payroll. Where the hell were they when she needed them? Why in the hell did she have to die alone?"
 
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We Were Strangers (1949)

Huston was on a roll when he directed this movie; it followed Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Key Largo and preceded The Asphalt Jungle. I was surprised when I saw We Were Strangers in his list of films because I'd never seen it or heard of it. I think the reason for that comes down to politics. Huston was a prominent Hollywood liberal; he was one of the founding members of the Committee for the First Amendment, a group of like-minded celebrities that banded together in 1947 to assist the Hollywood Ten. This was the historical context for We Were Strangers.

The movie is a story of the Cuban Revolution of 1933 and the overthrow of the regime of President Gerardo Machado. Huston co-wrote the screenplay which draws upon a true story of an assassination attempt on the president. It stars John Garfield as an American assisting the revolutionaries and Jennifer Jones as a Cuban woman who joins them after the murder of her brother. The film clearly sympathizes with the revolutionaries although it spends little time discussing their motivations--most of the revolutionaries shown in the movie have personal reasons like Jones' character. Huston's movie strikes a serious tone, there is little humor to be had to lighten the mood. Garfield's character is a true believer in the cause and argues that the ends justify the means even when innocent civilians are involved. He has none of the cynicism of Bogart in Casablanca or Huston's Across the Pacific, he's more extreme than his Cuban colleagues and his relationship with Jones serves to radicalize her character. Garfield is very good in this tough guy role--I've always found him to be one of the most "modern" actors of the 40s . I know its unfashionable today to cast Anglo actresses as Latinas but I thought Jones was believable in spite of a sometimes shaky accent.

SPOILERISH PARAGRAPH - We Were Strangers is an interesting historical artifact but not a great Huston film. The story is flat and rather uneventful. The elaborate assassination scheme involves tunneling through a cemetery that's kind of reminiscent of The Asphalt Jungle but the revolutionaries never follow through with it due to unforeseen circumstances. The collapse of their plan results in tragedy even though the revolution is victorious off-screen which makes the ending seem a bit confused. Some of the scenes have a nice documentary feel --the exteriors were shot in Cuba with some obvious rear-screen effects when the characters are superimposed in front of them. There's a lot of sometimes didactic dialog that drags the movie down.

We Were Strangers was a commercial failure that managed to get panned by critics on the left and the right. Later in his life Huston dismissed it as a product of his idealistic youth. However he was consistent in his support the Hollywood Ten and refused to name names when he testified before the House Un-American Affairs Committee. He avoided the blacklist (Garfield did not) but it damaged Huston's reputation in Hollywood in the early 50s. He moved to Ireland during this period to escape the hysteria and made pictures outside of the studio system.

There's an excellent 480p print of We Were Strangers on YouTube without commercials.
 
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Huston's adaptation of Stephen Crane's civil war novel The Red Badge of Courage (1951) is being broadcast on TCM next Monday (Veterans' Day) at 8AM EST. Huston's original two hour cut was mangled by the studio after poor previews. The final released film was only 69 minutes--it has its moments but is understandably disjointed.

If you don't have TCM, there are decent prints streaming elsewhere.
 
The Kremlin Letter (1970)

I love spy movies from the 60s and 70s but had managed to miss this one until DotM. There are two broad categories of spy thrillers: the 007-type with lots of guns, gadgets and action and the more cerebral stories centered on more realistic spy tradecraft. The Kremlin Letter definitely falls in the latter category. It's a story of a team of six unaffiliated agents working for the West who infiltrate into Russia on a mission to recover the eponymous letter that could provoke World War III if it falls into the wrong hands.

Huston never seems particularly interested in about the main story line; the macguffin mainly functions as a device to set up deceptions and alliances among its ensemble cast. . These plot machinations are intentionally confusing which is exacerbated by some awkward transitions and members of the team disappearing for long stretches of time. Where the film shines is as a character piece involving an excellent group of actors although a bland Patrick O'Neal is kind of a weak link as the key western spy. Richard Boone is a scene stealer as the folksy mentor for O'Neal and Orson Welles makes a small part as a KGB chief seem much bigger. Huston himself makes a credited appearance early in the film as a US admiral admonishing O'Neal's character for being a spy.

It's a solid movie for fans of the genre as long as you're not expecting a lot of thrills. There are moments of humor in the beginning as the team is assembled but things take a much darker turn once they get on with their mission. Most of the movie is set in Moscow and involves characters who either are or are pretending to be Russian. Huston resolves this in an innovative and effective way; characters begin a scene speaking Russian with a voiceover in English eventually transitioning into English only. This creates an illusion that the scene is taking place in Russian without the use of subtitles.

There is a good commercial free widescreen print available on YouTube which claims to be 720p but appears to be upscaled.
 
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The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

Shortly after Huston directed Orson Welles in The Kremlin Letter, Welles returned the favor by casting Huston in a new film that would mark his return to Hollywood after ten years of artistic exile in Europe. Welles shot The Other Side of the Wind beginning in 1970 and continuing for six years off-and-on when he had funds. By that time he had 100 hours of footage but no money for post-production so it sat until his death in 1985 and for another three decades before being rescued and reconstructed according to Welles' notes.

What's left is uneven, indulgent, sometimes frustrating but occasionally brilliant. It's an autobiographical story of a legendary director named Jake Hannaford who returns to Hollywood to try to make a picture called The Other Side of the Wind but encounters financial problems and dies. That's not a spoiler because Hannaford's death is revealed in the opening minutes as in Citizen Kane. Also similar to Kane, the portrait of the director is built from multiple perspectives but in a much more frenetic style that jumps rapidly between observers of the great man. The story unfolds over the last day of Hannaford's life as he invites a group of friends, colleagues and industry types to a party at his ranch for a screening of the rough cut of his movie. The movie-within-a-movie is a beautifully imagined parody (I think) of 60s artsy cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni starring Welles' romantic partner and late period muse Oja Kodar. The party is a mess with lots of Hollywood backbiting, power outages and chaos. The party is shot with handheld cameras in a variety of film stocks and aspect ratios, jumping from black and white to color and featuring a dizzying array of dutch angles, shaky cameras and fast cuts, Even a half century on, The Other Side of the Wind is a radical looking film so it must have baffled the few contemporary viewers Welles showed it to.

This thread is about Huston though so I'll on move to him. As you probably could guess, Huston plays Hannaford the director as an assemblage of parts of Welles and himself. The movie revolves around him and his character dominates proceedings even when he's not on-screen. Hannaford isn't a sympathetic character; he's egocentric, lecherous and sadistic but most of the sycophants at the party overlook that because he's a genius. Huston the actor doesn't show a lot of range but then again, he rarely does. He just speaks in a growl and flashes that grin that's equal parts evil and fatherly.

The Other Side of the Wind is available on Netflix.
 
Wise Blood (1979)

A lot of his movies are streaming (I’ve only seen a couple) and I decided to start with this one just based on the mood I was in at the time. I liked it, but you can really feel that it was originally a novel. I know of flannery O’Connor, but never read her. most of the scenes are more like slices of life that I could imagine in a novel, more so than there being a real arc like you expect in a film. Feels a little like confederacy of dunces at time, with the absurd depictions of old southerners. I am definitely glad that Billy Bibbit was finally able to get laid. I never really understood the motivations of his character though. I don’t know if more was explained in the book about his backstory. For those who don’t know, Brad Dourif plays a war veteran coming back from WWII who seems quite disillusioned and annoyed at life, and he goes to a poor town inhabited by several street preachers. He decides that he will be a preacher, but for the church without Christ. He never really gets into what that’s supposed to mean for people, and maybe he was just doing it to be contrarian, as he seemed quite disgusted with the people claiming to offer hope through religion. He eventually takes on a bit of a messiah complex. It’s funny at times and I do appreciate the overall tone, which is not totally dissimilar to one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, it does fit in well with a lot of other mid to late 70s movies where people are just kind of disaffected and alienated from the world in the wake of Vietnam and all of the upheaval of the 60s and it’s themes meant that it could have easily been set in that time period rather than the 50s.
 
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I've watched a few this month so far with DotM themes. It feels Huston might be like other directors we have tackled who also largely hitched their wagon to actors that I don't particularly love in movies. This month I have a little bit of a Bogart bias and speedbump to get past. I thought I would try knocking out a few right away, so I watched High Sierra, Maltese Falcon, and The African Queen. Maltese is still the best of that bunch, and I am still thinking about African Queen. I think my day off this week will be a Sierra Madre watch.

Tonight if I can stay awake long enough, I am going to throw on a random noir. Murder By Contract was mentioned on a pod I was listening to recently, so maybe that one.
 
Wise Blood (1979)

A lot of his movies are streaming (I’ve only seen a couple) and I decided to start with this one just based on the mood I was in at the team. I liked it, but you can really feel that it was originally a novel. I know of flannery O’Connor, but never read her. most of the scenes are more like slices of life that I could imagine in a novel, more so than there being a real arc like you expect in a film. Feels a little like confederacy of dunces at time, with the absurd depictions of old southerners. I am definitely glad that Billy Bibbit was finally able to get laid. I never really understood the motivations of his character though. I don’t know if more was explained in the book about his backstory. For those who don’t know, Brad Dourif plays a war veteran coming back from WWII who seems quite disillusioned and annoyed at life, and he goes to a poor town inhabited by several street preachers. He decides that he will be a preacher, but for the church without Christ. He never really gets into what that’s supposed to mean for people, and maybe he was just doing it to be contrarian, as he seemed quite disgusted with the people claiming to offer hope through religion. He eventually takes on a bit of a messiah complex. It’s funny at times and I do appreciate the overall tone, which is not totally dissimilar to one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, it does fit in well with a lot of other mid to late 70s movies where people are just kind of disaffected and alienated from the world in the wake of Vietnam and all of the upheaval of the 60s and it’s themes meant that it could have easily been set in that time period rather than the 50s.
I haven’t seen this one, but just downloaded earlier today to watch on a flight tomorrow. But, seeing the comment about someone getting laid, maybe need to check my surroundings before watching.
 
Wise Blood (1979)

A lot of his movies are streaming (I’ve only seen a couple) and I decided to start with this one just based on the mood I was in at the team. I liked it, but you can really feel that it was originally a novel. I know of flannery O’Connor, but never read her. most of the scenes are more like slices of life that I could imagine in a novel, more so than there being a real arc like you expect in a film. Feels a little like confederacy of dunces at time, with the absurd depictions of old southerners. I am definitely glad that Billy Bibbit was finally able to get laid. I never really understood the motivations of his character though. I don’t know if more was explained in the book about his backstory. For those who don’t know, Brad Dourif plays a war veteran coming back from WWII who seems quite disillusioned and annoyed at life, and he goes to a poor town inhabited by several street preachers. He decides that he will be a preacher, but for the church without Christ. He never really gets into what that’s supposed to mean for people, and maybe he was just doing it to be contrarian, as he seemed quite disgusted with the people claiming to offer hope through religion. He eventually takes on a bit of a messiah complex. It’s funny at times and I do appreciate the overall tone, which is not totally dissimilar to one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, it does fit in well with a lot of other mid to late 70s movies where people are just kind of disaffected and alienated from the world in the wake of Vietnam and all of the upheaval of the 60s and it’s themes meant that it could have easily been set in that time period rather than the 50s.
I haven’t seen this one, but just downloaded earlier today to watch on a flight tomorrow. But, seeing the comment about someone getting laid, maybe need to check my surroundings before watching.
You don’t actually see anything, so you will be safe…
 
I've watched a few this month so far with DotM themes. It feels Huston might be like other directors we have tackled who also largely hitched their wagon to actors that I don't particularly love in movies. This month I have a little bit of a Bogart bias and speedbump to get past. I thought I would try knocking out a few right away, so I watched High Sierra, Maltese Falcon, and The African Queen. Maltese is still the best of that bunch, and I am still thinking about African Queen. I think my day off this week will be a Sierra Madre watch.

Tonight if I can stay awake long enough, I am going to throw on a random noir. Murder By Contract was mentioned on a pod I was listening to recently, so maybe that one.
I watched the asphalt jungle also, which is a very solid noir
 
Wise Blood (1979)

A lot of his movies are streaming (I’ve only seen a couple) and I decided to start with this one just based on the mood I was in at the time. I liked it, but you can really feel that it was originally a novel. I know of flannery O’Connor, but never read her. most of the scenes are more like slices of life that I could imagine in a novel, more so than there being a real arc like you expect in a film. Feels a little like confederacy of dunces at time, with the absurd depictions of old southerners. I am definitely glad that Billy Bibbit was finally able to get laid. I never really understood the motivations of his character though. I don’t know if more was explained in the book about his backstory. For those who don’t know, Brad Dourif plays a war veteran coming back from WWII who seems quite disillusioned and annoyed at life, and he goes to a poor town inhabited by several street preachers. He decides that he will be a preacher, but for the church without Christ. He never really gets into what that’s supposed to mean for people, and maybe he was just doing it to be contrarian, as he seemed quite disgusted with the people claiming to offer hope through religion. He eventually takes on a bit of a messiah complex. It’s funny at times and I do appreciate the overall tone, which is not totally dissimilar to one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, it does fit in well with a lot of other mid to late 70s movies where people are just kind of disaffected and alienated from the world in the wake of Vietnam and all of the upheaval of the 60s and it’s themes meant that it could have easily been set in that time period rather than the 50s.

Well this one sent me down a Flannery O’Connor rabbit hole. A very Catholic woman, her.
 
Not Huston movies, but last night and this morning after watching a short doc on Columbia Noirs, I landed on a great noir double features from Fritz Lang with the same acting pair of Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford with The Big Heat and Human Desire. Grahame I had seen in another noir I love - In a Lonely Place, but I don't think I had ever seen a Ford movie. I loved both of them.
 
Finished Wise Blood today. Did not get to it on the flight as was hoping. Not so much because was concerned about kids seeing some scenes, but coincidentally ended up with co-workers in my group next to me on my flight and decided did not want to get into what I was watching and why. Nothing really to add to Larry’s post. Good movie, but left me with some questions too. Did just buy a Flannery O’Connor collection off Amazon, as she’s been an author I’ve been meaning to give a whirl.

Just started up The Red Badge of Courage. Recorded it off TCM when it aired there. Made myself the Hammet Martini that I mentioned upthread as an Eddie Mueller suggestion for The Maltese Falcon. Not the right movie for it, but, eh, I’m not particular (pretty strong drink, as pure alcohol). Speaking of The Maltese Falcon and TCM, it looks like it airs there on Tuesday morning.
 
Moby **** (1956)

I'd always heard negative things about Huston's version of Melville's novel to screen so I never watched it until now. It was much better than I expected so thanks DotM. I thought it really stands out in the context of typical 1950s Hollywood fare. Moby **** is a earnest attempt at translating an unfilmable classic; it doesn't always succeed, but takes some big stylistic chances and holds up well almost 70 years later.

Huston and co-writer Ray Bradbury cut out a lot but capture the gist of the source material. Huston loves Melville's prose and uses it at times to his own detriment. The first hour is loaded with expository voiceover to set the mood and introduce the crew; thankfully lessens in the second half. The characters speak with literary tongue but the Pequod is manifested with a similarly supernatural mood so it all evens out. The pacing is uneven (although not as much as the book) and the slow buildup does a great job of conveying an overwhelming sense of dread.

Desaturated color palettes are old hat now but Huston's decision to process the color film to look like 19th century whaling prints must have been daring for its time. It's a wonderful looking picture thanks to the great English cinematographer (and frequent Huston collaborator) Oswald Morris. The tight compositions emphasize the cramped quarters on board. The whaling action is excellent for its day--there's some obvious use of miniatures and rear screen projection but the scenes are cut quickly enough to prevent the eye from lingering too much. The casting of 38 year old Gregory Peck as Ahab was criticized at the time; he's a little young but he's crazed and commanding enough for me. Orson Welles has tremendous presence in a small role as Father Mapple. Welles loved the novel as much as Huston did and made a couple of attempts to bring it to the screen including a 1971 version where he performed all the roles.
 
I've watched a few this month so far with DotM themes. It feels Huston might be like other directors we have tackled who also largely hitched their wagon to actors that I don't particularly love in movies. This month I have a little bit of a Bogart bias and speedbump to get past. I thought I would try knocking out a few right away, so I watched High Sierra, Maltese Falcon, and The African Queen. Maltese is still the best of that bunch, and I am still thinking about African Queen. I think my day off this week will be a Sierra Madre watch.

Tonight if I can stay awake long enough, I am going to throw on a random noir. Murder By Contract was mentioned on a pod I was listening to recently, so maybe that one.
I watched the African queen last week. Hepburn was good, but I was not as high on bogart’s performance. There are certainly worse things than watching bogey and Hepburn onscreen for 90 minutes. The effects are obviously laughable by today’s standards, but the challenges they encounter and the path that the boat took were a pretty good metaphor for life.

I started fat city the other day, but didn’t get too far yet. It’s more similar to wise blood, but certainly interesting that the same person made asphalt jungle, African queen, fat city, wise blood and Chinatown
 
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Huston was an actor's director who gives performers plenty of leeway and allows them to work in long uninterrupted takes. This sometimes leads to unnatural positioning of the actors in order to get them all into a single shot.
this makes sense to me based on what I have watched
 
Beat the Devil

Oh dear. This is a bad movie. Apparently the script, written on a day-to-day basis as the film was shot...and it shows. Roger Ebert observed that the film has been characterized as the first camp film.

Gina Lollabrigida sure was a looker though.
 
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Beat the Devil

Oh dear. This is a bad movie. Apparently the script, written on a day-to-day basis as the film was shot...and it shows. Roger Ebert observed that the film has been characterized as the first camp film.

Gina Lollabrigida sure was a looker though.

I kind of liked it :shrug:

To be sure, it's an odd little movie. There's not really a story to speak of; the gang is planning a caper but they're too incompetent to come close to pulling if off. The characters amused me and like a number of Huston's 50s films, it has a funkiness to it that anticipates indie films from the 70s to the present.
 
Beat the Devil

Oh dear. This is a bad movie. Apparently the script, written on a day-to-day basis as the film was shot...and it shows. Roger Ebert observed that the film has been characterized as the first camp film.

Gina Lollabrigida sure was a looker though.

I kind of liked it :shrug:

To be sure, it's an odd little movie. There's not really a story to speak of; the gang is planning a caper but they're too incompetent to come close to pulling if off. The characters amused me and like a number of Huston's 50s films, it has a funkiness to it that anticipates indie films from the 70s to the present.
I chuckled a couple times early on. But when they finally get on the ship it, well, sinks.

The ship captain is Jar Jar Binks level annoying.
 
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I haven’t seen Fat City. Will need to add that to the list this month.

I may be overrating it but it's amazing how an established director in his mid-60s transitioned so effortlessly to the style of New Hollywood.
finally finished up fat city and it definitely belongs in the lineage of bleak, Vietnam and post-vietnam era, post modern films with the basic theme of “who am I, where am I going” . I have to look at more of his prior films, but I agree that this is a pretty impressive departure from the films prior to this that I have watched. He still has that style of framing to mostly focus on letting the actors do their thing, but the cinematography is really dark and bleak and gritty and evokes the tone of the movie really well.
 
The Unforgiven is a movie that I ended up liking more than I thought I would. Huston’s use of color and the detail that color movies can bring seems to have developed more, especially in some of the battle scenes. I guess I’m in the minority, but I didn’t really care so much for the African queen and I think part of it may have e been the cinematography and/or the seeming lack of attention to the details that could now be more vividly seen. I believe that was his first color movie, and my perception is that by the unforgiven, he had a better sense of how to use the new color film techniques. The movie is set somewhere in the “old west”, maybe the late 1800s(?) somewhere not too far from Wichita, as it is referenced multiple times. Audrey Hepburn plays the adopted daughter of a widow, whose three sons are expanding their ranching/cattle enterprise with a nearby businessman. Burt Lancaster plays Ben, the eldest son of the family and the unquestioned alpha among the three brothers, who is also doted on by Hepburn and the mother. A strange old man enters the area early in the movie, a spectre not unlike a John Carpenter* villain, who seemingly has vast and unsettling knowledge from unknown sources. He either directly triggers or simply represents the lurking catastrophe that will beset the Zacharys: a claim that Hepburn is in fact a Kiowa Indian. This sets off a major conflict between the Zacharys and their business partner and the racism of most people in the area becomes apparent, though partially their anger is due to the unrest that this issues is stirring up in the Kiowa causing them to become increasingly hostile to these settlers. There are brief moments when Hepburn considers what this possible development might mean for her personally, but I wish that the film had to more interested in that existential dilemma. The film obviously feels dated, but something about it still feels like the start of something new for Huston, with a fundamental issue being this family’s identity and feeling of alienation, which I think shows up more in Huston’s subsequent works. I suppose if I watched it again I could articulate a bit better, but this was just my impression on first viewing.


*when the Zacharys are trapped in their home and trying to fend off the attack from the Kiowa, it reminded me of the police station in assault on precinct 13 when the gang members are running at the station and the officers are just trying to shoot as many as they can. Not particularly novel or inventive on either score, but I couldn’t help but think about considering the year-long series of directors.
 
Nothing to do with Huston, but, for all of the film nerds, TCM is currently airing a Scorsese documentary on the films of Powell and Pressburger.

 
Nothing to do with Huston, but, for all of the film nerds, TCM is currently airing a Scorsese documentary on the films of Powell and Pressburger.


I watched a couple of early Powell & Pressburger movies earlier in the month: The Spy in Black (1939) and 49th Parallel (1941). Both were well crafted pictures that held my interest in spite of some very dated qualities. Interestingly, they both centered on the crew of a German U-Boat interacting with civilians in Allied territories.

The Spy in Black was set in WWI and released a month before WWII so the German captain was portrayed more heroically. It was the better movie of the two with some of the suspenseful sequences reminding me of British-era Hitchcock. 49th Parallel was a WWII film set in Canada with a heavier helping of wartime propaganda. The plot was an twist on a road movie as the U-Boat survivors encountered an odd collection of Canadian characters as they tried to escape to the neutral US. Laurence Olivier had a small but memorable part as a Quebecois fur trapper with a ridiculous accent.
 
I intended to watch Huston's Escape to Victory aka Victory (1981) this month but haven't gotten around to it yet.
 
Our good friends at Pluto have The Misfits available to stream.

This is really an appropriate title considering how this movie is really all over the place. This is the only screenplay ever written by Arthur Miller and it definitely feels like a play a lot of the time, considering the way that it really relies on the big performances of individual actors in scenes in order to drive the story at all. Marilyn Monroe is a recent divorcee with an extreme sense of empathy/naivety/presence/emotion. The movie starts with her going to court to finalize her divorce and him pleading with her to stay and she says “if I’m going to be alone, I’d rather be by myself.” A poignant line revealing her heightened sensitivity and the way she experiences the world. Unfortunately, over the course of the film, I find her performance a little uneven and confusing, sometimes maybe performative for its own sake. There are several moments where she is quite enthralling with her acting. She meets up with Eli Wallach and a weird old Clark Gable, who are cowboys, and they somehow convince Monroe to come along with them out to Wallach’s country house. Wallach and Gable later recruit Montgomery Clift to help them with a venture in which they will round up 15 wild horses which they can then sell to a dog food company for a few hundred bucks. The group has a variety of outings and events in which they interact as pairs, a trio or a foursome, revealing more about themselves. The film is ultimately much more a character study than anything else, though something about them rarely came across as all that authentic. The final act does feature some interesting scenes with the horses they captured and each character reacting to the capture in a way that was interesting, a little unexpected but still made sense. The ending shot is overly wistful for what we’ve experienced and actually almost exactly the same as The Unforgiven, except it shows stars instead of birds. Anyway, not a very good movie all around, but fairly interesting to note the convergence of the onscreen star power, a legendary director, and one of the great writers of the 21st century.
 
Our good friends at Pluto have The Misfits available to stream.

This is really an appropriate title considering how this movie is really all over the place. This is the only screenplay ever written by Arthur Miller and it definitely feels like a play a lot of the time, considering the way that it really relies on the big performances of individual actors in scenes in order to drive the story at all. Marilyn Monroe is a recent divorcee with an extreme sense of empathy/naivety/presence/emotion. The movie starts with her going to court to finalize her divorce and him pleading with her to stay and she says “if I’m going to be alone, I’d rather be by myself.” A poignant line revealing her heightened sensitivity and the way she experiences the world. Unfortunately, over the course of the film, I find her performance a little uneven and confusing, sometimes maybe performative for its own sake. There are several moments where she is quite enthralling with her acting. She meets up with Eli Wallach and a weird old Clark Gable, who are cowboys, and they somehow convince Monroe to come along with them out to Wallach’s country house. Wallach and Gable later recruit Montgomery Clift to help them with a venture in which they will round up 15 wild horses which they can then sell to a dog food company for a few hundred bucks. The group has a variety of outings and events in which they interact as pairs, a trio or a foursome, revealing more about themselves. The film is ultimately much more a character study than anything else, though something about them rarely came across as all that authentic. The final act does feature some interesting scenes with the horses they captured and each character reacting to the capture in a way that was interesting, a little unexpected but still made sense. The ending shot is overly wistful for what we’ve experienced and actually almost exactly the same as The Unforgiven, except it shows stars instead of birds. Anyway, not a very good movie all around, but fairly interesting to note the convergence of the onscreen star power, a legendary director, and one of the great writers of the 21st century.
I adore The Misfits even with its ramshackle approach. I’m sure I’ve posted about this here several times but the dark cloud of fate that hangs over the stars of the film really adds to it.

Gable suffered a fatal heart attack 2 days after filming wrapped. It was Monroe’s last film before she died of a drug overdose. Clift was trying to recover his career after a near fatal auto accident scarred his face and left him deeply drug addicted. Monroe famously said he was the only person she ever met who was in worse shape than she was. Clift would barely work after this becoming too unreliable due to his addictions and personal problems. July 22, 1966 he was at his apartment. His companion saw they were airing The Misfits on TV. Clift adamant about not wanting to watch it, went to sleep by himself. He never woke up.

This movie captured 3 of the great stars and truly troubled stars of classic Hollywood in their farewells to the movies and to life itself.
 

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