Key Largo

(This is part of The John Huston Blogothon At Icebox Movies. Go THERE!)



There’s really no damn reason that Key Largo should be my favorite John Huston movie.

I admire Huston’s films for their gritty realism; the way they really broke away from set bound filmmaking. Key Largo is completely stagy, totally set bound (Its based on a play by Max Anderson and brother does it show). I admire Huston’s films for their virility; the way they charge ahead madly to adventure and doom. Key Largo is mostly just people waiting around. I admire Huston’s films for their dynamism. Key Largo is a master class of restraint.

And yet for those who question Huston’s auteurism, I can offer no further proof of it. Despite carrying none of the calling cards I associate with Huston, Key Largo is unmistakably a Huston film, with its focus on masculinity and impotency. Its tight control of tone, its experiments in style, and its knowing precise takes on human nature.

Key Largo follows Humphrey Bogart as a GI just returned for the war, fulfilling the final request of his friend by delivering letters and personal effects to the GI’s now widow, and father, who owns a resort on the Key. A Hurricane warning strands Bogart at the hotel, along with the only other guests, a small time Chicago hood and his meager posse. Who can’t quite admit to himself that he’s straight up running for his life from the law and rival mobsters, and not just making some kind of power play.

It’s far too depressingly easy to imagine what the contemporary version of this would look like. With say Bruce Willis, sneaking from room to room offing thugs and making strained quips like “That was a force five!”

Instead Key Largo develops into a tightly coiled machine. Laying on the pressure ounce by ounce until it becomes nigh unbearable. It’s a movie with a perfect eye and ear for human nature, personified by a cast that represents the Hollywood contract system at its best.

Many talk about “hang out movies” movies that are enjoyable primarily because of the charisma of the actors and shading of the characters. Key Largo is perhaps the worlds first “anti Hang out film” a movie that succeeds primarily because of the profound tension created by the characters disparate styles and personalities.

There is of course Bogart at the center. Unassailably cool, unwilling to surrender either his dignity and his decency in the face of the corrupt men who want to take them. And Bacall every inch his match. Conventional wisdom says that offscreen couples never work onscreen, and old young couplings make both look foolish. But Bacall and Bogart’s four onscreen pairings refute that in the strongest possible terms. Not only do they always seem matched, in every sense of the word, but as for heat, they always seem about two seconds away from tearing off each others clothes and vigorously fucking.

Opposing them are Edward G. Robinson, in arguably his greatest performance as a man no less threatening for being utterly pathetic. And Claire Trevor. Pitiful as Robinson’s mistress, a terminal alcoholic who he makes sing for a drink in one of the most cringe inducing scenes I’ve ever seen in a film.

Huston was not a showy auteur. He did not draw attention to himself and what he did. Instead he merely crafted wise films about the varied nature of humanity that some how never quite crossed the line into cynical, no matter how tempting it must have been. He was the rarest of filmmakers. One who made the system work for them. Giving him the time and resources for daring experimentation, and the support for solid storytelling.

If a reluctance to be pigeon holed is all it takes for one to be denied auteur status I cannot help but wonder if such distinctions are as silly as outsiders suppose them to be.

The 25: Part 13: Chinatown

(The twenty five is an examination of the twenty five films that made me a cinephile. These aren’t necessarily what I consider best movies, nor are they necessarily my favorite. Though in some cases they are both. Instead these are the films that made the biggest most indenialable impression on me. Films that if they hadn’t hit a certain way at a certain time I would not be the same film goer that I am today. They’re the twenty five.)



If JFK was the first film I could remember realizing was adult, Chinatown is the first film I can remember realizing was art. Chinatown is a film of such sensuous surface pleasures that it would be easy to overlook the level the film is playing at. Yet even at fourteen I never could. There are dark currents in Chinatown that will carry you away. For all the pleasures of Neo Noir Chinatown is the real deal, swimming amongst the jokey likes of The Long Goodbye and The Late Show like a shark in a pool of guppies. That’s its secret weapon, just how damn well it works as a narrative, piecing together a narrative that is damn near labyrinth while never getting you lost.

Before I gave up on the idea of having one, I used to tell people that Chinatown was my favorite movie. Its easy to see why. It’s a fine film, with golden cinematography (The imagery is lovely all that dusty golden light, the boy on his donkey in the dry river bed, the flaw in Dunaway's eye), a script by Robert Towne that’s legendary, and a cast filled with the likes of Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston giving their career best performances. Nicholson connects with Towne’s screenplay in a genuine way I don’t think he did with anything else. Its probably the only Nicholson performance made of small moments. Even early Nicholson was defined by his grandeur, think of him playing the piano in the middle of the road in Five Easy Pieces, or telling the boys about the aliens in Easy Rider, and lets not even go into his “But these go up to eleven.” Performances he’s been content to give since then. But it’s the little things here, the way he drops the word “métier” in conversation, casually but making damn sure its noticed. The way he flinches, only for a second, when confronted with the swollen face of Burt Young’s beaten wife. Another example of his failure to live up to his responsibility. It makes Jake Gittes perhaps the only truly vulnerable character Nicholson ever played. And then ending is shocking not merely for what happens, but how badly it breaks him. He’s matched of course by Faye Dunaway, as the noble doomed Evelyn Mulray. Dunaway has never been better. Very few have.

But at the end of the day, that’s not what draws me to Chinatown. It has a pull to it, like an undertow. In the midst of an industry that at times seems dedicated to telling us that everything is alright, Chinatown tells us the exact opposite (Which is part of the reason the film’s clumsy, silly sequel The Two Jakes, which contains what as far as I'm concerned is the single stupidest most nonsensical bit of character motivation I've ever had the misfortune to see, failed so very badly). Despite its classic status, Chinatown is perhaps the bleakest American film ever made. A film in which the evil devour the innocent, and experience not a burp of indigestion. The film documents the birth of Los Angeles as we know it, with the air of someone recording a Satantic Baptism. Caught in the middle is Jake Gittes, a private eye who is duped into ruining the reputation of a seemingly inconsequential civil servant. His simple quest to find out who used him is complicated when he runs across Noah Cross, a very evil man who sits at the dark heart of the film’s mystery.

Cross, played by Huston, is my favorite villain and the most realistic potrayl of evil, I’ve ever seen in a film. All unthinking hunger and want. Cross is a man ruled by his appetites, and his appetites, be they for fish with their heads on, the San Fernado Valley, or his own daughter, are horrific. Huston, all likably avuncular and full of disarming folksy charm, until he bears his teeth, gives him a rancid grandeur, and the scene in which Nicholson asks him exactly what he’s after has the chilling ring of truth to it.

There is of course Polanski to fit in. It has always been difficult to separate Polanski from his art, now its damn near impossible. The recent turns in his case add another sickly layer to the film, as we wonder how Polanski must have contemplated Cross’s famous line “That most men never have to face the fact that under the right circumstances they’re capable of anything.”

Its that darkest of truths that makes Chinatown what it is. That makes the “My Daughter my sister.” Line carry all its horrific power after a trillion parodies. That makes those final doomed moments just as sickening each time you want them, the frantic last struggle for survival breaking the mise en scene itself, taking it from the classical homage it had been employing, to brutal hand held for those last couple of scenes.

Though it may no longer hold the top spot, Chinatown is still a favorite of mine. Easily within my top five. But I watch it rarely, only once every few years. Its too bitter. Too true.

Wise Blood

The thing I love about John Huston, the thing that makes him such a rewarding filmmaker is the fact that he never stopped pushing himself.

While other directors of the studio era stood dumbfounded like deer in the headlights before The 70’s. Getting mowed down in a bloody awful spectacle, which had them feebly turning out a cheap imitation of themselves or two before silencing themselves forever, Huston instead went out and made Fat City. A film so gritty that makes the harsh realism of the movie brats look as artificial as Finnegan’s Rainbow. Huston’s career was that of an innovator, which is why even watching a minor film like Moulin Rouge can be a fascinating experience, just for the way he uses something inconsequential to test the boundaries of what he can do. Unfortunately this dings him in the eyes of some of the more annoying astringently auteurist critics who can’t recognize the drive to push the limit as being an artistic signature in and of itself. And in an artistic period where most directors would be happy to make small reflective pieces, primarily about themselves, Huston suddenly decided to take up adapting unadaptable novels as a hobby.

It’s not as if he didn’t have practice. Huston’s career began with the adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. In his salad days Huston helmed an adaptation of Moby Dick. A work that could best be described as unfortunate (One of my favorite lines about the film, I’m afraid I forget who wrote it, went “Huston saw Ahab as a heroic non believer in God. Everyone else saw Atticus Finch behaving erratically.) He even tried to do a literal interpretation of the entire Bible until the studio realized what the fuck he was doing and made him stop at Genesis. Still this pales in comparison to the ambition with which Huston finished his career. He adapted The Dead as his final film, bringing James Joyce to the screen which anyone will tell you, is a trifle difficult. A few years before he directed Under The Volcano, Malcolm Lowry’s sweaty proto Gonzo classic. And before that he directed Flannery O’Connor’s The Wise Blood.

Now that’s a trio that’ll make an English major blanche.



As you might recall I am all about Flannery O’Connor. If forced to choose the one book to take with me to a desert island it might honestly be the complete collection of her short stories. Her work has a beauty and fragility to its language and an honesty and passion in its subject that never fails to shake me. In my review of the book Wise Blood I called it unquantifiable. I think that’s just about right.

I had to wonder how anyone could turn it into a coherent movie. Flannery’s book is all fever dream language, and metaphor. How does one literalize a passage like:

"Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown."

The short answer is Huston doesn’t even try to make it coherent. He wades hip deep into material that would make less stout hearted directors faint. You remember the scene in Dead Man were Crispin Glover tells Johnny Depp he’s going to die and then stares unnervingly at him for about five minutes? Imagine that scene blown up to feature length and you’ll begin to understand what Wise Blood is like. Who else but Huston would keep the scene from the book in which a minor character steals a Gorilla suit and runs around attempting to shake hands with people. And not only keep it, but shoot it without once winking. Wise Blood may not work as a film on its own. But as an artifact, or concordance with the novel it’s fascinating.

The only wrong note the film plays is a jarring broad score that ranks as one of the worst and inappropriate I’ve ever heard. Its like leftover Hee Haw music that was rejected for being too cornpone. Its like scoring a Bergman film with a slide whistle.

Give full credit to the cast, who are fully able to tune into Huston and O’Connor’s somewhat disparate wavelengths simultaneously. The Southern Gothic is one of the toughest tones to capture in American art. It has resulted in some of the greatest works of American Literature, Painting, Film, and Music ever made, and some of the absolute worst. The difference is commitment, nothing stinks worse then inauthentic Southerness, what Noel Murray referred to as “A Bunch of college kids from New York dropping their R’s and singing about Coal Mines collapsing.” Huston and his cast sell it. Particularly Doriff a better actor then he is usually given opportunity to show, Ned Beatty knocking it out of the park for the second time this week, and Harry Dean Stanton as the would be Blind Preacher Asa Hawks. (Also William Hickey in a cameo that's pretty much perfect.)

Huston similarly commits tackling his subject head on. He changes the setting to the modern day (Not that you can tell in most shots) and shoots the imagery however grotesque with a straight ahead matter of factness that only adds to their queasy power, you’d be hard pressed to find an image more dislocating then the Madonna and Child Parody Huston creates at a key turning point in the film.

Whether you fine Wise Blood a thought provoking parable on the inescapability of God, like O’Connor. Or a grotesque parody of religious mania like Huston. You won’t see anything else quite like it. As O'Connor herself, "Grotesqueries? We are all grotesqueries."



(All Art work comes from Josh Cochran's site)

Someone Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something Part 4: The Asphalt Jungle

(So I've been helping to program, a film noir retrospective here in SLO. I took a two month hiatus, while others took the hosting job. But I'm back this month for the final film in the series. The Asphalt Jungle.

Once again this was written for speech so the syntax might be a bit odd. Please forgive me. Otherwise Enjoy.)




The film we’re showing today is The Asphalt Jungle. It’s a noir film notable for the fact that many purists would contend that its not a noir film at all, but technically a crime movie. I obviously disagree, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

The film was directed by John Huston, whose famous for making films in virtually ever genre that exists. War films, Epics Westerns, Spy Films, Action films comedies, Musicals even adaptations of Flannery O’Conner and Joyce one of the things that makes Huston so much damn fun is the fact that he never allowed himself to be pigeonholed.

All of that being said, the one genre according to some people, that Huston never made, despite making The Asphalt Jungle and The Maltese Falcon as well as starring in arguably the great neo noir with Chinatown, was a noir film. The reason is simple, if you can remember back to when I first talked about Film Noir all the way back with Out Of The Past, I said that the thing that separates Noir from the crime film or the mystery, is that Noir usually deals with normal people being lured into committing evil desperate acts. In other words, its not the acts themselves that lend Noir films their power, but the fact that these seemingly normal characters at there center can be committing these acts.

Therefore, since The Asphalt Jungle, is a film in which career criminals, not “good citizen’s” are committing these crimes, just as The Maltese Falcon follows Private Eyes and gangsters, they are not true Noirs.

But what these films feature that is even more important, is the character of fate as a conscience force. In the key scene in Hammett’s novel, Sam Spade tells his client the story of a man who when he was nearly killed in a random accident one day, fled his family and moved to another part of the country in order to change the course of his life and avoid such a fate. After a few years he settled into the exact same groove, and even started a second family, only to be killed in another random accident. The point is, no matter where you run, your fate is your own. Once it has its knives sharpened for you, there is no way to escape.

The message is carried over in The Asphalt Jungle. Its characters are doomed, whether by fate in the external sense, or their own inescapable flaws matters very little in the end. The professor cannot help but stop and watch The Bobbysoxers dance. His nature seals his own fate.

The Asphalt Jungle, runs as smoothly as fate itself. Huston was one of Hollywood’s best storytellers as well as one of its most impeccable casters, and both aspects of his art are in full swing here. There is of course Marylin Monroe in her first role beautiful and doomed ("Do I still get my trip to Cuba?"), and Sam Jaffe, wonderfully perverse and corrupt as the dirty old man behind it all.

But its really Sterling Hayden who holds it all together. Hayden, never seemed quite so self aware, as Bogart and Mitchum. Though he can play shrewd and smart, like he did in his other great Noir of fate, Kubrick’s The Killers, he was also awfully good at playing dumb.

He’s just tough enough to take all the punishment the world can dish out at full brunt. And in this film, the world never runs out of ammo.

He is in the end what gives the movie the noble dignity required of noir. He’s what makes it hurt.

The Unseen #19: The MacKintosh Man

The Macintosh Man

Why’d I Buy It?: Came in the Paul Newman Boxset I picked up this Christmas.

Why Haven’t I Watched It?: The Macintosh Man is a movie I’ve always been curious about, and one of the large reasons I bought the set (well that and I wanted to own Harper and The Left Handed Gun). It’s a 70’s John Le Carre style espionage movie directed by John Huston, written by Walter Hill, starring Paul Newman and I don’t think I’ve ever read a single positive review of it.

So in order to reiterate. This is one of my favorite directors, adapting a script from one of the greatest genre directors, with one of my favorite stars, making a film in one of my favorite genres, smack dab in the middle of my favorite era of filmmaking… And it’s bad? How could I not be curious to watch it?

How Was It?:

Well go ahead and consider this the first positive review of Mackintosh Man. It’s not perfect and it’s kind of lumpy but I couldn’t find it anything but entertaining, Mackintosh Man is one of those movies that seems like a couple of different movies at once. It starts as a lofi heist movie, Before turning suddenly into a prison movie and a pretty good one (One difference between Brit’s and American’s Newman must fend off a polite request for anal sex not an attempted rape) And THEN a spy flick.

It’s a down beat gritty spy movie (with the exception of a prison break involving a giant yellow crane so utterly conspicuous its not even funny.

Hill and Huston (God can you imagine if those two had a drinking session? It’d be so manly it’d resurrect the ghost of Hemingway) are ballsy enough to let you NOT know everything Mackintosh is up to. In fact you don’t learn what he’s up to until nearly 2/3rds into the movie. Even then you don’t get the whole story.

Huston brings his skill and style to several great scenes, particularly a tense escape through the Irish moors (which beats No Country For Old Men’s “large angry dog plus river” beat by a over thirty years). In a later sequence over same moors, he also directs what as far as I know is his only car chase. A perversely exciting chase between two of the shittiest looking cars you have ever seen in your life.

Huston lends the movie a gritty downbeat style drawing an ominous vibe from Posh Parlimentary Chambers, London’s Urban Sprawl, the grey anonymous prison and the wide open spaces of the countryside equally. Newman in turn projects his trademark era of cool and quiet competence. Watching Newman it came anew just how much of a shame it was to lose Newman. He straddled the line between old school movie star and “new era” actor perfectly. He was a good enough actor to play just about any role but enough of a movie star to always be undeniably himself. James Mason is a hell of a lot of fun playing a Foppish (how else?) British Neo Con with a dark secret.

For movie fans weaned on the Bourne, Mission Impossible, and Craig era Bond films, Mackintosh might come off as a bit dull. But for fans of the old school European espionage by the likes of Graham Greene and John Le Carre, The Mackintosh Man is a wonderful bit of old school genre craft. A pretty good movie, until an eye poppingly unexpected and bleak climax that arguably makes it great. If you get a chance pick it up.