From the Cheap Seats

As Daniel Day Lewis collected his Oscar last month, there was one name absent from his roll call of thank-yous. Not a major omission by any standards, but maybe it would have been appropriate for the newly anointed Best Actor to acknowledge the spectre that hovers above There Will Be Blood, the film for which he won: actor-writer-director John Huston.

Paul Thomas Anderson, who directed Day Lewis to such award winning effect, claimed to have watched Huston’s film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre repeatedly during the writing and shooting of his own epic of greed and madness. This influence can be felt in the deep, clean lines and precision of Anderson’s film, a much more disciplined affair than his previous work.

There’s no dialogue in There Will Be Blood for ten minutes but when the lead character starts to talk, you notice another manifestation of John Huston. The rich, expansive voice that flows out of Day Lewis’ character Daniel Plainview is modelled after Huston’s own baritone and, while there’s much more to the performance than mere ventriloquism, it’s a smart touch. It suggests a link to another movie where power is equated to the control of precious liquids: Chinatown, where Huston’s Noah Cross monopolises water rights. Cross would surely admire the cut of Daniel Plainview’s jib.

Huston was a charming man by all accounts. Watch him in interviews and you can see exactly why he was such a smash with the ladies. There’s a twinkle in his eye and mischief on his mind. One of the reasons Noah Cross is such a demonic villain is that Huston is so seductive. Yet there was surely more to him than that, as each of his five ex-wives would no doubt be happy to tell you.

Your mother warned you about very charming men with a twinkle in their eyes for a reason; they’ve got the skills to get you to do what they want, whether it’s to your advantage or not. Which takes us back to the robber-baron Daniel Plainview, a man who’s similarity to Huston goes further than the voice. Like Plainview, Huston was an adventurer, a chancer. Like Plainview, Huston had a dark side beneath the veneer.

Huston was, of course, a filmmaker but his life was more interesting than anything he directed. I’m just looking at the brief biography in a reference book and even the bare facts sound colourful: “b. Aug 5, 1906 Nevada, Mo., a town that family legend claims was won by his grandfather in a poker game.” [My italics] A poker game! A TOWN! You don’t get that level of detail about, say, Norman Wisdom.

From there, we discover Huston worked the vaudeville circuit, became a boxer, an actor, a (Mexican) cavalry officer, a reporter and finally in Hollywood. If he’d been born a couple of decades earlier, you fancy he might have wound up prospecting for oil himself, just like Plainview. There’s probably some inflation and exaggeration – the source seems to be Huston’s own autobiography – but even if he was lying, he was lying with more flair than most fibbers.

Somehow, he became regarded as a great director but his reputation needs to be gently adjusted downwards. There’s not much consistency in his work. He made some very good films (The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Wise Blood – all, significantly, from respectable literary sources) but he made some absolute stinkers.

Now, in any long career, there are bound to be a few misfires but Huston’s cock-ups are in a class by themselves. It’s inexplicable that he even agreed to direct them. Annie, for instance. Yes, Annie: little orphan Annie. The original red-headed step child – “the sun’ll come up to-morrow” – that Annie. Whatever persuaded him even to take it on? Probably the same imp of the perverse that suggested he undertake Escape to Victory. What was he thinking? “Here’s a film worthy of my talents: Sylvester Stallone and members of Ipswich Town Football Club giving the Nazis what for.”

Filmmaking seems to have been a way for him to indulge his wanderlust and give him the chance to have fun. Sometimes the audience shared the fun too: The African Queen is one of his most beloved films, although it’s rumoured he only made it because he wanted to go on safari and bag an elephant (an accusation made in the novel/ film White Hunter, Black Heart). Best of all is Beat The Devil, one of the very greatest films ever made. The original script was abandoned and they essentially made a new one up as they went along (Truman Capote came along for the ride: it shows.)

Huston may have had a high old time making all these but the legacy is wildly inconsistent. He seemed to have trusted to luck and hoped for happy accidents. But his luck was extremely variable – how else to explain The Bible…In The Beginning? What I’d like to see (or hear about) are the bits surrounding the filming of his movies – they’re surely more hair-raising than the bits between ‘action’ and ‘cut’.

There’s a lot to enjoy in Huston’s filmography. In addition to the above, The List of Adrian Messenger is an entertaining romp that plays like a pilot episode for The Avengers. Better still is The Man Who Would Be King, one of the greatest of adventure films. If he’d made nothing else but Beat the Devil and The Man Who Would Be King, he’d deserve his reputation as a great director. Unfortunately, he made lots and lots of other films which take the shine off his achievement.

But I think he was a major figure, not so much for his work but for who he was: he was one of the broadest characters to have worked in film, a dangerous man for sure, with depth and shading that must have made him hard to live with. It’s that life that we should study: a good biography is overdue. It would make exciting reading and, perhaps, a pretty good movie. I know just the man to star…