best/worst: John Huston

The best: The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Beat the Devil, the Orson Welles monologue in Moby Dick, The Man Who Would Be King, Prizzi's Honor, The Dead.

Not sure Reflections ina Golden Eye is GOOD, but it's fascinating.

In which he plays Noah Cross, a character who benefits from the manipulation of water. He played Noah in the Bible. My film professor thought this was all very significant.

But Edward G. Robinson! And the setting's great. It's a minor Bogart film, OK sure, but it's not bad.

I saw the Bible on TVas a kid, and he was real silly as Noah. Geo C Scott is a good Abraham tho.

Prizzi's Honor may be his 2nd-best film after Maltese Falcon, Jack hatas!

The Red Badge of Courage I remember being free of phony heroics.

And I also really like Under The Volcano , but have seen that on video only.

The Asphalt Jungle is ok but I saw it recently and it really paled in comparison with The Killing.

The African Queen is one of those official 'classics' that doesn't do much for me. Hepburn's first major irritating perf, and there would be no legend of Bogart if he had more roles like that. I prefer the gravity of Clint Eastwood's film a clef about its preproduction.

I find Sierra Madre slightly overrated too -- hstencil and I were discussing it on the G train last night -- save for Alfonso Bedoya and Walter H.

even it's a wonderful life?

Lionel Barrymore's OK pre-decrepitude (eg, Grand Hotel) tho his brother John said he thought of him whenever he played Richard III (for the appropriate ham quotient).

http://moma.org/exhibitions/film_media/2006/huston_family.html

I've not seen A Walk with Love and Death, which intrigues me for teenage Anjelica alone.

how is the "real" White Hunter/Black Heart - Roots of Heaven??? I like Juliette Greco (so did daryl zanuck).

I just find WH/BH more entertaining and honest than Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby ... or The African Queen.

Are you claiming Bogie as black (or is there something I'm forgetting)?

any "Myra Breckinridge" opinions?

"More champagne?"

Morbs, based on your posting time, you have a knack for going to the exact screenings I was planning on going to before running just slightly too late to overcome train delays. Second time this has happened in the last couple weeks I think! Gonna hit up BtD today though, am stoked.

catch me if you can, Dr C

I went on Tuesday. Third ilxor is the charm.

Yeah Beat the Devil is a hoot - totally pointless plot-wise, just establishing a space where, as HOOS said of The Usual Suspects, we get to watch that awesome cast fuck around for 90 mins so big up that flick. Bunch of character actors playing characters who put on characters, it's fun just watching them be in scenes together. Morley's every line is a delight and Jennifer Jones - who I think I've only ever seen in The Towering Inferno as Fred Astaire's love interest with the cheap death - was hilarious and hypnotic.

Caveat: I could have seeeeriously done without the North African digression and all its "oh but surprise, the stern-faced local bigwig... is actually a fan of Rita Hayworth!!!" latter-day Orientalist yuks. That's the period for you, but it does make me a little less likely to recommend the film to someone.

I wish you hadn't mentioned that other movie.

I used to teach The Dead in the early '00s when I asked my intro to lit class to read Dubliners. It's more than an honorable try: the Gretta/Gabriel confrontation is as moving as it needs to be.

Also: Prizzi's Honor hasn't survived its (inexplicable) reputation as an '80s Oscar prestige flick, despite how successfully it mixes tones.

Sorry, didn't like it that much at the time either

love it

Alfred, its "prestige" element had mostly to do with Anjelica and Dad working together for the second (and first successful) time, her Ex-Boyfriend's presence (told by the director "Everything you've done til now has been informed by your intelligence -- we can't have any of that"), and maybe a little of the Richard Condon revival (I think Manchurian Candidate had just been brought out of the vaults after a 20-year suppression).

Oh I'm aware of that. Apparently the old buzzard had to gently explain to Nicholson, "Jack, it's a comedy."

What about Bill Hickey?

"You want a cookie?"

the Self-Styled Siren on Devil -- i have to admit i didn't think to look for evidence of Bogart's varying teeth (car accident), but he looks like hell in some scenes more than others.

Jones wrote to Selznick, "Certainly my character has no reality of any kind and whether she is comedy, tragedy, or something 'bourgeois' I haven’t a notion." !!!

http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/beat-the-devil/

Two of the many things I liked about Beat The Devil:
The cinematography by Oswald Mosley Morris, with help from cameraman Freddie Francis
Robert Morley's stuff, presumably ad-libbed by him some of the time, such as "Neptune's mixture!"

"Now, breathe deeply. Remember, every breath is a guinea in the bank of health"

Also, speaking of Freddie Francis, there was the in-joke of one of the characters being named after associate producer Jack Clayton.

Yeah Morley's holding-forth was generally one of the highlights, always got a laugh.

The Criterion edition of Wise Blood is a terrific clean-up; the film's never looked better. I'm not as high on it as I once was twenty years ago: Huston goes for slapstick cornpone as if, like Jack Nicholson later in Prizzi's Honor, he was unsure about finding a tonal equivalent to the O'Connor novel. Excellent Bill Moyers interview from 1982 on the extras.

? Wtf is moyers' connection to this film?

None. Promo interview for Annie.

I'm crazy about Wise Blood but, like you, have not seen it in about 20 years.

Saw Wise Blood introduced by Richard Hell (?) a few years back - he correctly pointed out how bad/inappropriate some of the music is (slapstick cornpone is about right). But I like the film's tonal inconsistency because it reflects how O'Connor's novel can be read as cosmic tragedy or pitch black comedy.

Fat City just got a nice Region 2 Blu Ray release after being a hard film to legit source in the UK, looking forward to checking it out.

That Criterion WB set also has O'Connor reading "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," no?

yes and she's startling

My keepers. Freud is stilted as hell, camp in places ( “You’re the only doctor in the world who asks such questions!” Freud: “In the world perhaps.”)

I'd been meaning to see Fat City for about 30 years and finally did. It's very strong, and I almost immediately wanted to rewatch several scenes.

Susan Tyrell's performance is the type that makes you think, "this has the quality of an Oscar-nominated performance" and then you look it up and find out it was an Oscar-nominated performance.
It's crazy that she was only 26 in this movie - she comes across as a very convincing 40-something barfly.

I know the 70s were a different time but I was surprised when I learned Fat City did well at the box office.

It was Richard Dawson (of Family Feud)'s favorite film

I don't why the scene where Stacey Keach prepares a supper of boot leather steak with cold peas straight from the tin sticks me so much, but it's a classic of the genre.

With ketchup! But did he not heat the peas inside the can? I wasn't sure. Even that would be odd to me.

I think he just poured them straight out cold unless I'm remembering it wrong! It reminds me a bit of my mum telling me when she was living in a scummy bedsit in the early 60's without a cooker and resorted to heating a tin of beans in a constantly boiling electric kettle.

i also enjoyed "fat city." it's got the '70s thing where it has one pop song that it reuses over and over in different versions throughout, which i always appreciate. it's very faithful to the excellent source novel, so if you liked the movie, you might want to read the book too.

rocky had to have been directly influenced by it, right? very similar in being low-key blue-collar character studies disguised as boxing movies

happy birthday, John!

The Kris Kristofferson song works perfectly in Fat City. I was noticing how some Mexican-type horns enter the arrangement when Keach goes off picking fruit with the migrant workers and thought, this is a director (or whoever was responsible) who knows how to use music.

Thanks for pushing me to read the novel; my local bookstore had a copy.

it's very faithful to the excellent source novel

this was always Huston's signature move

whoa:

Under the then-extant rules, Stacy Keach should have been awarded Best Actor from the New York Film Critics Circle for his portrayal of Tully because it required only a plurality of the vote. Keach was the top vote-getter for Best Actor. At the time, the NYCC was second in prestige only to the Academy Awards and was a major influence on subsequent Oscar nominations. A vocal faction of the NYFCC, dismayed by the rather low percentage of votes that would have given Keach the award, successfully demanded a rule change so that the winner would have to obtain a majority. In subsequent balloting, Keach failed to win a majority of the vote, and he lost ground to the performance of Marlon Brando in The Godfather. However, Brando could not gain a majority either. As a compromise candidate, Laurence Olivier in Sleuth eventually was awarded Best Actor.

Coincidentally, director John Huston had initially wanted Brando to play the role of Tully. When Brando informed Huston repeatedly that he needed some more time to think about it, Huston finally came to the conclusion that the star wasn't really interested and looked for another actor until he finally cast the then relatively unknown Keach.

Looking through my books old film reviews it's interesting that neither Pauline Kael, John Simon, nor Stanley Kauffman were much impressed by Stacy Keach's performance. Kael thought Susan Tyrell should have won the Oscar, but her review of the film was mixed - she wondered why she was watching these loser characters. Simon didn't like the film at all and felt that Tyrell's performance was artless and out of control.

Oh, also John Simon's review misspells John Huston's name as Houston throughout.

Brando would've been too old for that role. The character in both the book and the film is 29. Brando was 47. Stacy Keach was the same age as the character.

I don't suppose I will be the first one who thinks Richard Basehart's Ishmael in Moby Dick looks so uncannily like Ewen McGregor that a DNA test shouldn't be out of the question.

Looking through my books old film reviews it's interesting that neither Pauline Kael, John Simon, nor Stanley Kauffman were much impressed by Stacy Keach's performance. Kael thought Susan Tyrell should have won the Oscar, but her review of the film was mixed - she wondered why she was watching these loser characters. Simon didn't like the film at all and felt that Tyrell's performance was artless and out of control.

― Josefa,

I thought Kael said in a later but contemporaneous review that a performance comes around once in a while so bad it's a wonder it doesn't win an Oscar.

^You're right! That was the passage I was referring to, but rereading it now it's clear Kael was being ironic, comparing Tyrrell's performance to previous bad performances that did win Oscars. Kael's phrase, "a performance of that caliber" threw me.

and she's wrong! I had this conversation pre-COVID a couple years ago over drinks about the best drunk performances in film. I mentioned Susan Tyrell, particularly her second bar scene where Keach picks her up. She creates an alternate reality like I've seen other deep alcoholics do.

Still haven't seen Fat City, but anyone looking for a true monster of a Susan Tyrell performance is encouraged to check out the 80s queer horror should-be classic Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker.

Kael thought Susan Tyrell should have won the Oscar, but her review of the film was mixed - she wondered why she was watching these loser characters.

lol I know no one is consistent about stuff like this but "don't want to watch losers" would be a tough standard for a cinemagoer in the 1970's

Man Fat City! Help me make it through the night is used so well. Love how it ends with the second verse, “yesterday is dead and gone.” Nice gut punch