Films of the 1950s of John Huston

Huston thought of himself as a writer-director and almost always had a hand in the screenplays for his films, though he preferred working in collaboration with other writers. A lover of literature from the time he learned to read at age three, he drew the stories for his films primarily from novels and plays. The Asphalt Jungle (1950) was based on the hard-boiled crime novel of the same name by W.R. Burnett, who had provided the source novels for High Sierra and Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931). Sam Jaffe, Sterling Hayden, and James Whitmore starred in that caper film noir as a gang plotting the multimillion-dollar robbery of a jewelry exchange. A thrilling exercise in fatalism, The Asphalt Jungle was one of Huston’s most expertly structured films and earned him and cowriter Ben Maddow an Academy Award nomination for their screenplay.

Huston was less fortunate with his 1951 adaptation of Stephen Crane’s literary classic The Red Badge of Courage. Real-life World War II hero Audie Murphy starred in this story of a young Union soldier who deserts his company during the American Civil War. With the Korean War raging, MGM executives felt that the film’s antiwar message was too blatant and cut The Red Badge of Courage down to 69 minutes. (The undoctored version was among Huston’s favourites of his films.) Nevertheless, what remained, including some magnificently staged battle scenes, was impressive enough to have been called a minor masterpiece by Lillian Ross of The New Yorker magazine; she published the book Picture (1952), which chronicled the film’s making.

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Much of Huston’s next film, The African Queen (1951), was shot on location in Uganda and Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Novelist and pioneering film critic James Agee worked with Huston on the adaptation of C.S. Forester’s popular novel (as did the uncredited John Collier and Peter Viertel). The performances delivered by Bogart and Katharine Hepburn were among their most memorable, as drunken boat captain Charlie Allnut and as Rosie Sayer, the impossibly prim spinster who convinces him to take her on his rattletrap steamer down the Congo River to civilization at the outset of World War I. This splendid romance-comedy-adventure has remained one of the most popular Hollywood movies of all time. Huston was again nominated for Academy Awards for best director and best screenplay; Bogart won the award for best actor.

In 1952 Huston traveled to France to shoot Moulin Rouge (1952), a gorgeously mounted, sentimental biography of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (played José Ferrer), the crippled artist who became the toast of Montmartre for his lively artworks. Moulin Rouge was nominated for the Academy Award for best picture, and Huston was nominated for best director, the fourth time in five years that he had been nominated for that award. He would have to wait 33 years before the Academy nominated him again, as he entered the extended hit-or-miss phase of his career.

Written with Truman Capote and cofinanced by Bogart’s Santana production company, Beat the Devil (1953) was filmed in Italy. A delightful spoof of The Maltese Falcon, it featured Bogart, Lorre, Jennifer Jones, Robert Morley, and Gina Lollobrigida as a motley shipboard assembly of adventurers, frauds, and con artists trying to locate a uranium mine while enduring a variety of comic disasters. Capote later said that they made up the story as they went along, an irreverent approach perhaps better suited to sensibilities in the 21st century than to those of the 1950s. Beat the Devil was a box-office disaster and precipitated a split between Bogart (who called the film “a mess”) and Huston after many years of fruitful collaboration.

Moby Dick (1956), Huston’s epic adaptation of Herman Melville’s novel, was shot in Ireland, where Huston had gone to live in 1952, largely because he had become disgusted by the political climate of the United States during the McCarthy era. Although some critics found the stolid Gregory Peck badly suited to the role of the fiery, obsessed Captain Ahab, Huston and Ray Bradbury captured much of the poetry of Melville in their script, and the sea storm and whaling sequences were impressively staged. Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), a much quieter affair, starred Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr as a marine and a nun stranded on a Pacific island during World War II. Kerr received an Academy Award nomination for best actress, and Huston’s and John Lee Mahin’s screenplay was also nominated.

Huston began working on David O. Selznick’s remake of A Farewell to Arms (1957) but departed the production to instead direct the undistinguished period film The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958). Filmed in French Equatorial Africa with Errol Flynn and Trevor Howard, The Roots of Heaven (1958) followed and drew mixed reviews.