Happy Birthday John Huston

Here at Arena we are celebrating the 110th birthday of one of the most influential film directors of the 20th Century, John Huston; we are proud to say he was the focus of our film, Huston’s Hobby (1981, dir. Alan Yentob and Gavin Millar).



The American’s portfolio of work is varied. It began back in the 1940s during the Golden Age of Hollywood, and survived the decline of the studio system during the fifties, the Hollywood New Wave of the sixties and the rise of the blockbuster in the seventies.

The son of actor Walter Huston and father of actress Angelica Huston, he is known for his collaborations with actor Humphrey Bogart and Orson Welles, and his friendship with novelist Ernest Hemingway.

Before he ventured into motion pictures, Huston experimented with boxing and bull fighting. His career choices were bohemian in nature and broad in variety, much like the man himself.

The beginnings of his career as a film director came during the Second World War: Huston’s first feature film was The Maltese Falcon (1941) starring Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet. It was also the first pairing of Greenstreet and Lorre, who would go on to make eight further films together.



The Maltese Falcon is widely considered to be as influential to the art of film as Citizen Kane. Watching the films back to back, you see many parallels. Both were the debut films for the respective directors. Both use lighting to convey mood and depth of field. Both also adopted innovative camera angles, including the low camera angle, shooting from the floor to reveal the roof of the set. This was particularly tricky at the time because studio lighting and microphones were usually rigged above the actors as they performed.

John Huston famously also directed Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen (1951) along with Katharine Hepburn. The film was shot in what is today called Congo, and during filming all of the crew, including Hepburn, apparently got sick with dysentery from drinking the water. Only Huston and Bogart avoided getting ill by supposedly drinking nothing but whiskey throughout the shoot. Another story, recounted by Huston during his AFI Lifetime Achievement Award speech, was that the company hired a local hunter to cook for the cast and crew during filming. Meanwhile, members of the local village were going missing. One day the hunter was arrested by the Congolese police as it turned out he had been cooking his victims and serving them to the crew.

Here, Huston discusses the making of the film and how he worked with Hepburn on her memorable performance.

In 1956, Huston directed Gregory Peck in Moby Dick, which also featured Orson Welles. Welles and Huston collaborated on many film projects, remaining friends until Welles’s death in 1985. When Welles was awarded an Honorary Oscar at the 1971 Academy Awards, Huston accepted it on his behalf but criticised the industry for refusing to grant Welles the necessary freedom as a director.

In this clip from Arena’s The Orson Welles Story, Welles describes Huston’s theatrical approach to directing.

In the 70s, Huston was also in his 70s. Yet he showed no signs of slowing down and continued to work as a director and actor. He directed nine films in the decade, including The Man Who Would Be King (1975), starring Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer. He worked with established actors but also sought out emerging talent, such as Brad Dourif in Wise Blood (1979) and Sylvester Stallone in Escape to Victory (1981).

He also continued to act and is perhaps most well-known for his role as Noah Cross in Chinatown (1974). And before the role belonged to Ian McKellen, Huston played the speaking role of Gandalf for the animated versions of The Hobbit (1977) and The Return of the King (1980).

Huston directed 47 films in his lifetime, many of them adaptations of novels. His films varied in terms of genre and tone, from hardboiled film noirs like The Maltese Falcon to musicals such as Moulin Rouge (1952) and Annie (1982). Compared with directors such as Scorsese, Tarantino, Hitchcock and Carpenter, Huston’s films arguably lack a distinct style. Indeed, Huston himself accepts this apparent lack of continuity across his films. As the following clip reveals, inconsistency seeped into every aspect of Huston’s life, from his films, his career choices, and even is wives.

And yet one could argue that this “lack” of style is what identifies a Huston film. Each of his films feels fresh, innovative and evocative, rather than repetitive. They do not follow the same beats or retread the same territory. Each film is independent. This could be seen as a facet of Huston’s personality, always exploring new avenues, keeping a fresh perspective on life, and perennially remaining relevant.

Huston, however, suggests that he does seek to evoke certain themes in his movies. As the following clip reveals, Huston uses Moby Dick as an example of one prevailing theme in his films: the main protagonist pits themself against a higher power, in this case God. They are ultimately defeated in the end, but the defeat is not seen as inevitable until the final moments of the film.

There is little doubt that Huston still influences film makers and even actors today. For his role as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis adopted Huston’s distinctive voice and even appears to imitate Huston’s shuffling demeanour.

There remains one film starring John Huston which has yet to be released: The Other Side of the Wind, directed by Orson Welles. It is a film about a film maker (Huston), who plans to make a comeback in Hollywood by making a new movie called The Other Side of the Wind. Aside from its troubled production history, very little is known about the film. However, clips suggest that the style is akin to that of Welles’s F For Fake and the film could, perhaps, be one of the most original and innovative in the history of cinema if and when it is released.

Huston left his mark on cinema, kick-started the careers of many actors, influenced future directors and left a large volume of work which will live on for centuries to come. What’s more, even when Huston reached his 70s and 80s, he never contemplated retiring as a director. His determination in his later years is apparent in this clip. At the age of 75, he was still active, and preparing to film Annie.

A lifelong smoker, John Huston died from emphysema on 28 August 1987 at the age of 81. His final, and Oscar-nominated film, The Dead, was filmed as Huston sat in a wheelchair hooked to an oxygen machine.