John Huston

I never cared much for Huston's most celebrated films:  the literate Maltese Falcon (1941) and The African Queen (1951) but I think The Asphalt Jungle (1950) is one of the great caper films and Huston's final film, The Dead (1987), is intensely moving and beautiful, true in spirit to James Joyce's story.  Lately I have been watching some of Huston's films from the 70's, particularly The Mackintosh Man (1973) and Fat City (1972). (I wrote about Huston's The Man Who Would Be King, (1975), on Jan 15, 2016)

Fat City is a fatalistic film about one boxer down-and-out (Stacey Keach) and another up-and-coming (Jeff Bridges).  In typical Huston style they are both failing and flailing in their attempts to succeed and make a life and the film has some interesting analogies to Huston's own life of early success and later obscurity..  Huston never stopped making films, traveling all over the world to make them, even as he was more recognized as an actor (The Cardinal,1963; Chinatown, 1974 et al.).  And Huston always had his pick of collaborators; Richard Sylbert for the production design of Fat City and Conrad Hall for the cinematography, capturing the grittiness of the boxers and onion harvesters of Stockton, Ca.

The Mackintosh Man is a cerebral spy film in the era of James Bond; it is more like John LeCarre than Ian Fleming. It is not as merciless and ruthless as Huston's The Kremlin Letter (1970) but, once again, the infiltrator of the spy network (Paul Newman) fails in his mission(as Huston's protagonists usually do) to capture the British traitor. Newman is helped by Domique Sanda (an actress discovered by Bresson, who is always enigmatic).  Huston does some extraordinary location shooting in Ireland, capturing the wild beauty of the countryside and the isolation of the towns (the main thing I remembered from when I first saw the film in 1973) and the island of Malta.  The film, like many Huston films, builds the story slowly, leading up to an impressive prison break and confrontation with the pompous member of Parliament (James Mason) who is the leader of the spy ring.