Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,525

This is the grave of John Huston.

Born in 1906 in Nevada, Missouri, Huston grew up with the movies. His father was Walter Huston after all. There was a brief time when Walter gave up acting to work as an engineer, which is why I think he was born in Missouri. His mother was a sportswriter, which is interesting given you don’t hear much about early 20th century women sportswriters. His parents were basically terrible at it though and John mostly grew up in boarding schools. Women who knew Huston in the future–and many women knew Huston in the future because he went through them with incredible speed–blamed his mother for creating his destructive relationships with women. Take that for what you will.

Huston dropped out of high school at the age of 15 to become a professional boxer. He actually became the top-ranked amateur lightweight in California, but got his nose busted up and he decided he didn’t like that as much as he thought he would. He went to Mexico a few years, dabbled in just about everything, from ballet dancing to opera. Basically he was a rich kid who liked to have fun and didn’t have a care in the world. While in Mexico, he wrote a play and he sold it real fast. He realized he was a pretty good writer. He started writing a bunch of stories. But in the end, the easiest way for him to make a living writing was to use his Hollywood connections. So he got a job at Universal as a script doctor.

Huston was also a massive drunk. He nearly killed one girlfriend in a drunk driving accident, then did run over another actress and killed her. There have long been rumors it was actually Clark Gable who did this and Eddie Mannix paid Huston to take the fall, but that’s probably not true. Huston would have a serious relationship with alcohol his whole life, even if he later claimed that killing that poor woman was traumatic for him. OK. After this, he spent more time drinking in Europe.

It wasn’t until 1937 that Huston remotely got his life together, but then it came pretty fast. He came back to Hollywood, got serious about writing, and started writing scripts for himself. Sure, Huston was a nepo baby, to use the parlance of our time. He couldn’t have messed around for so long and just hopped back into the business without daddy. But at least he was good at it.

Huston got two Academy Award nominations for his early scripts–Sergeant York and Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet. Howard Hawks directed the former and thought Huston was great and really started promoting him. Then Huston wrote High Sierra for Raoul Walsh. At this point, Warner Brothers gave him the green light to do whatever he wanted. And what he wanted was to adapt The Maltese Falcon to the screen. How did that one turn out again? Oh yeah, just one of the best movies in film history. Other than the terrible miscasting of Mary Astor, who Bogart had zero chemistry with, the film is utterly brilliant.

So at that point, Huston was basically gold. He could do whatever he wanted. He went on to quickly make In This Our Life and Across the Pacific, neither of which I’ve seen. Then World War II happened and Huston gladly volunteered to make war films. He was at first stuck in pretty much the worst spot in the war–the Aleutians, where the Army wanted him to make a film highlighting service out there. He despised it, but did make Report from the Aleutians.

Then things got real interesting. 1944’s The Battle of San Pietro, detailing a totally rote battle in the brutality going up the Italian peninsula was controversial for two reasons. First, it faked footage. Well, whatever, you shoot in a war zone. Second, it was the most unromantic non-propaganda piece of propaganda ever made. This film is astounding and is in my opinion the unquestionable best of the Hollywood directors make war films movies. But it was so harsh and so tough that the Army did not want to release it. Would audiences want to see a film that basically said their loved ones were sacrificing themselves to advance a mile to the next battle? Finally, a clearly unhappy Mark Clark filmed an intro to it that talked about what an important battle it was, which was bullshit. Moreover, Huston then went on to film the psychological damage that soldiers suffered and went into the mental hospitals. Let There Be Light was suppressed by the military until 1981, despite showing that the military was effective at rehabbing soldiers with PTSD. But you think the military wanted this shown? No way. Huston thought it was one of his finest works and thought it was completely lost for a long time before discovering it still existed.

Huston was supposed to direct The Stranger when he came back, but he wasn’t available yet after he rewrote the original script and it went to Orson Welles instead, who did a great job with it. So it was Treasure of the Sierra Madre that brought Huston back to the cinemas and yep, another great film. Jack Warner hated it and hated the money Huston spent on filming it in Mexico, but the audiences sure liked it and Warner trusted money.

The good to great films just kept coming–Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The Red Badge of Courage, The African Queen. Huston also put his career on the line to fight McCarthyism. He co-founded  “Committee for the First Amendment” to fight Congress’ Hollywood witch hunts. In fact, Huston moved to Ireland in the 50s to get away from the American scene and eventually became an Irish citizen in 1964. The quality of films dropped too around this time. A film like Moby Dick, with a script written by Ray Bradbury, perhaps should have been good but it’s pretty whatever. Freud: The Secret Passion and The Night of the Iguana are pretty forgettable. A huge exception though is the fantastic The Misfits, which was the last film made by both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. The Bible is just a ridiculous film and I wish Huston hadn’t directed it so I could forget its existence. I haven’t seen too many of his later films, though I really should watch Fat City, both because it is supposed to be quite good and because I like the novel.

But what we all know late-era Huston from is his amazing work as the evil water guru in Chinatown. God, that voice. What a voice. And what a creepy, horrifying effect it was used for. One of my all-time favorite performances, screen-chewing as it was. He also used that voice for The Hobbit, when he was the voice of Gandalf.

Huston’s personal life remained pretty messy for most of his life, even if he wasn’t killing people by driving drunk anymore. He was married five times, though the fourth marriage, to Enrica Soma, lasted until her death in 1969 and she is Anjelica’s mother. But even that marriage was either an open marriage or they were just cheating on each other without caring, because he got the author Zoe Sallis pregnant during the marriage and Danny Huston was the child, while his wife had a child from another man during the marriage too.

Huston was a massive smoker as well and this is what killed him, in 1987. By this time, he was living in Middletown, Rhode Island. I wonder if I can find his house. He was 81 years old.

John Huston is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California. That’s his mom he’s buried with, despite their, uh, complicated relationship.

If you would like this series to visit other great directors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Huston won Best Director only once, in 1948 for Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Joseph Mankiewicz, who won the next year for A Letter to Three Wives and then again in 1950 for All About Eve, is in Bedford, New York. George Stevens, who then won in 1951 for A Place in the Sun, is also in Hollywood, but at a different cemetery. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.