September 17, 2019 (XXXIX: 4) John Huston: THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950, 112m) The version of this Goldenrod Handout sent out in our Monday mailing, and the one online, has hot links.

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DIRECTOR John Huston WRITING screenplay adapted by Ben Maddow and John Huston from the W.R. Burnett novel PRODUCED BY Arthur Hornblow Jr. and John Huston MUSIC Miklós Rózsa CINEMATOGRAPHY Harold Rosson EDITING George Boemler The film was nominated for Academy Awards in 1951 for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Sam Jaffe), Best Director (John Huston), Best Writing, Screenplay (Ben Maddow and John Huston), and Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (Harold Rosson). It was entered into the National Film Registry by the National Film Preservation Board in 2008. CAST Sterling Hayden...Dix Handley Louis Calhern...Alonzo D. Emmerich Jean Hagen...Doll Conovan James Whitmore...Gus Minissi Sam Jaffe...Doc Erwin Riedenschneider John McIntire...Police Commissioner Hardy Marc Lawrence...Cobby Barry Kelley...Lt. Ditrich Anthony Caruso...Louis Ciavelli Teresa Celli...Maria Ciavelli Marilyn Monroe...Angela Phinlay William 'Wee Willie' Davis...Timmons (as William Davis) Dorothy Tree...May Emmerich Brad Dexter...Bob Brannom John Maxwell...Dr. Swanson JOHN HUSTON (b. August 5, 1906 in Nevada, Missouri—d. August 28, 1987 (age 81) in Middletown, Rhode Island) won two Oscars in 1949 for Best Director and Best Writing, Screenplay for The Treasure of the Sierra

Madre (1948)§. He was frequently nominated for Oscars for his writing, directing, production, and, even, acting: Best Writing, Original Screenplay for Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940)* and Sergeant York (1941);* Best Writing, Screenplay for The Maltese Falcon (1941),* The Asphalt Jungle (1950),***** The African Queen (1951, with James Agee);* Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium for Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957)* and for The Man Who Would Be King (1975);* for Best Director for The Asphalt Jungle (1950),***** The African Queen (1951),* Moulin Rouge (1952),***** and for Prizzi's Honor (1985); Best Picture for Moulin Rouge (1952)***** and Best Actor in a Supporting Role for The Cardinal (1963). He was also nominated for the distinguished Palm d’Or for Under the Volcano (1984) at Cannes. His frequent recognition for writing may be reflected in his recurring film adaptation of literary classics: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951)§, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1956),****** Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1957, uncredited), Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1979, as Jhon Huston),** and, his final film, a haunting adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead (1987). He directed

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47 films. These are some of his other films: In This Our Life (1942), Winning Your Wings (1942 Short), Across the Pacific (1942), Report from the Aleutians (1943 Documentary),* San Pietro (1945Documentary short),***** Let There Be Light (1946 Documentary),* Key Largo (1948),* We Were Strangers( 1948)§, Beat the Devil (1953),***** The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958), The Roots of Heaven (1958), The Unforgiven (1960), The Misfits (1961),**** Freud (1962),** The List of Adrian Messenger (1963),** The Night of the Iguana (1964),* The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966),** Casino Royale (scenes at Sir James Bond's house and castle in Scotland scenes) (1967),** Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967),*** Sinful Davey (1969),*** A Walk with Love and Death (1969),**** The Kremlin Letter (1970),****** Fat City (1972),*** The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972),** The MacKintosh Man (1973),*** Phobia (1980), Victory (1981), and Annie (1982).** He wrote for 40 films, including films he did not direct, including: Wuthering Heights (1939 contributing writer - uncredited), The Storm (1930 dialogue), Law and Order (1932 adaptation), Jezebel (1938 screen play), Juarez (1939 screen play), High Sierra (1941 screen play), Three Strangers (1946 original screenplay), The Stranger (1946 uncredited), and The Killers (1946 uncredited). He acted in 54 films, including the films noted above and, among others: The Shakedown (1929), Hell's Heroes (1929), The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), The Cardinal (1963), Candy (1968), De Sade (1968), Myra Breckinridge (1970), The Devil's Backbone (1971), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), Chinatown (1974), The Wind and the Lion (1975), Sherlock Holmes in New York (1976 TV Movie), The Rhinemann Exchange (1977 TV Mini-Series), The Hobbit (1977 TV Movie), Winter Kills (1979), and Cannery Row (1982). He also produced 15 films, including those noted above. *Wrote **Acted in §Wrote and acted in ***Produced ****Produced and acted in *****Produced and wrote ******Wrote, produced, acted in

W.R. BURNETT (b. November 25, 1899 in Springfield, Ohio—d. April 25, 1982 (age 82) in Santa Monica, California) was an American novelist and screenwriter (69 credits). In Chicago, Burnett found a job as a night clerk in the seedy Northmere Hotel, putting him in the esteemed company of marginal characters: prize fighters, hoodlums, hustlers and hobos. This milieu inspired his 1929 novel Little Caesar, which was adapted into a 1931 film produced by First National Pictures (Warner Brothers) and starring the unknown Edward G. Robinson. The novel and film’s unexpected success landed him a job as a film screenwriter. The Al Capone theme was one he

returned to in 1932 with Scarface. Burnett worked with many of the greats in acting and directing, including John Huston, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Michael Cimino, Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, Paul Muni, Steve McQueen, and Clint Eastwood. He received an Oscar nomination for his script for Wake Island (1942) and a Writers Guild nomination for his script for The Great Escape (1963). These are some of the films he has written for: The Finger Points (1931), Iron Man (1931), The Beast of the City (1932), Law and Order (1932), Dark Hazard (1934), The Whole Town's Talking (1935), Dr. Socrates (1935), 36

Hours to Kill (1936), Wild West Days (1937), Wine, Women and Horses (1937), Some Blondes Are Dangerous (1937), King of the Underworld (1939), Dark Command (1940), The Westerner (1940), Law and Order (1940), High Sierra (1941), The Getaway (1941), Dance Hall (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), Crash Dive (1943), Action in the North Atlantic (1943), Background to Danger (1943), San Antonio (1945), Nobody Lives Forever (1946), The Man I Love (1947), Belle Starr's Daughter (1948), Yellow Sky (1948), Kraft Theatre (TV Series) (1949), Colorado Territory (1949), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Danger (TV Series) (1950), Vendetta (1950), Iron Man (1951), The Racket (1951), Studio One in Hollywood (TV Series) (1952), Law and Order (1953), Arrowhead (1953), Dangerous Mission (1954), Night People (1954), Captain Lightfoot (1955), Illegal (1955), I Died a Thousand Times (1955), Screen Directors Playhouse (TV Series) (1955), Studio 57 (TV Series) (1956), Accused of Murder (1956), Short Cut to Hell (1957), The Badlanders (1958), The Hangman (1959), The Untouchables (TV Series) (1959), September Storm (1960), Naked City (TV Series) (1960), The Asphalt Jungle (TV Series) (1961), The Lawbreakers

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(1961), Sergeants 3 (1962), Cairo (1963), 4 for Texas (1963), The Legend of Jesse James (TV Series) (1965), The Jackals (1967), Off to See the Wizard (TV Series) (1967), The Virginian (TV Series) (1967), Bonanza (TV Series) (1968), Ice Station Zebra (1968), Stiletto (1969), and Cool Breeze (1972). MIKLÓS RÓZSA (b. April 18, 1907 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary [now Hungary]—d. July 27, 1995 (age 88) in Los Angeles, California) was a Hungarian-American composer trained in Germany (1925–1931), and active in France (1931–1935), the United Kingdom (1935–1940), and the United States (1940–1995), with extensive sojourns in Italy from 1953. Best known for his nearly one hundred film scores (95 credits), he nevertheless maintained a steadfast allegiance to absolute concert music throughout what he called his "double life." He won Oscars for scoring Spellbound (1945), A Double Life (1947), and Ben-Hur (1959). He was also nominated for 10 other films. These are some other films he composed for: Thunder in the City (1937), The Four Feathers (1939), The Thief of Bagdad (1940), That Hamilton Woman (1941), The Jungle Book (1942), Sahara (1943), So Proudly We Hail! (1943), Double Indemnity (1944), Blood on the Sun (1945), Lady on a Train (1945), The Lost Weekend (1945), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), The Killers (1946), Song of Scheherazade (1947), The Macomber Affair (1947), Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948), Command Decision (1948), Madame Bovary (1949), Adam's Rib (1949), East Side, West Side (1949), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Quo Vadis (1951), Ivanhoe (1952), The Story of Three Loves (1953), Julius Caesar (1953), Knights of the Round Table (1953), Men of the Fighting Lady (1954), Valley of the Kings (1954), Bhowani Junction (1956), Lust for Life (1956), Something of Value (1957), The Seventh Sin (1957), Tip on a Dead Jockey (1957), The World, The Flesh and The Devil (1959), King of Kings (1961), El Cid (1961), Sodom and Gomorrah (1962), The V.I.P.s (1963), The Green Berets (1968), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), Fedora (1978), Last Embrace (1979), Time After Time (1979), Eye of the Needle (1981), and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982). HAROLD ROSSON (b. April 6, 1895 in New York City, New York—d. September 6, 1988 (age 93) in Palm Beach, Florida) was an American cinematographer (154 credits) who worked during the early and classical Hollywood cinema. His career began in the early days of silent film in the 1910s. He is best known for his pioneering use of Technicolor in the visually groundbreaking 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. He was

nominated for 5 Oscars. These are some of the films he worked on: David Harum (1915), Oliver Twist (1916), The Victoria Cross (1916), The Cinema Murder (1919), Polly of the Storm Country (1920), Everything for Sale (1921), Dark Secrets (1923), Manhattan (1924), A Man Must Live (1925), The Little French Girl (1925), Up in Mabel's Room (1926), Getting Gertie's Garter (1927), Rough House Rosie (1927), Service for Ladies (1927), A Gentleman of Paris (1927), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), Abie's Irish Rose (1928), The Docks of New York (1928), Trent's Last Case (1929), Madam Satan (1930), Men Call It Love (1931), Son of India (1931), The Squaw Man (1931), Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), Red-Headed Woman (1932), Red Dust (1932), The Barbarian (1933), Hold Your Man (1933), Treasure Island (1934), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), The Ghost Goes West (1935), The Garden of Allah (1936), Captains Courageous (1937), Too Hot to Handle (1938), I Take This Woman (1940), A Door Will Open (1940), Edison, the Man (1940), Dr. Kildare Goes Home (1940), Flight Command (1940), The Penalty (1941), Tortilla Flat (1942), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), Three Wise Fools (1946), Duel in the Sun (1946), The Hucksters (1947), Command Decision (1948), The Stratton Story (1949), On the Town (1949), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), Lone Star (1952), Singin' in the Rain (1952), The Story of Three Loves (1953), Mambo (1954), Ulysses (1954), Pete Kelly's Blues (1955), The Bad Seed (1956), The Enemy Below (1957), No Time for Sergeants (1958), Decision at Midnight (1963), and El Dorado (1967)

STERLING HAYDEN (B. March 26, 1916 in Upper Montclair, New Jersey—d. May 23, 1986 (age 70) in Sausalito, California) was an American actor (72 credits). A leading man for most of his career, he specialized in westerns and film noir throughout the 1950s, in films such as John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956). He became noted for supporting roles in

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the 1960s, perhaps most memorably as the comically paranoid General Jack D. Ripper in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). These are some of the other films he acted in: Virginia (1941), El Paso (1949), Manhandled (1949), Journey Into Light (1951), Flat Top (1952), The Star (1952), So Big (1953), Fighter Attack (1953), Prince Valiant (1954), The Last Command (1955), Top Gun (1955), The Iron Sheriff (1957), Valerie (1957), Terror in a Texas Town (1958), The Godfather (1972), The Long Goodbye (1973), 1900 (1976), King of the Gypsies (1978), Winter Kills (1979), The Outsider (1979), 9 to 5 (1980), Venom (1981), and The Blue and the Gray (TV Mini-Series) (1982).

LOUIS CALHERN (b. February 19, 1895 as Carl Henry Vogt in Brooklyn, New York—d. May 12, 1956 (age 61) in Tokyo, Japan) was an American stage and screen actor (73 credits). Among his many memorable screen portrayals were Ambassador Trentino in the Marx Brothers classic Duck Soup (1933) and three diverse roles that he appeared in at MGM in 1950: a singing role as Buffalo Bill in the film version of the musical Annie Get Your Gun, the double-crossing lawyer and sugar-daddy to Marilyn Monroe in John Huston's film noir classic The Asphalt Jungle, and his Oscar-nominated performance as Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Magnificent Yankee (re-creating his role from the Broadway stage). These are some of the other films he acted in: What's Worth While? (1921), Too Wise Wives (1921), The Last Moment (1923), Stolen Heaven (1931), The Road to Singapore (1931), Blonde Crazy (1931), Okay America! (1932), 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), Strictly Personal (1933), The Count of Monte Cristo (1934), The Man with Two Faces (1934), The Arizonian (1935), The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Juarez (1939), Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940), Heaven Can Wait (1943), Nobody's Darling (1943), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944),

Notorious (1946), Arch of Triumph (1948), The Red Danube (1949), Nancy Goes to Rio (1950), A Life of Her Own (1950), Washington Story (1952), The Prisoner of Zenda (1952), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Julius Caesar (1953), Executive Suite (1954), Men of the Fighting Lady (1954), The Student Prince (1954), Blackboard Jungle (1955), and High Society (1956), JEAN HAGEN (b. August 3, 1923 in Chicago, Illinois—d. August 29, 1977 (age 54) in Los Angeles, California) was an American film and television actress (40 credits) best known for her role as Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain (1952), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her film debut was as a comical femme fatale in the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn 1949 classic Adam's Rib, directed by George Cukor. The Asphalt Jungle (1950) provided Hagen with her first starring role. Hagen received excellent reviews playing Doll Conover, a woman who sticks by criminal Dix's side until the bitter end. These are some of her other film and television appearances: Ambush (1950), Side Street (1950), A Life of Her Own (1950), Night Into Morning (1951), No Questions Asked (1951), Carbine Williams (1952), Arena (1953), Latin Lovers (1953), Half a Hero (1953), The Big Knife (1955), Sunrise at Campobello (1960), Ben Casey (TV Series) (1962), Panic in Year Zero (1952), Starsky and Hutch (TV Series) (1976), and The Streets of San Francisco (TV Series) (1976). JAMES WHITMORE (b. October 1, 1921 in White Plains, New York—d. February 6, 2009 (age 87) in Malibu, California) was an American film and television actor (159 credits) and theater actor. During his career, Whitmore won three of the four EGOT honors: a Tony, a Grammy, and an Emmy. Whitmore also won a Golden Globe and was nominated for two Academy Awards. These are some of his film and television appearances: Repertory Theatre (TV Series) (1949), The Undercover Man (1949), Battleground (1949), The Outriders (1950), Please Believe Me (1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Next Voice You Hear... (1950), Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone (1950), Angels in the Outfield (1951), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), Across the Wide Missouri (1951), Because You're Mine (1952), The Girl Who Had Everything (1953), Kiss Me Kate (1953), All the Brothers Were Valiant (1953), The Great Diamond Robbery (1954), The Command (1954), Them! (1954), Battle Cry (1955), The McConnell Story (1955), Oklahoma! (1955), The Last Frontier (1955), The Eddy Duchin Story (1956), Crime in the Streets (1956), Bus Stop (TV Series) (1961), The Twilight Zone (TV Series) (1963), Black Like Me (1964), Chuka (1967), Nobody's Perfect (1968), Planet of the Apes (1968), Madigan (1968),

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Bonanza (TV Series) (1968), The Split (1968), Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), Chato's Land (1972), The Harrad Experiment (1973), High Crime (1973), I Will Fight No More Forever (TV Movie) (1975), The First Deadly Sin (1980), Nuts (1987), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Fun with Dick and Jane (2005), and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (TV Series) (2007).

SAM JAFFE (b. March 10, 1891 in New York City, New York—d. March 24, 1984 (age 93) in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California) was an American film and television actor (74 credits). In 1951, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and appeared in other classic films such as Ben-Hur (1959) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). These are some his other film and television appearances: A Cheap Vacation (Short) (1916), The Scarlet Empress (1934), We Live Again (1934), Lost Horizon (1937), Gunga Din (1939), Stage Door Canteen (1943), 13 Rue Madeleine (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), The Accused (1949), Rope of Sand (1949), I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1951), Under the Gun (1951), The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958), The Untouchables (TV Series) (1961), Naked City (TV Series) (1961), Bonanza (TV Series) (1966), Batman (TV Series) (1966), Guns for San Sebastian (1968), The Great Bank Robbery (1969), The Streets of San Francisco (TV Series) (1974), Columbo (TV Series) (1975), The Bionic Woman (TV Series) (1976), Kojak (TV Series) (1977), Gideon's Trumpet (TV Movie) (1980), Nothing Lasts Forever (1984), and On the Line (1984). JOHN MCINTIRE (b. June 27, 1907 in Spokane, Washington—d. January 30, 1991 (age 83) in Pasadena, California) was an American character actor (142 credits) in film and television. These are some of the films and

television series he appeared in: The Ramparts We Watch (1940), The Hucksters (1947), Call Northside 777 (1948), Black Bart (1948), River Lady (1948), The Street with No Name (1948), Command Decision (1948), Down to the Sea in Ships (1949), Red Canyon (1949), Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949), Ambush (1950), Francis (1950), No Sad Songs for Me (1950), Shadow on the Wall (1950), Winchester '73 (1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Saddle Tramp (1950), Walk Softly, Stranger (1950), You're in the Navy Now (1951), Horizons West (1952), A Lion Is in the Streets (1953), Apache (1954), The Far Country (1954), Stranger on Horseback (1955), The Phenix City Story (1955), The Kentuckian (1955), To Hell and Back (1955), I've Lived Before (1956), Away All Boats (1956), The Tin Star (1957), The Light in the Forest (1958), Naked City (TV Series) (1958-1959), The Gunfight at Dodge City (1959), Who Was That Lady? (1960), Psycho (1960), Elmer Gantry (1960), Seven Ways from Sundown (1960), The Untouchables (TV Series) (1960), Two Rode Together (1961), Summer and Smoke (1961), The Fugitive (TV Series) (1966), Dallas (TV Series) (1979), The Incredible Hulk (TV Series) (1980), Honkytonk Man (1982), Cloak & Dagger (1984), St. Elsewhere (TV Series) (1986), and Turner & Hooch (1989). MARC LAWRENCE (b. February 17, 1910 in New York City, New York—d. November 27, 2005 (age 95) in Palm Springs, California) was an American character actor in film and television (221 credits) who specialized in portraying underworld types. These are some films and television series he appeared in: If I Had a Million (1932), Gambling Ship (1933), White Woman (1933), Straight Is the Way (1934), Strangers All (1935), Dr. Socrates (1935), Robin Hood of El Dorado (1936), Under Two Flags (1936), Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936), San Quentin (1937), Charlie Chan on Broadway (1937), Penitentiary (1938), Convicted (1938), I Am the Law (1938), While New York Sleeps (1938), Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938), Homicide Bureau (1939), Blind Alley (1939), Johnny Apollo (1940), Brigham Young (1940), The Great Profile (1940), Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum (1940), Lady Scarface (1941), Public Enemies (1941), Nazi Agent (1942), This Gun for Hire (1942), The Ox-Bow Incident (1942), Submarine Alert (1943), Tampico (1944), The Princess and the Pirate (1944), Dillinger (1945), Don't Fence Me In (1945), Life with Blondie (1945), Blonde Alibi (1946), The Virginian (1946), Cloak and Dagger (1946), Joe Palooka in the Knockout (1947), Unconquered (1947), Captain from Castile (1947), I Walk Alone (1947), Key Largo (1948), Calamity Jane and Sam Bass (1949), Tough Assignment (1949), Black Hand (1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Desert Hawk (1950), Abbott and Costello in the Foreign

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Legion (1950), My Favorite Spy (1951), Funniest Show on Earth (1953), Helen of Troy (1956), The Rifleman (TV Series) (1958-60), The Untouchables (TV Series) (1960-63), King of Kong Island (1968), The Kremlin Letter (1970), Bonanza (TV Series) (1970), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Marathon Man (1976), Baretta (TV Series) (1976), Wonder Woman (TV Series) (1979), Cataclysm (1980), The Big Easy (1986), Ruby (1992), Four Rooms (1995), Gotti (TV Movie) (1996), End of Days (1999), and The Shipping News (2001). MARILYN MONROE (b. Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926 in Los Angeles, California—d. August 5, 1962 (age 36) in Los Angeles, California) was an American film actress (33 credits), model, and singer. The critic Jacqueline Rose recently recounted how cinematographer Jack Cardiff once said that Monroe glowed. In Rose’s essay, she asks what did this glow both illuminate and obscure. Rose asks “What does she allow us to see and not to see?” Citing Monroe’s own words, Rose suggests one thing Monroe’s male admirers did not see was her: “Men do not see me,” she said, “they just lay their eyes on me.” Rose, in particular, is interested in Monroe’s obscured intellectual qualities, qualities that drew journalist Bill Weatherby to her as her confidant and discussion partner in the last years of her life. In her last interview, Monroe reflected on the human condition: “We human beings are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves” (London Review of Books). 1950, Monroe had bit parts in Love Happy, A Ticket to Tomahawk, Right Cross and The Fireball, but also appeared in minor supporting roles in two critically acclaimed films: Joseph Mankiewicz's drama All About Eve and John Huston's crime film The Asphalt Jungle. Despite only appearing on screen for a few minutes in the latter, she gained a mention in Photoplay, an early film fan magazine, and according to Monroe biographer Donald Spoto “moved effectively from movie model to serious actress.” These are some of her other film appearances: Dangerous Years (1947), You Were Meant for Me (1948), Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948), Green Grass of Wyoming (1948), Ladies of the Chorus (1948), Home Town Story (1951), As Young as You Feel (1951), Love Nest (1951), Let's Make It Legal (1951), Clash by Night (1952), We're Not Married! (1952), Don't Bother to Knock (1952), O. Henry's Full House (1952), Monkey Business (1952), The Jack Benny Program (TV Series) (1952), Niagara (1953), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), River of No Return (1954), There's No Business Like Show Business (1954), The Seven Year Itch (1955), Bus Stop (1956), The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), Some Like It Hot (1959), Let's Make Love (1960), and The Misfits (1961).

“John Huston”: from World Film Directors, Vol I. Edited by John Wakeman. H. W. Wilson Co., NY, 1987, entry by Philip Kemp John (Marcellus) Huston, American director, scenarist, actor, and producer, was born in the town of Nevada, Missouri, where the Water and Power Company—or, according to some accounts, the entire town—had been won by his maternal grandfather, John Gore, in a poker game. Huston’s father, Walter, was at that time a small-time actor whose itinerant troupe had just gone bust in Arizona; John Gore therefore installed him as head of Nevada’s public utilities. Totally without engineering training, he proved spectacularly unsuited for this post, and when a fire broke out he mishandled a valve, cutting off the water supply. Half of Nevada burned to the ground, and Walter, with his wife and infant son John, went back on the road. Huston’s parents’ marriage—contracted at the St. Louis World’s Fair was never a great success, and in 1909 they separated, divorcing four years later. Huston spent his boyhood shuttling between them, spending most of the time with his mother, who became a journalist under her own name of Rhea Gore. With her he traveled the Midwest, picking up her taste for literature, horses, plush hotels, and gambling. He remained somewhat in awe of her, though, feeling that she despised him as a romantic fantasist. “Nothing I ever did pleased my mother,” he later remarked. He was far more at ease with his father, who when not acting in New York would take him on the vaudeville circuit, staying in hotels that were anything but plush. Huston thoroughly relished the contrast, and was enthralled by the theatrical low-life he encountered. But at twelve he was found to be suffering from Bright’s disease and an “enlarged heart.” The boy was placed in a sanatorium in Phoenix, Arizona, and told he must henceforth live as a cautious invalid. Rebelling, he took up secret midnight swimming in a nearby river. After some months, this pastime was discovered, and it was decided that he must have made a fortunate recovery. His mother, who had remarried, moved to Los Angeles, where Huston attended Lincoln High School. As if making up for list time, he plunged into a multitude of interests: abstract painting, ballet, English and French literature, opera, horseback riding, and boxing. At fifteen he dropped out of high school, becoming one of the state’s top-

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ranking amateur lightweights (with a permanently flattened nose) while studying at the Art Students League in Los Angeles. He was also “infatuated” with the cinema, though as yet only as a spectator. “Charlie Chaplin was a god, and William S. Hart. I remember the enormous impact the UFA films had on me, those of Emil Jannings and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I saw this many times.” Walter Huston had moved over from vaudeville to the legitimate theatre, and in 1924 achieved fame on Broadway with the lead in O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms. Watching his father’s rehearsals, Huston was deeply impressed by O’Neill’s work and fascinated by the mechanism of acting: “What I learned there, during those weeks of rehearsal, would serve me for the rest of my life.” He himself acted briefly with the Provincetown Players in 1924. The following year, recovering from a mastoid operation, he took a long vacation in Mexico, where among other adventures he rode as an honorary member of the Mexican cavalry. On his return, Huston married a friend from high school, Dorothy Harvey. The marriage lasted barely a year. He had begun to write short stories, one of which was published by H.L. Mencken in the American Mercury. Further pieces, clearly influence by Hemingway, appeared in Esquire, the New York Times, and other journals He also wrote Frankie and Johnny, “ a puppet play with music (the music being by Sam Jaffe). This was produced in Greenwich Village by Ruth Squires and published in book form. Through his mother, Huston was given a job on the New York Graphic. “I had no talent as a journalist whatever and I was fired oftener than any reporter ever has been within such a limited time. There was a kind-hearted city editor who kept hiring me back.” When even that man’s patience ran out, Huston headed for Hollywood, where his father had moved with the coming of talkies. Huston was hired as a scenarist by Goldwyn Studios, spent six months there with no assignments, and then moved to his father’s studio, Universal, where he collaborated on four scripts, two of them for films starring his father: A House Divided and Law and Order. His colleagues had no doubt of his talent, but one of them described him at this time as “just a drunken boy, hopelessly immature.” After a lethal automobile accident in which he was the driver, he “wanted nothing so much as to get away” and left Universal for a job at Gaumont-British in London. Unhappy there, he quit again and lived rough for a while, before bumming his way to Paris and eventually back to New York. After a brief stint as a journalist there and a few months with the WPA Theatre in Chicago, he returned to Hollywood in 1937 and went to work as a writer for Warner Brothers. Newly married to Leslie Black, Huston now seemed ready to settle to a serious career as a screenwriter. His first credit was for William Wyler’s Jezebel (1937); this was

followed by The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938), and two of Warner’s prestigious biopics, Juarez (1939) and Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940). Dr. Ehrlich won Huston an Academy Award nomination, as did his next script, for Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York (1941). He was now successful enough to persuade the studio that, if his next script was a hit, he should

be allowed a chance to direct. “They indulged me rather. They liked my work as a writer and they wanted to keep me on. If I wanted to direct, why, they’d give me a shot at it, and if it didn’t come off all that well, they wouldn’t be too disappointed as it was to be a very small picture.” Huston’s next script was for High Sierra (1941). Directed by Raoul Walsh, it gave Humphrey Bogart, as a gunman on the run, his breakthrough to stardom, and provided Huston with the hit he wanted. Warners

kept their word and offered him his choice of subject. He chose Dashiell Hammett’s thriller, The Maltese Falcon, which had already been adapted twice by Warners, both times badly. Wisely, Huston stuck closely to the original, taking over much of Hammett’s dialogue unchanged, and filming with a clean, uncluttered style that provided a cinematic equivalent to the novel’s fast, laconic narrative. He also benefited from a superb cast. George Raft was offered the role of the private eye Sam Spade but turned it down (as he had previously with the lead in High Sierra). Bogart, who liked Huston, was happy to take over, supported by Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet (in his first film role), Elisha Cook, Jr. and—in a walk-on part “for luck”—Walter Huston. The Maltese Falcon (1941) was made on a small, B-picture budget, and put out by Warners with minimal publicity. They were taken aback by the enthusiastic response of public and critics. The latter immediately hailed the film as a classic, and it has since been claimed as the best detective melodrama ever made. “It is hard to say,” wrote Harold Barnes in the Herald Tribune, “whether Huston the adapter or Huston the fledgling director, is more responsible for this triumph.” Already, in his directorial debut, many of Huston’s characteristic preoccupations appear. The plot is a web of deceptive appearances; characters and even objects (including the coveted falcon itself) are duplicitous and untrustworthy, and the hero himself is not what he seems. Spade, outwardly a cynical opportunist, proves to be driven by a scrupulous personal code. “When a man’s partner is killed,” he says, turning the woman he wants over to justice, “he’s supposed to do something about it.” …A few days before shooting was complete on Across the Pacific, Huston received his army induction papers….Appositely, his first assignment as a documentary filmmaker for the Signal Corps was across the Pacific—in the Aleutian islands off Alaska. The resulting film, Report From the Aleutians (1943) was described in the New York Times as “one of the war’s outstanding records of what our men are

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doing. It is furthermore an honest record.” Promoted to captain, Huston was sent to Italy to make The Battle of San Pietro (1944) regarded as one of the finest combat documentaries ever filmed. “No war film I have seen,” wrote James Agee in The Nation, “has been quite so attentive to the heaviness of casualties, and to the number of yards gained or lost, in such an action.”…Huston’s ironic realism disconcerted the War Department. One general accused him of having made “a film against war,” eliciting the response: “Well, sir, when I make a picture that’s for war—why I hope you take me out and shoot me.” Despite this, he was promoted to major and awarded the Legion of Merit. His last film for the army was Let There Be Light (1945), on the rehabilitation of soldiers suffering from combat neuroses. The overtly optimistic message was constantly undercut by the compassionate objectivity of the filming, which for Huston was “practically a religious experience.” The War Department shelved the picture, but it was finally given general release in 1980. Noting “its voice-over narration [provided by Walter Huston], its use of wipes and dissolves, and its full-orchestra soundtrack music,” Vincent Canby called it “an amazingly elegant movie.” Discharged from the Army in 1945, Huston returned to Hollywood, where he was divorced from his second wife. After a brief, spectacular affair with Olivia de Havilland, he married the actress Evelyn Keyes in 1946…. At this period Huston had a reputation—which he did little to discourage—as one of the wild men of Hollywood. Along with such friends as Bogart and William Wyler, he indulged in frequent and well-publicized bouts of drinking, gambling, and general horseplay. …Jack Warner, though autocratic, was ready to tolerate a lot in return for talent and box-office success. He even let himself be persuaded—though with considerable misgivings—to allow Huston to shoot his next film almost entirely on location, and in Mexico. At the time, this was a radical move. The results justified it. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) is generally agreed to be one of Huston’s finest films. …Treasure has often been cited as the archetypal Huston movie, though the director himself denies the presence of any authorial unity in his films.” I fail to see any continuity in my work from picture to picture—what’s remarkable is how different the pictures are, one from another. In fact, though Huston’s cinematic style varies according to the nature of his subject matter, clear thematic preoccupations can be seen to recur throughout his work. The classic “Huston movie” concerns a quest, often a parody of one of society’s sanctioned forms of endeavor—the pursuit of wealth, power, religious knowledge, imperial sovereignty—which is destined, after initial success, to end in failure and futility. (This kind of denouement became known in the trade as “the Huston ending.”)… The art, technique, and moral implications of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (as of The Maltese Falcon) have since been discussed in great detail by many critics.

…Warners were less circumspect over Huston’s next film, his fourth with Bogart. Key Largo (1948) was adapted from a prewar play by Maxwell Anderson, originally written in blank verse. Huston and his co-scriptwriter Richard Brooks, junked the verse and updated the plot….To Huston’s annoyance, the studio cut several scenes from the final release. Not long before this, Huston had been refused permission, under the terms of his contract, to direct a play by his idol Eugene O’Neill for the Broadway stage, Angered by these incidents, Huston left Warners when his contract expired. Together with Sam Spiegel and Jules Buck, Huston

founded Horizon Films. The new company’s first feature was a courageous failure. Huston had been among the strongest opponents of HUAC and the Hollywood blacklist, and when John Garfield came under pressure, Huston offered him the lead on We Were Strangers (1949) as a deliberate gesture of defiance—the more so since the prophetic plot concerned a

revolution in Cuba against a corrupt dictatorship. It was attacked on release by both left and right. It was also a box-office disaster, and Huston admitted that “it didn’t turn out to be a very good picture.” Needing funds, he signed a short-term contract with MGM. Having refused Quo Vadis—despite an amazing episode when Louis B. Mayer (according to Huston) “crawled across the floor and took my hands and kissed them” in order to persuade him to reconsider—Huston took on a far more congenial subject in The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Based on a novel by W.R. Burnett (author of Little Caesar and High Sierra), this was the progenitor of a long cycle of “caper movies,” in which a crime (here a million-dollar jewel theft) is successfully carried out by sympathetically depicted criminals, only to fail through subsequent ill-chance or internal dissension. Huston was breaking new ground in presenting crime as an occupation like any other, “a left-handed form of human endeavor” carried out by ordinary people motivated not by the megalomanic will to power of the 1930s movie gangsters, but simply by the desire to feed their families or realize some small private ambition….That same year, 1950, Huston was amicably divorced from Evelyn Keyes; one day later he married Enrica Soma. In August, while Asphalt Jungle was still filming, his father died of a heart attack. Huston’s second picture for MGM was…The Red Badge of Courage (1951), taken from Stephen Crane’s novel of the Civil War….Huston left for Africa to make a film for Sam Spiegel, his partner in Horizon Films. The script of The African Queen (1951) was taken from C.S. Forester’s novel and written by Huston in collaboration with his greatest critical supporter, James Agee….Filming, on location in the Congo and Uganda, took place under appalling conditions: not only extreme heat and humidity, but dysentery, malaria, mosquitoes, crocodiles and safari ants beset actors and crew. Everybody became ill except Bogart, Lauren Bacall (who came to keep Bogart company)

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and Huston, who all ascribed their immunity to copious quantities of Scotch….The film was a huge popular success, and won Bogart the only Oscar of his career. Through some financial sleight-of-hand, little of the profits from The African Queen ever reached Huston, who consequently pulled out of Horizon Films. For his next three films he acted as his own producer….Meanwhile, disgusted by the HUAC “witch-hunt” and the “moral rot” it had induced in the entertainment industry, Huston had moved to Ireland. He had bought a house in Galway, St. Clerans, and moved there in 1952 with his wife Enrica and their children Anthony and Angelica. Twelve years later he took Irish citizenship…. After two financially unsuccessful pictures [Beat the Devil and Moby Dick]…deep in debt…he accepted a three-picture contract with 20th Century-Fox…Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (1957), teaming Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr as a marine and a nun stranded on a Japanese-held island during World War II, struck many reviewers as an attempt to repeat The African Queen. Huston coscripted, and enjoyed working with Mitchum, whom he considers “one of the really fine actors of my time.” …A retrospective atmosphere of doom hangs over the Misfits (1961). Clark Gable died shortly after shooting was finished. Marilyn Monroe never completed another film. Montgomery Clift and Thelma Ritter were dead within a few years. While the film was being made, the marriage between Monroe and Arthur Miller (who had written the script) broke up, virtually on set. The story, about down-and-out modern cowboys who round up wild horses to be made into dog food, carries strong allegorical overtones as a metaphor for the trashing of the American dream of innocence and freedom, the closing of the frontier. Despite problems with Monroe, who by this stage in her career was in a desperate condition, Huston was pleased with the finished picture. “I had obtained the qualities I wanted.” Critical and public reception was lukewarm, but the film’s reputation has grown steadily ever since. Huston had conceived the idea of making a film about Freud while working on Let There Be Light. He now invited Jean-Paul Sartre to prepare a script. Sartre did so—four hundred pages of it. Huston tactfully suggested that cuts might be necessary, and he and Sartre went over the script together. Sartre returned to Paris, and in due course submitted his revised script—of six hundred pages. With the help of Charles Kaufman, who had coscripted Let There Be Light, the scenario was pruned to a manageable hundred and fifty pages, although Sartre disowned it. Freud: The Secret Passion (1962) is not a conventional biopic, but rather an intellectual detective story, in which Freud is shown tracking down, in himself as much as

in others, the psychosexual source of the guilt which torments them….By way of relaxation, Huston turned to a spoof murder mystery, The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), in which the villain, played by Kirk Douglas, appears in numerous elaborate disguises. As an additional gimmick, the film features various guest stars, also heavily disguised. Response was mainly puzzled….

“The Huston ending” wherein all human activities culminate in ironic futility and disaster was notably absent from The Night of the Iguana (1964). Huston and his co-scriptwriter, Anthony Veiller, took a characteristically overheated and doom-laden play by Tennessee Williams and transformed it into a melodramatic farce with a happy ending. Amazingly, Williams went along with their changes and even helped with the script…. While Iguana was doing well at the box office, Huston

was visited in Ireland by Dino de Laurentiis, who planned to film The Bible. He envisaged a multiplicity of episodes, each with its own eminent director. Eventually, the producer modestly limited himself to half the Book of Genesis, with Huston as sole director. Huston also played Noah and the voice of God….The film finally cost eighteen million—by far the most expensive of Huston’s career—and received atrocious notices…. In Fat City (1972) Huston drew on the boxing world of his youth. Unlike most fight movies, though, the film offered its characters no moment of glory in the big time; these were the small-time losers on the lower fringes of the sport, failures and derelicts never more than a step away from defeat. Filmed in muted, smoky tones in the bars, tenements, and pool-halls of dead-end Stockton, California, Fat City offers the clearest statement of Huston’s fascination with defeat, and the small vestiges of dignity that can be salvaged from it. As a washed-up fighter, Stacy Keach gave the performance of a lifetime. Critics hailed the film as a return to form, and John Russell Taylor described it as “one of those late films by old masters that look effortless because they are effortless.”… Huston had long cherished an ambition to film Kipling’s story The Man Who Would Be King. Originally he planned it with Gable and Bogart; then with Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. It finally reached the screen with Sean Connery and Michael Caine in the leading roles as the two British soldiers who set up a private kingdom in the wild mountains of Afghanistan. For once, delay proved beneficial. As Huston remarked, his modern actors brought “a reality to it that the old stars could not do. Today they would seem synthetic, so in a way I’m glad I didn’t make the picture with them.” Certainly it would be hard to imagine the film done

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better. There is a sweep and grandeur, a legendary resonance to the narrative for which the misused term “epic” is for once wholly appropriate.…For the first time in a decade, Huston achieved success at the box office as well as with the critics, and he and Gladys Hill were nominated for an Academy Award for their screenplay. After The Man Who Would Be King, Huston underwent heart surgery and as a result produced no feature films for four years. Any speculation, though, that his career as a director might be over was answered by Wise Blood (1979). … An unmixed success was Prizzi’s Honor (1985), based on the book by Richard Condon, starring Jack Nicholson, Katherine Turner, William Hickey and Huston’s daughter Anjelica (who won an Oscar for best supporting actress), and featuring a witty opera-spouting score by Alex North. Huston’s gift for eliciting definitive performances from his actors and his delight in labyrinthine plots were evident in this dark satire on the Mafia, American business, family honor, and romantic love. Nicolson, as Charley Partanna, a faithful enforcer for the Prizzi family, falls in love with a glamorous mystery woman (Turner), who turns out to be a professional killer as well. After a convoluted series of double-crosses and unexpected revelations, Charley is forced to make the ultimate choice between personal happiness and family obligation. The film, wrote Vincent Canby, “does to The Godfather what Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews did to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. It locates the deliriously comic center within all sentimentality.” Many critics thought it a perfect Huston vehicle and the director’s most fully realized film since The Man who Would be King. After this success, Huston set to work on an adaptation of James Joyce’s story” The Dead,” which he completed shortly before his death. Robin Wood wrote of Huston in Richard Roud’s Cinema that “the problem lies in tracing any significant unifying or developing pattern through his career as a whole….This is but one of several signs—though a crucial one—that Huston is not a major artist, though he has at different stages of his career been mistaken for one.” This is the view that has dominated serious discussion of Huston’s work since the rise of auteurist criticism in the 1960s. But Andrew Sarris, once one of the director’s most dismissive critics, wrote in 1980 that “what I have always tended to underestimate in Huston was how deep in his guts he could feel the universal experience of pointlessness and failure. And there are other signs that Huston’s films are being reassessed—notably the thirty-page essay by Richard T. Jameson in Film Comment (May-June, 1980). Although all of Huston’s pictures are adaptations, in which he has sought “to find the particular style or look best suited to render a script into a persuasive and distinctive cinematic reality,” Jameson maintains that “we do encounter a cohesive world-view, not only thematically, but also stylistically; there is a Huston look,” though one extremely difficult to define. Jameson might agree with James Agee that this “look” proceeds from Huston’s “sense of what is natural to the eye and his delicate, simple feeling for space relationships.” It is, moreover, Jameson’s “considered opinion that with The Misfits Huston entered upon virtually a second career (after a few years of wandering in the contract wilderness) that includes some of the most mature, most

personal, and most provocative films, not only of his oeuvre but also of the Sixties and Seventies at large.” In his last years, Huston pursued a parallel career as a film actor. In 1963 he was invited by Otto Preminger to portray a Boston prelate in The Cardinal and virtually stole the picture. Then, besides taking key roles in several of his own films, he appeared in a wide variety of works directed by others: most notably as the sinister patriarch Noah Cross in Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), and as Teddy Roosevelt’s adviser John Hay in Milius’s The Wind and the Lion (1975). Huston evidently enjoyed acting and invariably denied that he took it at all seriously. “It’s a cinch,” he maintained, “and they pay you damn near as much as you make directing.” Suffering from emphysema, Huston spent some time in hospitals at the end of his life. When in Mexico, he lived at his home in Las Calletas, near Puerta Vallarta, in a clearing between the jungle and the Pacific Ocean, accessible only by boat, together with various friends and a wide variety of animals. Living by the sea, he said, quoting an Irish saying, “lends tranquility to the soul. I’m content to have arrived at this moment in eternity, but for the life of me I don’t know how I got here.”

from John Huston’s Filmmaking. Lesley Brill. Cambridge U Press NY 1997 Why has Huston’s artistic personality gone more or less unremarked for so long? Briefly, his neglect seems to be a consequence partly of the history of taste and fashion among critics and academics in film studies, and partly of a stylistic finish so smooth and self-effacing that it conceals its remarkable art as straightforward. Generic story-telling (if such a thing exists). Huston’s art looks to us, I suspect, as Shakespeare’s did to his contemporaries: like nature itself. James Agee, in his enormously influential 1950 Life magazine portrait established this understanding: “Each of Huston’s pictures has a visual tone and style of its own, dictated to his camera by the story’s essential content and spirit.” James Naremore characterizes Huston’s method by contrasting it with Dashiell Hammett’s: “Hammett’s art is minimalist and deadpan, but Huston, contrary to his reputation. Is a highly energetic and expressive storyteller who like to make comments through his images.

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To my knowledge, at least thirty-four of Huston’s thirty-seven features films derive directly from novels, stories, or plays. Huston began in the movies as a writer of screenplays.... He has spoken of the intimate connection between writing and directing: “There’s really no difference between them, it’s an extension, one from the other. Ideally I think the writer should go on and direct the picture. I think of the director as an extension of the writer.” Implicit in early works like The Maltese Falcon, In This Our Life, and Key Largo (’48), themes of identity continue to dominate at the end of Huston’s career in Prizzi’s Honor and The Dead. In a 1981 interview, Huston spoke of his first film as “a dramatization of myself, how I felt about things.” from John Huston: An Open Book. Knopf, NY 1980 I came well to my very first directorial assignment. The Maltese Falcon was a very carefully tailored screenplay, not only scene by scene, but set-up by set-up. I made a sketch of each set-up. If it was to be a pan or dolly shot, I’d indicate it. I didn’t want ever to be at a loss before the actors or the camera crew. I went over the sketches with Willy Wyler. He had a few suggestions to make, but on the whole, approved what he saw. I also showed the sketches to my producer, Henry Blanke. All Blanke said was, “John, just remember that each scene as you shoot it, is the most important scene in the picture.” That’s the best advice a young director could have. from John Huston Interviews. Edited by Robert Emmet Long. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2001. “An Interview with John Huston” David Brandes, 1977 DB: Mr. Huston, you’re a writer, you’re a director, and you’re an actor. And you’re famous in all three areas. Which do you prefer? JH: I don’t make a distinction between writing and directing. But to write and direct one’s own material is certainly the best approach. The directing is kind of an extension of the writing. So far as the acting is concerned, that’s just a sort of lark—a well-paid lark, I might add—to relieve the responsibilities of being a director. DB: Why would a creative person like yourself become a filmmaker rather than, say, a novel writer? JH: I was raised in the tradition of films—that is, like so many children of my generation, we looked to the screen for our heroes; we imitated and emulated William S. Hart; people like Hart and Chaplin were gods. The films were every bit as much alive as literature, and I was always fascinated by films. So I started out to become a writer but I wasn’t aware I wanted to become a director until after I had written for films for several years. Then I decided I could do my own material

better than someone else. So I really just drifted into directing…. DB: What about the writing itself? Is there anything about the screenplay form which makes it appeal to you? JH: The ideal screenplay has a kind of discipline. You must make your points with a certain clarity and decisiveness

which makes the ideal screenplay closer to poetry than to the novel. I find the form itself attracts me. DB: Yet poetry is such a pure form whereas film seems to be much more of a composite, so much less pure. JH:I think of pictures as being quite pure when they are truly realized. And closer, perhaps, to the thought processes than any other form. The ideal picture is almost as though the reel were behind your own eyes and you were projecting your own thoughts. Its only when the picture falters that

your thoughts stumble as a result of the picture’s faltering. Something “wrong” appears on the screen and the dream is broken…. I don’t make drawings anymore, but there’s a logic to shooting a scene. After your first shot, everything else falls into place. And shooting on location as I do and not in the studio, the circumstances usually tell you what the first shot is going to be. By the way, I’d like to make an observation here. Very seldom does an audience realize what you’re doing with the camera. When the camera is performing at its best, the audience isn’t aware of it. It’s so close to the thought process that you’re watching the scene, not the movement of the camera—no matter what kind of ballet it might be doing. As a rule, I think of the camera as part of the scene. It’s the camera as protagonist. You enter the scene through the camera’s eyes. It has a physiological function. Like the physiology of the cut. Try this little trick yourself. Look at something directly in front of you. Then look at something to the direct right of you. You’ve made a complete right angle. But notice that in doing it you blink your eyes. In other words, because you’re familiar with the whole area in between, you blank it out and go directly from point A to point B. That is a cut. Only when the intervening space—the relationship between those two objects—is important do you pan. If it isn't important, you cut…. Making a film is like every other undertaking in life. Its success depends on whether or not you’re equipped for it. And I’m not referring to learning. I don’t know that I’ve learned a hell of a lot. I think I was probably as good a director at the beginning as I am now. Oh I’ve probably learned a few small technical things. But I’m not sure my understanding has deepened since I was nine years old…. DV: Do you feel a film like Jaws will have the same appeal over time?

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JH: I haven’t seen Jaws so I can’t comment on it. But good films—truly good films—will endure. Granted the camera used to turn at a different speed and the acting style was one of exaggerated delivery. Today we’re closer to reality. Figures on the screen move at the same pace we do in life. And the style has changed, of course. But a Chaplin film is as good today as it was then. DB: What is your opinion of the state of the art today? JH: One of the ill effects of the modern set up of the industry is that if a picture isn’t immediately successful, they won’t risk any more money publicizing it. I’ve seen a number of fine films that the public was barely able to see. Like The Traveling Executioner with Stacy Keach, or Walkabout from Australia. I think Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller was a kind of masterpiece. Midnight Cowboy was a wonderful film. Beautiful pictures—and our loss, as a result of the present economic set up. On the other hand, Earthquake, Towering Inferno, etc. I haven’t seen them and I’m not drawn to them because they seem to contain a formula. What I hear about them doesn’t sufficiently attract me. I’d rather read a book. For more on Houston, see Bruce Jackson: “John Huston,” http://sensesofcinema.com/2019/great-directors/huston-john/

Geoffrey O’Brien: “The Asphalt Jungle: ‘A Left-Handed Form of Human Endeavor’” (Criterion Notes) Jean-Pierre Melville once declared that, by his reckoning, there were precisely nineteen possible dramatic variants on the relations between cops and crooks, and that all nineteen were to be found in “that masterpiece of John Huston” The Asphalt Jungle (1950). From Bob le flambeur (1956) on, Melville’s own work often pays direct homage to the film he so admired, and he was certainly not alone in his emulation. The cinematic descendants of The Asphalt Jungle are by now almost beyond counting, including three direct remakes: Delmer Daves’s The

Badlanders (1958), Wolf Rilla’s Cairo (1963), and Barry Pollack’s Cool Breeze (1972). The celebrated eleven-minute jewelry store robbery, with its blueprinted maneuvers, deft evasions of electronic surveillance, and carefully controlled explosions, created a model that Rififi, The Killing, Seven Thieves, and a thousand others would ever more elaborately follow. Every heist movie, every tale of downbeat criminals coming together in a foredoomed conspiracy under the guidance of a professorial mastermind, carries echoes of Huston’s film, whose originality is perhaps now harder to discern because its elements have been so widely appropriated. It firmed up the template for one of cinema’s most familiar dramatic arcs: the assembling of the team, the high-precision execution of the caper, the chaotic and generally bloody aftermath. Yet even if The Asphalt Jungle was seen in its own day as a model of nail-biting suspense, it comes across now as a most Chekhovian film noir, steeped in a mood of regret even before the action begins and proceeding almost gently on its inevitable downward course. Everybody is more or less washed up from the start: the nervous bookie Cobby (Marc Lawrence), with his admission that “money makes me sweat, that’s the way I am”; the Kentucky-born hooligan Dix (Sterling Hayden), nursing memories of his family’s lost days of horse-breeding glory, and shrugging off the helplessly adoring Doll (Jean Hagen); the cat-loving, hunchbacked diner owner Gus (James Whitmore); the corrupt, philandering lawyer Alonzo D. Emmerich (Louis Calhern), whose bedridden wife (Dorothy Tree) is lost in probably delusory memories while his young girlfriend, Angela (Marilyn Monroe), dreams of a beach holiday in Cuba and his henchman (Brad Dexter) stores up grudges for eventual payback. The emergence from prison of the brilliant Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) with a master plan for a high-yield robbery brings these people together, but there is never any doubt about the outcome. Every fatal character trait, every incipient double cross is laid out so plainly that even the participants seem quite aware of the odds against them. The film is remarkably faithful to its source, W. R. Burnett’s 1949 novel. Huston was generally conscientious in his literary adaptations, and he admired Burnett’s book greatly. The script retains long stretches of dialogue from the novel, and some of the movie’s most indelible grace notes are pure Burnett, like Gus’s violent rage at the trucker who mouths off about deliberately running over cats, or Mrs. Emmerich’s pitiful plea for a game of casino with her distracted husband. All the main points of plot and motivation are set out explicitly and at length in the novel. Yet the film has a spare beauty that Burnett’s book

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only partly suggests. Mostly this has to do with what Huston and screenwriter Ben Maddow leave out. For one thing, they give little time to the police. In the novel, the police chief is a central figure, but in the film, the character (played by John McIntire) seems almost perfunctory. The whole apparatus of the law becomes something like an arbitrary external constraint that the characters, in their various degrees and varieties of criminality, must work around in order to go about their business. (As Doc dispassionately observes: “Experience has taught me never to trust a policeman. Just when you think one’s all right, he turns legit.”) The casualness with which this parallel universe of thieves and operators is established, the absence of both melodramatic portentousness and sociological explanation, sets the film apart from most of its genre predecessors. Brilliantly distilling a wordier passage in Burnett’s novel, the screenplay achieves its most memorable line as the doomed Emmerich remarks with philosophical resignation: “After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.” The elliptical matter-of-factness with which the movie brings us into situations is achieved in part by skipping over much of Burnett’s parsing of his characters’ moods and motives. The novelist ventures at length inside their minds, as in this passage (quoted here only in part) in which Emmerich begins to plot his betrayal: “God! He’d have to compose himself. He mustn’t let these men realize how desperate he was—how willing to clutch at straws. And come to think of it, what the hell had been in his mind when he’d suggested that he act as fence?” An expressive close-up of Louis Calhern’s face—a portrait of evasion and tortured self-knowledge—obviates the need for such leaden explanatory soliloquies. In place of verbiage, Huston gives us moments of being, conveyed above all through those close-ups of faces: the tearful Doll awkwardly removing a false eyelash while her love object, Dix, looks on with an impassivity beyond indifference; Doc, just released from a seven-year stretch, flipping with weary compulsion through the pinups of a wall calendar; or Emmerich gazing down at his sleeping girlfriend, a picture of middle-aged lust gone terminally sour. Huston orchestrates an exciting and intricate narrative while sustaining at every moment a meditative sense of personalities in isolation. The plot moves forward like a machine lurching out of control, but we are more aware of the undertow of each character caught up in his or her particular trap.

Huston’s is always an art of characterization. Plot for him is never more than the anecdotal circumstance that allows individuals to become fully visible. This applies as much to his first movie, 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, as to his last, 1987’s The Dead. Whatever their literary origins, movies as different as The Night of the Iguana, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Kremlin Letter, Fat City, and Wise

Blood are driven not by the suspense of their stories but by the palpable presence of the people caught up, often stumblingly, in those stories. Huston said once that his notion of what directing was about came from observing his father, the actor Walter Huston, developing a role in rehearsals. The visual power of his films comes in general not from effects of architecture or landscape—master though he was of such

effects—but from the way he watches humans making their way, or failing to make their way, through those surroundings. People are never silhouettes. We are aware of how much space they occupy—whether it is the somewhat diminutive Sam Jaffe and Marc Lawrence or the loomingly tall Sterling Hayden—and how they occupy it, how they make their presence known, how they maneuver their way among their allies and adversaries. In an interview with the writer Patrick McGilligan, Maddow suggested that much of The Asphalt Jungle’s power is “due to the fact that these were New York actors who all knew one another and were trying to outdo one another—and who were stimulants to one another.” (Maddow also felt that “most of Huston’s talent came in the choice of casting.”) Nowhere is the tension between actors more acutely perceptible than in the scene in which Sam Jaffe’s Doc has his first meeting with Louis Calhern’s Emmerich. The false pleasantries and penetrating glances and visible calculations of self-interest as they size each other up are as savage in their implications as any of the actual violence that ensues. Doc, the master crook in need of financing, stares with polite skepticism at the moneyman offering a deal seemingly too good to be true, while Emmerich returns the stare with an unyielding mask of sophisticated geniality, as if daring the other man to call his bluff. Later, when Emmerich’s double cross falls clumsily and bloodily apart, Doc addresses him with not rage or resentment but rather baffled incredulity: “What ever possessed you to pull such a stunt?” Jaffe delivers the line like a somewhat irascible professor responding to a graduate student’s unaccountable error. The Asphalt Jungle’s setting is urban, but its scenes are mostly interiors, airless rooms accessed by

Huston—THE ASPHALT JUNGLE—14

way of airless corridors and stairways. The little we see of the unnamed Midwestern city where the film takes place was filmed in Cincinnati, but after the opening sequence, where we follow Dix as he evades a prowl car in the early-morning hours, the sense of the city here has little to do with public vistas. The nocturnal comings and goings and midnight telephone calls serve to connect a series of overcrowded spaces—Cobby’s bookie headquarters, Dix’s and Doll’s cramped, featureless walk-up apartments, Gus’s hamburger joint, the smoky police precinct where Dix is hauled in for a lineup—spaces alike in their sense of temporariness and discomfort. In contrast, Emmerich’s homes—the official residence where he keeps up the facade of his illusory prosperity, and the hideaway reserved for Angela—offer a comforting suggestion of luxury straight out of a glossy magazine, a suggestion that evaporates as Emmerich’s way of life falls apart as we watch, if we had not already seen it falling apart in the immeasurable tiredness in his eyes. None of these people is settled anywhere; each is in transit to a place almost by definition unreachable, whether the Mexican haven where Doc dreams of indulging his passion for underage girls, or the beach where Angela hopes to dazzle men with her new bathing suit, or the Kentucky horse country where the wounded Dix drives in search of the lost paradise of his childhood. For Emmerich, the place is simply death itself, as he wistfully asks the men he has betrayed: “Why don’t you kill me?” Aside from some incidental brutes—the corrupt cop Ditrich (Barry Kelley) and Emmerich’s ill-fated henchman—all the characters are afforded a measure of compassion, even the weaseling Cobby and the fraudulent Emmerich. For Doc and Dix, the film devises a marvelous pair of parallel endings, each tracking a nearly achieved escape from the coils of the city. Doc makes it to the edge of town, but at a roadside diner where he has stopped for only a moment, he catches sight of a teenage girl (the uncredited Helene Stanley) dancing to the jukebox. He gives her a pile of nickels so she can keep playing the music, and for a few moments the screen is given over to a vision of her dancing alone and obliviously, lost in her own pleasure, a vision of such compelling delight that he can’t take his eyes off her: earthly paradise, as long as the nickels

don’t run out. He stays a minute too long and gets nabbed outside the diner. As for the wounded Dix, he manages to make his way with Doll back to the horse farm his family was dispossessed of, just in time to collapse dead in the

field, an object of apparent indifference to the horses browsing around him. Another earthly paradise, this one with no need for people at all. By way of historical footnote, it should be stated that The Asphalt Jungle’s aura of loss and regret merges unavoidably with the shadow of the blacklist that in retrospect looms over the picture. In short order, Sam Jaffe would be smeared by zealots of the right and kept from screen work for a

decade; Dorothy Tree would likewise be blacklisted; Sterling Hayden and Marc Lawrence would both reluctantly name names, with Hayden nursing a lifelong sense of guilt and Lawrence forced to find film work abroad; and Ben Maddow would work without credit on a remarkable succession of screenplays, including Johnny Guitar, Men in War, and Murder by Contract, until he too finally gave in to the pressure to name names and was able to reemerge under his own byline in 1960, with another Huston collaboration, The Unforgiven. As for Huston, who in the first days of the Hollywood anti-Communist hearings had been one of the founders of the oppositional Committee for the First Amendment, he found it expedient in 1952 to move to Ireland, where he established citizenship. “Film noir” (Wikipedia) Film noir (/nwɑːr/; French: [film nwaʁ]) is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of American film noir. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key, black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography. Many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Great Depression. The term film noir, French for "black film" (literal) or "dark film" (closer meaning),[1] was first applied to Hollywood films by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, but was unrecognized by most American film industry professionals of that era.[2] Cinema historians and critics

Huston—THE ASPHALT JUNGLE—15

defined the category retrospectively. Before the notion was widely adopted in the 1970s, many of the classic film noir[a] were referred to as "melodramas". Whether film noir qualifies as a distinct genre is a matter of ongoing debate among scholars. Film noir encompasses a range of plots: the central figure may be a private investigator (The Big Sleep), a plainclothes policeman (The Big Heat), an aging boxer (The Set-Up), a hapless grifter (Night and the City), a law-

abiding citizen lured into a life of crime (Gun Crazy), or simply a victim of circumstance (D.O.A.). Although film noir was originally associated with American productions, the term has been used to describe films from around the world. Many films released from the 1960s onward share attributes with film noirs of the classical period, and often treat its conventions self-referentially. Some refer to such latter-day works as neo-noir. The clichés of film noir have inspired parody since the mid-1940s.

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2019 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS (SERIES 39) Sept 24 Vittorio De Sica Umberto D. 1952

Oct 1 Charles Laughton The Night of the Hunter 1955 Oct 8 Masaki Kobayashi Harakiri 1962

Oct 15 Nicholas Roeg Don’t Look Now 1973 Oct 22 Mel Brooks Blazing Saddles 1974 Oct 29 Larisa Shepitko The Ascent 1977

Nov 5 Louis Malle Au revoir les enfants 1987 Nov 12 Charles Burnett To Sleep With Anger 1990

Nov 19 Steve James, Frederick Marks & Peter Gilbert Hoop Dreams 1994 Nov 26 Alfonso Cuarón Roma 2018

Dec 3 Baz Luhrmann Moulin Rouge 2001

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CONTACTS: ...email Diane Christian: engdc@buffalo.edu…email Bruce Jackson bjackson@buffalo.edu...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http: //buffalofilmseminars.com...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addtolist@buffalofilmseminars.com....for cast and crew info on any film: http: //imdb.com/

The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Dipson Amherst Theatre, with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.