Film Noir FAQ by David J. Hogan

Author:David J. Hogan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: film
Publisher: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books
Published: 2013-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

Case File: John Huston (1906–87)

The legendarily larger-than-life polymath who helped invent film noir had determination and talent enough to defy the odds and forge a Hollywood career that lasted a remarkable fifty-eight years. For many of those years, from 1938 until his death in 1987, Huston was a major figure who wowed audiences and his peers as a writer, director, producer, and actor. (He also kept a very lively, often raucous, private life, which didn’t diminish his popularity around town.) Huston’s script for The Maltese Falcon, which was the first film he directed, captured the terse qualities of Dashiell Hammett’s plotting and dialogue, and added a compellingly visual dimension. Huston contributed greatly to the career of Humphrey Bogart, with a 1941 script for High Sierra, script and direction of The Maltese Falcon a year later, and subsequent collaborations on Across the Pacific, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The African Queen, and Beat the Devil.

Huston’s interest in deeply ambivalent protagonists found expression in nearly all of his movies, and with particular piquancy in The Maltese Falcon and his other noir work: The Killers (contributing writer, uncredited), Three Strangers (writer), and The Asphalt Jungle (producer, cowriter, director). Huston did not return to noir after The Asphalt Jungle, except for a stunningly malignant turn as an actor in Roman Polanski’s brilliant 1974 neo-noir Chinatown.

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