Instant Expert's Guide to John Huston

Cinema Paradiso's Instant Expert guides contain all you need to know about the directors who have shaped screen history. Our 31st profile explores the life and work of a true Hollywood maverick, John Huston.

The majority of John Huston's 37 features were adapted from literary sources. He read voraciously and always succeeded in conveying the spirit of the author whose work he was interpreting. His narratives were classically structured, while his dialogue was accessibly fluent. But, unlike many of his contemporaries, Huston relied primarily on imagery to tell his stories. His compositional sense came from his knowledge of art, but his blocking of characters within the frame and his camera movements were instinctive and highly distinctive.

It's often said that Huston could never be classified as an auteur because he resisted imposing his personality upon the material. In fact, Huston went further than many auteurs, as he sought to use the paraphernalia of cinema to share his personal experience of a text with the audience. The results were occasionally uneven, with his less accomplished outings often being the result of miscalculation or studio interference. But triumph and failure alike reflected the character of their maker, a pugnacious, egotistical man of action, who also happened to be a solicitous and sophisticated aesthete.

Win, Place, or Show

John Marcellus Huston was born on 5 August 1906 in Nevada, Missouri. His father was the Canadian actor, Walter Huston, while mother Rhea Gore was a respected sports editor, who took a break from her journalistic career after her son arrived. Walter also felt the burden of parenthood and decided to abandon the vaudeville stage for a steadier job as a civil engineer.

The lure of the greasepaint proved too strong, however, and Walter returned to the stage in a double act with Bayonne Whipple, who became his second wife in 1912. John stayed with Rhea, who returned to newspapers and later worked at the New York Evening Graphic with future director Samuel Fuller. However, young John spent most of his childhood in boarding schools, although he was frequently ill and endured a prolonged period of bed rest in Arizona after being diagnosed with an enlarged heart and a kidney problem.

He would later scoff at the doctor who had written him off and would devote himself to proving that he was hale and hearty. Indeed, having enrolled at Abraham Lincoln High School, he took up boxing. Over 6ft, he became so proficient that he took the California amateur title at lightweight at 15 and went on to win all but three of his 25 bouts as a semi-professional. He also participated in prize fights in clubs for $5 a night. but quit after breaking his nose.

By this stage, Huston had become fixated with art. He joined the Art Students League and fell under the spell of abstract artist Stanton MacDonald-Wright. In addition to shaping his visual sense, MacDonald-Wright also introduced Huston to French literature, ballet, and opera and he later claimed to have learnt more from their brief associations than he did from his schooldays.

Huston would also aver in his 70s that 'having a single consuming interest is unthinkable to me'. While living in Los Angeles, he discovered moving pictures and became an avid admirer of Charlie Chaplin. He also took up horse riding and often accompanied his mother to racetracks and the other major sporting events she was covering for her paper. While staying with his father, he would frequently watch him rehearse and became so hooked that he moved to New York in 1924, with a view to becoming an actor.

Having received glowing notices for his first stage role in Sherwood Anderson's The Triumph of the Egg, Huston joined the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village. He was mostly seen in off-Broadway productions, but became restless after having surgery and travelled to Mexico in order work with a famous trainer in the military. According to Huston, he secured an honorary commission to ride with the cavalry, but his two-year sojourn came to abrupt end after he was challenged to a duel over a woman's honour by a South African count. He returned to Los Angeles in 1926 and married his school sweetheart, Dorothy Harvey. At 20, the time had come to settle down. Or so he thought.

Jack of All Trades

While in Mexico, Huston had written a play based on the popular ballad, 'Frankie and Johnny'. As a teenager, he had been introduced to playwright Eugene O'Neill while Walter Huston was appearing in Desire Under the Elms in New York (this was filmed by Delber Mann in 1958, with Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins). During their discussions, Huston had learnt much about structuring a storyline and developing characters. Equally significant was an illicit copy of James Joyce's banned novel, Ulysses, which had thrilled Huston and influenced his own writing.

In 1929, Huston's short story, 'Fool', was accepted for publication in the prestigious American Mercury magazine. Esteemed editor, H.L. Mencken, also took 'Figures of Fighting Men' and Huston stories were soon cropping up in Esquire, Theatre Arts, and The New York Times. He also landed a reporting berth on The New York Graphic, only for his services to be dispensed with after he accused the wrong man in a report on a murder case.

Undaunted, Huston shelved plans to write a book about French painters and, following the advice of Broadway director Herman Shumlin, went west to try his luck in Hollywood. Walter was already there, having taken the title role in D.W. Griffith's first talkie, Abraham Lincoln (1930). Indeed, the pair were also filmed for a prologue to the reissued 1915 silent, The Birth of a Nation, which had changed the face of cinema worldwide, in spite of its pernicious views on race.

Frustrated by a dead-end job in the script editing department at Samuel Goldwyn Productions, Huston decamped to Universal, where Henry Blanke gave him the chance to write. Taking heed of O'Neill's advice on writing for the screen, Huston followed an uncredited appearance as an extra in William Wyler's The Shakedown (1929) by joining the script teams behind the same director's melodramas, The Storm (1930) and A House Divided (1931), the latter of which starred Walter Huston. Cinema Paradiso users can discover more about this important film-maker in The Instant Expert's Guide to WilliamWyler.

While his father was receiving plaudits for his work in Howard Hawks's The Criminal Code (1930) and Lewis Milestone's Rain (1932), Huston revelled in writing for Bela Lugosi in Robert Florey's adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue. He then wrote for his father again in Edward L. Cahn's Law and Order (both 1932), which was based on a novel by W.R. Burnett and marked the first time that the events at the O.K. Corral had been depicted on film.

Rather than boosting Huston's reputation, however, the picture presaged a hiatus, as he was forced to leave town after he was involved in a couple of traffic accidents. He had become known as a 'lusty, hard-drinking libertine' and his marriage fell apart after he started dating Zita Johann, the Austrian wife of actor-producer John Houseman, who had made her name opposite Boris Karloff in Karl Freund's The Mummy (1932). However, they parted after a drunken Huston hit a parked car and Johann had been thrown through the windscreen.

She recovered, but actress Tosca Roulien was not so fortunate. The 25 year-old was married to Raul Roulien, 'the Brazilian Valentino' who was co-starring at the time with Dolores Del Rio in Thornton Freeland's Flying Down to Rio (1933), which was the first film to partner Ginger Rogers with Fred Astaire. Huston was supposed to have run her over around midnight on Sunset Boulevard in a car borrowed from actress Greta Nissen. Cinematographer William Miller was allegedly in the passenger seat and the city authorities quickly decided that Huston had no charge to answer because he had driven Roulien to the nearest hospital for help.

Author E.J. Fleming believes that Clark Gable was actually at the wheel and explains in his book, The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine how studio chief Louis B. Mayer had paid Huston to take the rap to prevent his biggest star from going to jail. Eddie Mannix, who was played by Josh Brolin in Joel and Ethan Coen's Hail, Caesar! (2016), certainly had the clout to sway a coroner's jury and sweet talk the press into running the MGM version of events. Others insist that Huston was to blame. But why would MGM have invested so heavily in saving the skin of a novice writer from another studio or gone to such lengths to establish that Gable was on location at a time when most movies were made in-house?

Gable was 'punished' by being loaned out to Columbia for Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), which became the first film to win the Big Five Oscars. For his part, Huston was removed from the writing team for Walter Lang's The Mighty Barnum (1934) and dispatched on a secondment trip to Britain. At British Gaumont, he reunited with Edward L. Cahn to contribute to the story of Death Drives Through (1934) before doing some adaptation work for Robert Wyler on It Happened in Paris (1935). Both films are available as part of the excellent Ealing Rarities Collection.

However, London didn't suit Huston and he took the opportunity to venture across the Channel to Paris. As he had no job, he sang for his supper on the streets and slept in parks, when not pursuing his passion for French art in the city's many galleries. Eventually, he made his way back Stateside, where he became editor of Midweek Pictorial in New York and married his second wife, Lesley Black. Some sources mention the odd acting engagement, while Huston continued to write.

While in London, he had acquired a wooden figure from an antique shop and it inspired him to concoct a story about people sharing a sweepstake ticket. Apparently, he mentioned the idea to Alfred Hitchcock at a party, but it was only in 1937 that he worked it into a screenplay entitled Three Men and a Girl. Huston sold it to Warner Bros for $5000 and returned to Hollywood with a screenwriting contract. Over the next few years, Huston took credits on Anatole Litvak's The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse, William Wyler's Jezebel (both 1938) and Wuthering Heights, and William Dieterle's Juaraz (both 1939). He also shared Oscar nominations for Dieterle's Dr Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940) and Howard Hawks's Sergeant York (1941).

By now, however, Huston was becoming impatient with the way other directors interpreted his scenarios. He felt films should be a moving canvas that reflected art as much as drama and asked the Warner front office for a chance to direct. Jack Warner challenged him to write a hit in return for a low-budget assignment and Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941) not only rang the box-office tills, but it also confirmed the star potential of longtime contract stalwart, Humphrey Bogart. He would repay Huston by headlining his directorial debut.

Not Bad For a Beginner

With only $300,000 at his disposal, Huston knew he had to work cannily to make an impression. He opted to adapt Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled thriller, The Maltese Falcon, even though Roy Del Ruth's 1931 version and William Dieterle's 1936 reworking, Satan Met a Lady, had failed at the box office. In addition to sticking closely to Hammett's crackling dialogue, Huston also produced a series of shooting sketches so that he knew where the actors and the camera would be positioned for each shot.

Most importantly, he chose Humphrey Bogart to play private eye Sam Spade and surrounded him with a superb rogues' gallery that consisted of Mary Astor as femme fatale Brigid O'Shaughnessy, Peter Lorre as the sinister Joel Cairo, and Sidney Greenstreet as the hulking Kasper Gutman. He even found an uncredited guest spot for his father, as Captain Jacoby.

Much to the surprise of the studio, who had released the picture as a programmer with little publicity, The Maltese Falcon (1941) drew admiring reviews and Huston was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Subsequently, it would be identified as Hollywood's first film noir, thanks to the pessimistic plot, the acerbic dialogue, and Arthur Edeson's sombre cinematography.

Delighted by the success, Warners assigned Huston to direct Across the Pacific, a spy thriller about a Japanese plot to bomb Pearl Harbor. When this actually happened, the studio shut down production while the screenplay was rewritten to focus on the Panama Canal. Although Huston started directing a cast that reunited Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet, he was called away to make Winning Your Wings with James Stewart for the Army Signal Corps. The project was completed by Vincent Sherman and Raoul Walsh similarly had to step in when Uncle Sam called Huston away from directing Bette Davis and new companion Olivia De Havilland in an adaptation of Ellen Glasgow's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, In This Our Life (all 1942), which charts the rocky relationship of two sisters after one jilts her groom at the altar to run off with the other's husband.

Rising to the rank of major and receiving the Legion of Merit, Huston made three of the most potent and contentious shorts of the Second World War. While filming Report From the Aleutians (1942) - which can be found alongside John Ford's The Battle of Midway (1942) and William Wyler's Memphis Belle (1944) on World War II: In Colour (2013) - Huston had to take over from a gunner who had been killed during a dogfight with a Zero plane. However, he wasn't allowed to put his name on the film and the Oscar for Best Documentary Short went to the United States Army Pictorial Service.

Huston also marched alongside the 143rd Regiment of the 36th Division of the US Army in order to make The Battle of San Pietro (1943). Scholar Peter Maslowski has disproved Huston's claims not to have recreated any events for the camera, but this presented such an unflinching insight into combat in Italy that the top brass decided to shelve the film because its anti-war stance would be bad for morale. General George C. Marshall disagreed, however, and ordered that it was shown as a training film to prepare troops for what they would have to face in the field.

Domestic audiences only got to see the film in 1945. But the ban on Let There Be Light (1946) held for 35 years, as this study of post-traumatic stress disorder among combat veterans at Mason General Hospital in Brentwood, New York was deemed too demoralising to be shown to peacetime audiences. Indeed a print given to Huston for a gallery screening was confiscated and the film was only cleared for release in January 1981.

There were no such problems over Frank Capra and Joris Ivens's Know Your Enemy: Japan (1944), to which Huston had made an uncredited script contribution. He had similarly worked on André De Toth's psychological thriller, Dark Waters (1944). On returning to Hollywood, he was hired to redraft Anthony Veiller's screenplay for The Stranger (1946), with a view to directing. However, he left the project in the capable hands of Orson Welles, who also co-starred with Edward G. Robinson in this tale of fugitive Fifth Columnists in a New England backwater.

Another project that got away was Three Strangers (1946), the sweepstake story that Huston had considered turning into a sequel to The Maltese Falcon, with Bogart, Astor, and Greenstreet being reunited in different roles. However, the rights to Hammett's characters had expired and Greenstreet and Lorre ended up headlining a picture that passed to Jean Negulesco because Huston was still attached to the Signal Corps.

The last screenplay for four decades to which Huston contributed but didn't direct was for Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946), which starred Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, and Edmond O'Brien. Centring on an insurance investigation into a boxer's death, the source story was written by Ernest Hemingway, who was to become a good friend of Huston's. They had much in common in being men of action who were also deeply cerebral. In addition to sharing a fascination with bullfighting (Huston tried to adapt Barnaby Conrad's bestselling Matador in 1952), they were also inveterate womanisers, with Huston's latest fling being with socialite Marietta FitzGerald, who was married Desmond FitzGerald, who would later become a prominent figure in the CIA.

Huston and Orson Welles were also kindred spirits. Both were vagabonds who lived on their own terms, as they took acting roles in mediocre pictures in order to fill their coffers. They were also obsessives, with Huston being a reckless gambler who was prepared to risk his life in order to make a film his way. Perhaps there's no wonder that Welles would cast Huston as director Jake Hannaford in The Other Side of the Wind (2018), which was finally released 48 years after shooting had started in 1970.

The Insider Who Wanted Out

The Cold War had broken out by the time Huston returned to Hollywood. Like many left-leaning artists, he was appalled by the inauguration of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee to investigate Communist influence within the studio system. In 1947, he joined with William Wyler, actress Myrna Loy, and screenwriter Philip Dunne in forming the Committee For the First Amendment, which would organise a demonstration in Washington that would bring some of the biggest names in American cinema to the Capitol. However, the movement collapsed when it was discovered that Sterling Hayden had been a Party member and several major liberal-minded stars quit claiming to have been duped.

There's an irony to Huston's involvement with the CFFA, as several of his films concern groups of people embarking upon quests that are doomed to failure. Many of his characters have the best intentions, but they are either arrogant or ignorant and are unable to see themselves as they really are. In Huston's eyes, a hero is someone who retains their dignity in the face of discomfort or disaster and this attitude clearly drew him to B. Traven's 1927 novel, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Humphrey Bogart (Fred C. Dobbs), Tim Holt (Bob Curtin), and Walter Huston (Howard) play the three prospectors who head to the Mexican wilderness in search of gold. The studio had originally envisaged George Raft, John Garfield, and Edward G. Robinson in the roles. But Huston got his dream cast and took them south of the border to film, making this one of the first Hollywood pictures to be shot on foreign location.

He was rewarded after a five-month shoot with the Oscars for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, although Best Picture went to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948). Compensation came in the form of the Best Supporting Actor award for Walter Huston, as they became the first father-son duo to win Oscars at the same ceremony. In a landmark night for John Huston, he also guided Claire Trevor to a Best Supporting Actress win for her performance as alcoholic chanteuse, Gaye Dawn, in Key Largo (1948). Starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Edward G. Robinson, this Maxwell Anderson play was adapted by Huston and Richard Brooks and is set at a Florida hotel. But Huston was annoyed by the studio tinkering with the film at the editing stage and he let his contract wind down before forming Horizon Pictures with producer Sam Spiegel.

Their sole production was We Were Strangers (1949), which drew on Robert Sylvester's novel, Rough Sketch, to pitch John Garfield and Jennifer Jones into the attempted 1933 revolution in Cuba. Perhaps the least known film from Huston's heyday, this has never been officially released on disc in the UK. The same is not true of The Asphalt Jungle (1950), which Huston made for MGM from a novel by W.R. Burnett.

Creating a template for endless heist movies to follow, the action chronicles a jewel robbery from it being planned by Erwin 'Doc' Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) and shady lawyer Alonzo D. Emmerich (Louis Calhern) and carried out by a crew that includes the hot-headed Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden). A young Marilyn Monroe got her breakthrough as Emmerich's mistress, but Huston was more concerned with providing a Hawksian insight into working men going about their business.

Once again, Huston was nominated for Best Director and Screenplay, but lost out in each category to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for All About Eve (1950). He was recognised the Screen Directors Guild, but his burgeoning reputation counted for nothing when producer Dore Schary (who was battling Louis B. Mayer for control of MGM) responded to a preview walkout by cutting his 135-minute adaptation of Stephen Crane's Civil War classic, The Red Badge of Courage (1951), to just 69 minutes. Sadly, Cinema Paradiso is not currently able to offer this compelling pacifist tract on disc. But there's a nice irony in that MGM later recognised the cult status of the truncated version and approached Huston in the mid-1970s in the hope that he still had a copy of his director's cut.

Huston had never paid close attention to the post-production process, as he had sought to ensure that editors followed his outline by providing them with so few alternative takes from which to build a scene. However, he was thousands of miles away when Schary committed the studio's second-worst act of butchery after Irving G. Thalberg has taken against Erich von Stroheim's nine-hour first cut of Greed (1924).

Huston was on location in Uganda and the Congo adapting C.S. Forester's Great War adventure, The African Queen (1951). John Mills and Bette Davis had been mooted for the parts of boat captain Charlie Allnutt and missionary Rose Sawyer, while the British backers had suggested the married pairing of John McCallum and Googie Withers. Instead, Huston secured the services of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, who endured the location antics that Peter Viertel recorded in White Hunter, Black Heart, the 1953 roman à clef that was brought to the screen in 1990 by Clint Eastwood, who also took the Huston-inspired part of John Wilson. It's only a shame that no one has thought to adapt Hepburn's 1987 memoir, The Making of the African Queen: or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall, and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind.

Having secured further Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, Huston was delighted to see his old friend. Bogey, win his only Academy Award. He next hooked up with his predecessor as Best Actor for Moulin Rouge (1952), a biopic of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec that brought José Ferrer another Oscar nod (following his win for Michael Gordon's Cyrano De Bergerac, 1950). Huston was nominate for Best Picture and Best Director, but was more gratified by his Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

In 1950, Huston lost his father at the age of 67. Moreover, such was his discontent with the situation in Hollywood - where the blacklist was still in operation following the HUAC inquiry and he had been accused of being a Communist mastermind by right-wing columnist Frank Conniff - that he decided to take Irish citizenship and set up home at St Clerans, a Georgian country house in County Galway. Here, he enjoyed playing the local squire, as he dressed in tweed and rode to hounds. In 1950, he had divorced actress Evelyn Keyes, who had played one of Vivien Leigh's sisters in Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939) and the equally fictional Julie Benson opposite Larry Parks in Alfred E. Green's The Jolson Story (1946).

Keyes had objected to the behaviour of Huston's monkey and he had opted to keep the pet rather than his wife. He wasn't single for long, however, as he married ballerina Enrica Soma, who turned down a contract with David O. Selznick in order to care for children Tony and Anjelica. Huston's schedule meant he was often away from home and, eventually, he fathered another son, Danny, with actress Zoe Sallis, while Soma's liaison with ennobled historian John Julius Norwich resulted in the birth of Allegra, whom Huston raised as his daughter after the 39 year-old Soma was killed in a car crash in 1969.

The first picture that lured Huston away from Galway proved to be his last with Humphrey Bogart. Adapted by Huston and Truman Capote from a novel by James Helvick, Beat the Devil (1954) was tantamount to a parody of Huston's previous quest outings, as it followed Billy Danreuther (Bogart) and his wife, Maria (Gina Lollobrigida), in pursuit of the African uranium mine that might also be a target for British tourists, Harry and Gwendolen Chelm (Edward Underdown and Jennifer Jones). With Robert Morley and Peter Lorre also in the cast, it remains among Huston's most underrated works. But, having lost several teeth while shooting and much of investment when it flopped at the box office, Bogart disliked it and never worked with Huston again. Looking back on their friendship, the director revealed: 'Bogey was not particularly well read. We didn't share much common intellectual ground. But Bogey was a good companion. We got along. We could insult each other without taking umbrage. And you can't do that with many people. And he was a decent man, completely without pretense.'

A Bit of a Dip

Collaborating with Huston on the 1956 adaptation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick left such an impression on writer Ray Bradbury that he had to pen a novel, Green Shadows, White Whale (1992), and a TV play to get over it. Peter O'Toole played the maverick director in 'Banshee', which aired in the Ray Bradbury Theatre series in 1986. Huston had hoped his father would play Captain Ahab in the ultimate doomed quest saga, but he had to settle for Gregory Peck, who felt miscast during a difficult shoot that was primarily based in the Irish resort of Youghal. Yet, Peck was keen to reunite with Huston on Melville's Polynesian odyssey, Typee, but they failed to raise the money.

Huston also walked away from David O. Selznick's adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1957), as he couldn't stand the producer's nitpicking memos and felt Jennifer Jones was wrong for the part of nurse Catherine Barkley. Charles Vidor took over what proved to be Selznick's final feature and Cinema Paradiso users can compare this version with Frank Borzage's 1932 interpretation, which co-starred Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper.

Frustrated by the negative response to Moby Dick, Huston retreated into familiar territory in adapting Charles Shaw's novel, Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (1957), as there was something African Queenish about the dynamic between Marine Robert Mitchum and nun Deborah Kerr, as they resisted the Japanese on a remote Pacific island. Although Huston and John Lee Mahin shared an Oscar nomination, the reviews were lukewarm. However, they glowed compared to the bafflement that greeted The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958), one of the few original screenplays that Huston tackled during his 46-year career. Taking over from Anthony Mann, Huston didn't get along with John Wayne, who was playing America's first consul to Japan. Indeed, they came to blows and Huston tried to have his name removed from the credits after Wayne conspired with 20th Century-Fox to re-edit the picture and shoot additional scenes.

We at Cinema Paradiso love a fascinating failure, however, and thoroughly recommend this clash of macho styles. Similarly, there are compelling reasons for catching Huston's take on Romain Gary's Prix Goncourt-winning novel, The Roots of Heaven (1958). The story centres on the efforts of conservationist Trevor Howard, disgraced British officer Errol Flynn, and nightclub hostess Juliette Gréco to save the elephants of French Equitorial Africa. But the off-screen subplots are just as intriguing, as Enrica Soma had an affair with co-scenarist Patrick Leigh Fermor, while the African shoot was disrupted by searing heat and tropical diseases.

Huston took the blame for the film's 'badness'. But his run of ill fortune continued with The Unforgiven (1960), a reworking of an Alan Le May novel that Huston had hoped would explore the issue of racial prejudice in the Old West. However, star Burt Lancaster proved resistant and a fractious shoot was extended to allow Audrey Hepburn time to recover from the broken back she had incurred in falling from a horse during rehearsals.

Despite branding the picture 'bombastic and over-inflated', Huston soon found himself back on the prairie with more horses for The Misfits (1961). Written by Arthur Miller and teaming his wife, Marilyn Monroe, with Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, this turned out to be one of the most eventful shoots in Huston's career and Cinema Paradiso users can learn more in What to Watch If You Like: The Misfits.

Feeling too emotionally fragile to play a patient with psychological problems, Monroe declined the opportunity to reunite with Clift on Freud (1962), which earned replacement Susannah York a Golden Globe nomination. Huston had contacted Jean-Paul Sartre about the screenplay in 1958, only for them to fall out when the Frenchman submitted an eight-hour epic after he had been asked to trim his original five-hour draft. The script and the score drew Oscar nominations, but respectful reviews had little impact on the film's commercial fate.

Seeking to lighten the mood after a run of intense projects, Huston alighted upon Philip MacDonald's novel, The List of Adrian Messenger (1963). George C. Scott stars in a quest to discover what links a group of murder victims. But, while the plot twisted teasingly, the critics picked up on the cameos by the likes of Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and Frank Sinatra, who removed their disguises to reveal their true identity at the close.

Filmed in Mismaloya to the south of Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana (1964) proved more of an artistic challenge, even though it brought Huston a Golden Globe nomination. He also so enjoyed the fishing during the 72-day shoot that he bought a cottage in the area. But he had to work hard to ensure that Richard Burton wasn't too distracted by new paramour Elizabeth Taylor, as he played the defrocked cleric who comes up against four formidable women (Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Grayson Hall, and Sue Lyon), while working as a tour guide.

The Writers Guild of America presented Huston with a special award for advancing the cause of literature on screen. However, there was nothing particularly sophisticated about his next two outings. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis and scripted from the first 22 chapters of the Book of Genesis by playwright Christopher Fry, The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966) was intended to be the first in a series of Old Testament features. But this all-star epic was left in isolation after failing to break even, even though Huston won a prestigious David Di Donatello Award for his direction. When Alec Guinness and Charles Chaplin proved unavailable, he also enjoyed himself as Noah (as well as the voice of God), as he was a great animal lover, in spite of his interest in blood sports.

If the tone shifted between episodes in this Sunday School special, it veered between directorial segments in Casino Royale (1967), a James Bond parody that saw Ken Hughes, Robert Parrish, Joseph McGrath, Val Guest variously calling the shots alongside Huston. David Niven led a stellar cast that hammed up gleefully all the way to the bank, while Burt Bacharach earned an Oscar nomination for the song, 'The Look of Love'. But this Swinging Sixties romp has never found favour with the critics, although Cinema Paradiso users can judge for themselves with a single click.

Unfortunately, it's not currently possible to see Huston's next feature, an adaptation of Carson McCullers's Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), which was to have starred Montgomery Clift, as an army major struggling to conceal his feelings for a fellow officer. Following his death in 1966, however, the role passed to Marlon Brando, who co-starred with Brian Keith and Elizabeth Taylor.

Huston was furious when Warner Bros over-rode his subtle lighting design and released the film in gleaming Technicolor. He was no more impressed by the Mirisch brothers for their final cut of Sinful Davey, the story of an 18th-century Scottish rogue that starred John Hurt. However, Huston only had himself to blame for the failure of A Walk With Love and Death (both 1969), an adaptation of Hans Koningsberger's novel about the 14th-century Jacquerie peasant uprising that he had conceived for his daughter, Anjelica, after denying her the chance to headline Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968). The pair had squabbled on set and some started to write Huston off as a studio era has-been.

Thesping on the Side

Although Huston had taken bit parts in a number of his films, he had not given a full dramatic performance. That changed when Otto Preminger cast him as Lawrence Glennon in The Cardinal (1963), who serves as mentor to an ambitious, but conflicted Catholic priest played by Tom Tryon. Having received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, Huston cast himself as Noah in The Bible and M in Casino Royale. He also narrated Terry Sanders's documentary, The Legend of Marilyn Monroe (1966).

After a chat about film in Ireland with Peter Lennon in Rocky Road to Dublin (1967), Huston played the hospital director in Christian Marquand's adaptation of Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg's novel, Candy (1968), a Buck Henry-scripted spin on Voltaire's Candide that included guest turns by Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Walter Matthau, and Ringo Starr. Following another clerical turn, as the Abbé in Cy Endfield's De Sade (1969), Huston found himself opposite Mae West and Raquel Welch, as drama school guru Buck Loner in Michael Sarne's adaptation of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (1970).

Mexico called Huston back for Pancho Kohner's The Bridge in the Jungle (1970), a B. Traven companion piece to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in which Huston played a crocodile hunter named Sleigh opposite Katy Jurado. Casting Huston as Captain Miles, Burt Kennedy's revisionist Native American Western, The Deserter, proved equally gritty, as did Richard C. Sarafian's Man in the Wilderness (both 1971), in which Huston played the villainous Captain Henry opposite Richard Harris in a survivalist adventures based on the exploits of the same Hugh Glass who later inspired Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant (2015).

With his familiar gravelly voice providing the narration as the orangutan Lawgiver in J. Lee Thompson's Battle For the Planet of the Apes (1973), Huston ventured into blockbuster territory for the first time. But he was much more memorable as Noah Cross, the incestuous villain in Roman Polanski's neo-noir masterpiece, Chinatown. Indeed, he should have won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but didn't even make the cut, as Robert De Niro, Lee Strasberg, and Michael V. Gazzo were all nominated for Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II, alongside Jeff Bridges for Michael Cimino's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Fred Astaire for John Guillermin's The Towering Inferno (all 1974).

Yet Huston didn't consider himself a good actor, dismissing the craft as 'a cinch..,and they pay you damn near as much as you make directing'. Having framed Robert Duvall and landed him in the Mexican prison from which Charles Bronson seeks to free him in Tom Gries's Breakout (1976), Huston played President Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of State, John Hay, in John Milius's The Wind and the Lion (1975). Next, he enjoyed himself as Professor Moriarty, giving Roger Moore and Patrick Macnee the run around in Boris Sagal's Sherlock Holmes in New York (1976). And he remained on the small screen to essay Ambassador Granville in Burt Kennedy's three-part adaptation of the Robert Ludlum bestseller, The Rhinemann Exchang (1977).

When Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass animated the J.R.R. Tolkien duo of The Hobbit (1977) and The Return of the King (1980), they cast Huston as Gandalf. However, this currently sits out of reach, alongside Ovidio G. Assonitis's legendarily wretched creature feature, Tentacles; Boris Sagal's Sophia Loren drama, Angela (both 1977); Umberto Lenzi's macaroni combat actioner, The Greatest Battle; René Cardona, Jr.'s sci-fi chiller, The Bermuda Triangle; and Richard Lang's mini-series, The Word (1978).

However, Cinema Paradiso members can catch Huston's performance as earthly emissary Jerzy Colsowicz in Giulio Paradisi's cult puzzler, The Visitor. He's seen to much better advantage, however, as Pa Kegan, the father of an assassinated president and his avenging brother in William Richert's adaptation of Richard Condon's Winter Kills (both 1979), a bleak political satire that was inspired by the shooting of John F. Kennedy.

Also released in 1979, Ernest Pintoff's martial arts thriller, Jaguar Lives!, casts Huston as shipping magnate Ralph Richards, who is caught up in the drug-smuggling ring run by Christopher Lee. Once again, this was hardly a distinguished project, but at least it's available to view, unlike Michael Grant's Head On (1980), in which Huston plays artist Clarke Hill. Also missing from disc are Huston's turn as Dr Larry Geller in Marshall Brickman's Dudley Moore comedy, Lovesick (1982), and his final big-screen appearance, as Meister Hora in Johannes Schaaf's fantasy, Momo (1986). We can't currently hear his narration for David S. Ward's adaptation of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row (1982) or Yoram Gross's dinosaur animation, Epic (1984). But Cinema Paradiso can bring you Disney's The Black Cauldron (1985), which was directed by Ted Berman and Richard Rich and features Huston as the narrator. He also appeared as the Collector of Souls in his son Danny's tele-adaptation of Leon Garfield's festive fantasy, Mr Corbett's Ghost (1987).

The Living Legend

Having ended a difficult decade by quitting a reunion with Katharine Hepburn on The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969) just 17 days before shooting began, Huston edged back towards form with The Kremlin Letter (1970). Adapted with assistant Gladys Hill from a Noel Behn novel, the engrossingly convoluted action pitches Patrick O'Neal into the murky Cold War world of freelance spies in order to retrieve a document falsely claiming an alliance between the West and the Soviet Union against China. Orson Welles, Max von Sydow, and Bibi Andersson led an all-star cast in a thriller whose reputation has steadily grown since initially failing to make ripples.

The same has proved true of The Last Run (1971), a road movie about an ageing getaway driver, which Huston spent months rewriting with son Tony before his on-set rows with George C. Scott prompted him to walk away. He moved on to Fat City (1972), an adaptation of a Leonard Gardner novel about a washed-up boxer (Stacy Keach) whose romantic travails with a jailbird's wife (Susan Tyrrell) mirror those of a promising contender (Jeff Bridges) and his pregnant girlfriend (Candy Clark). Sourly melancholic, the drama reminded critics of the quality of Huston's spare shooting technique and his no-nonsense storytelling style.

Tyrrell received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, but the film did only modest business. As did Huston's two collaborations with Paul Newman, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) and The Mackintosh Man (1973). Loosely based on fact, John Milius's script for the former shows how an outlaw set himself up as 'the law west of the Pecos' in the Texan town of Vinegaroon. Huston also took the role of Grizzly Adams, while Ava Gardner cameo'd as Lily Langry, but the reviews were mixed.

Derived from Desmond Bagley's The Freedom Trap, The Mackintosh Man was another spy thriller that saw Newman's troubleshooter jailed for a diamond theft in order to expose treachery in high places. With James Mason and Ian Bannen in the redoubtable supporting cast and scenes set in Ireland and Malta, this was very much of its time. But the passing years have only confirmed the brilliance of the Rudyard Kipling adaptation, The Man Who Would Be King (1975), which Huston had been planning to make for over 20 years. He had originally hoped to cast Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable as Danny Dravot and Peachy Carnehan, the British soldiers seeking their fortune in 19th-century India. Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas were next approached before Huston tried to convince Robert Redford and Paul Newman to continue their partnership. But the latter advised him to cast Sean Connery and Michael Caine and the result was a scathing indictment of Victorian colonialism that earned Huston an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Steven Spielberg would later cite the film as an influence on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). However, it failed to have the same box-office impact and Huston spent much of the next few years scouting around for suitable projects. Having completed the Bicentennial short, Independence (1976), he signed up to direct Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland, as a cop and a gangster's moll taking the scenic route to a courtroom in Love and Bullets (1979). But a combination of behind-the-scenes disquiet and ill health prompted Huston to bale out and Stuart Rosenberg took over.

He wasn't idle for long, though, as he took on Flannery O'Connor's 1952 Southern Gothic novel, Wise Blood (1979). Brad Dourif stars as Hazel Motes, a war veteran who founds his own religion, the Church of Truth Without Christ, and becomes embroiled with a shady promoter (Ned Beatty) and a street-preaching rival (Harry Dean Stanton). Largely praised after debuting at Cannes, this offbeat satire acquired a cult following and has since been hailed as one of Huston's best late-career outings.

A pause around the time of his divorce from fifth wife, Celeste Shane, saw Huston produce an autobiography, Open Book (1980). In it, he described his spouses as 'a schoolgirl, a gentlewoman, a motion-picture actress, a ballerina, and a crocodile'. This is hardly the comment of a #MeToo role model and the roguish charmer also had flings with Mary Astor and Henry Fonda's Italian countess wife, Afdera Franchetti. But Huston bristled with a brand of masculinity that was much admired during his lifetime, the alpha who worked hard and played even harder.

Indeed, such was his eagerness to remain busy that Huston made the worst film of his career, Phobia (1980). Hammer stalwart Jimmy Sangster was among the writers of this silly story that sees the phobic patients of psychiatrist Paul Michael Glaser being bumped off by a serial killer. There were those who viewed Escape to Victory (1981) with equal disdain. But football fans of a certain vintage still get a thrill from seeing Pelé, Bobby Moore, and Osvaldo Ardiles joining fellow POWs Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone in fleeing Max von Sydow's Nazis after a challenge match against a select Reich XI in Paris.

Such was Huston's affinity with the Brazilian superstar that he reunited with Pelé as Father Cardenas in Terrell Tannen's A Minor Miracle (1983), a true story about an orphanage being saved by a football match. Indeed, Huston remained in sentimental mode at the helm of Annie (1982), a big-screen version of the Broadway musical that Charles Strouse, Martin Chamin, and Thomas Meehan had based on Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie comic strip. Chosen over 8000 other hopefuls, Aileen Quinn gives a grand account of herself as the 1930s orphan who goes to live with New York millionaire, Oliver Warbucks (Albert Finney). More of a commercial than a critical success, this enduringly genial picture has since been followed by worthy remakes by Rob Marshall (1998) and Will Gluck (2014) .

Finney rejoined Huston in his adaptation of Malcolm Lowry's 1947 novel, Under the Volcano (1984), and drew an Oscar nomination for his performance as Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic ex-diplomat, who is visited on the Day of the Dead in 1938 in the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac by his ex-wife (Jacqueline Bisset) and his war correspondent brother (Anthony Andrews).

A veteran of Casino Royale and Judge Roy Bean, Bissett received a Golden Globe nomination, as did Finney. But Huston was overlooked after he lost out to Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas (1984) for the Palme d'or at Cannes. He wasn't finished yet, however. Despite suffering from emphysema and requiring another director to be on standby in order to meet the terms of an insurance agreement, Huston retreated to an oxygen tent between takes in order to complete Prizzi's Honor (1985), an adaptation of a Richard Condon novel about gangland assassins who fall in love.

In addition to becoming the oldest recipient of a nomination for Best Director (at 79 years and 184 days - a record that still stands), Huston also made history when Anjelica Huston took the statuette for Best Supporting Actress for her work as Maerose Prizzi, as he became the only director to have guided their father and daughter to an Academy Award. Moreover, the Hustons became the first and, to date, only family to have won Oscars across three successive generations.

Despite having settled at Las Caletas in the Mexican resort of Puerto Vallarta, Huston remained fond of Ireland and his swan song was an adaptation of James Joyce's The Dead (1987). Son Tony wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay, while Anjelica led the estimable ensemble. He had planned to direct Mr North (1988), but declining health following heart surgery forced him to hand son Danny his feature bow as a director.

At 81, John Huston died on 28 August 1987 in Middleton, Rhode Island. A posthumous Best Director nomination came from the Independent Spirit Awards for The Dead, while Danny Huston is currently part of the cast filming Across the River and Into the Trees, the Ernest Hemingway novel that his father had longed to adapt. With Tony's son, Jack, also now accumulating acting accolades, the Huston dynasty looks set to keep us entertained for some while yet.