John Huston's Filmmaking

There’s an old adage that it’s not good enough for you to succeed; your friends also have to fail.

Something akin to that seems to have infected academia, where it’s not enough to have produced a worthwhile study; all others which have preceded yours must be wrong or inferior.

Thus, for instance, I am implicated in Lesley Brill’s otherwise fine and valuable study for having (co-) edited an anthology on John Huston with a “fashionably dreary title” which gives Huston too little credit for being the genuine auteur that, at least according to Brill, he is. That perhaps not every study of a director’s career need be auteurist or that “authorship” as a category or an ontological state, for that matter, need not be a standard of value might be something for Brill to consider.

Others, too, are castigated for not allowing Huston a genuine auteur status. With authorship as his primary standard of value, Brill has produced a defiantly, if not exactly unapologetically, auteurist analysis of Huston’s career, seeking out those recurrences of theme, plot, style, and visual tropes which may be said to define the Huston “world view.”

Once he gets down to cases, Brill tends to be more generous in his acknowledgement of previous work while, without question, adding to our appreciation of Huston’s cinema which is, truth be told, as Brill states, in need of further analysis and reflection.

Brill, like Huston himself, may be out of step with current fashion. A humanist in these post-humanist times, an unregenerate auteurist in these post-death-of-the-author days, and an unabashedly literary scholar in this media-saturated era, Brill perhaps protests too much in favor of Huston’s authorship.

That Huston might very well be considered the primary author of most of his films could be taken as a given, considering the fact that he wrote or co-wrote most of his own scripts; alternatively, that the vast majority (34 out of 37) of the feature films that he directed are adaptations of novels, stories, or plays has worked against Huston’s image as the primary author of his films.

But if we allow the issue of authorship to fade into the background, disavow its central importance as a standard of value, we find that Brill has illuminated Huston’s cinema as few critics before him; if we are less than convinced of the overwhelming consistency among Huston’s films, we come away more convinced than ever of the brilliance and richness of his best work.

Brill has wisely chosen to focus only on a handful of Huston’s films. Though each film under analysis receives a separate chapter, Brill organizes these chapters into larger sections grouped around a similarity of theme or issue handled by the individual films within that section. Thus, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Man Who Would Be King, and The African Queen are grouped together as centrally about the issue of community and the self amidst a quest for external goals.

The Misfits, The Night of the Iguana, and Let There Be Light are concerned with, metaphorically, finding, one’s home; Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, The Maltese Falcon, and Reflections in a Golden Eye explore the quest for self-realization, as do many of Huston’s films, but here it is opposed by the weight of often oppressive social institutions. Somewhat more unusually than others, Brill accounts Freud an important Huston film and links it with Fat City as exploring psychological states of self-destructiveness and attempts at self-understanding. A concluding section looks at The Dead, Huston’s final film, and, interestingly, at An Open Book, Huston’s 1980 autobiography, understanding these two works as Huston’s self-revelation and his summations of his life and artistry.

Brill engages each film at a close, attentive level, careful to highlight the particular narrative and visual strategies of each, while drawing comparisons and recurrences to other of Huston’s works. We learn and appreciate much from the individual readings. But there is something very insular about Brill’s project. In attempting to prove Huston’s authorship and artistry, and a consistency and repetition across his career, Brill closes off Huston’s cinema to the world at large.

This is mirrored in Brill’s citations, the vast majority of which are references to other books and essays on Huston’s films. In attempting to clarify Huston’s world view, Brill has given us Huston’s world with little regard for the outside world. Those who already admire Huston’s works and wish to learn more and those who wish to get a fine introduction to an overlooked artist could do no better than Brill’s fine study. But Huston’s status as a major film artist with a continuing significance beyond mere questions of authorship remains a debatable subject still awaiting proof.