Perspectives On John Huston

John Huston's Filmmaking offers an analysis of the life and work of one of the greatest American independent filmmakers. Always visually exciting, Huston's films sensitively portray humankind in all its incarnations, chronicling the attempts by protagonists to conceive and articulate their identities. Fundamental questions of selfhood, happiness and love are intimately connected to the idea of home, which for the filmmaker also signified a congenial place among other people in the world. In this study, Lesley Brill shows Huston's films to be far more than formulaic adventures of masculine failure, arguing instead that they demonstrate the close connection between humanity, the natural world, and divinity.

Recounts the life of the influential director, writer, and actor and offers insight into his professional achievements as well as his extensive hobbies, five marriages, and homes in Mexico and Ireland.

Years after his death, American filmmaker John Huston (1906–1987) remains an enigmatic and compelling figure. This wide-ranging collection of new essays encompasses a variety of topics relating to Huston’s lifestyle, political activities and cinematic legacy. Fresh analyses of such films as Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen, The Misfits and Prizzi’s Honor are included along with insightful studies of Huston’s oft-overlooked literary adaptations In This Our Life, Moby Dick and A Walk With Love and Death. Also evaluated are Huston’s controversial World War II documentary Let There Be Light, and two a clef portraits of the “real” Huston in the films The Way We Were and White Hunter, Black Heart. Bookending these essays are revealing interviews with John’s actress daughter Angelica Huston and film producer Wieland Schultz-Keil.

Argues that understanding Huston’s film adaptations of literary works is essential to understanding his oeuvre as a filmmaker. John Huston as Adaptor makes the case that adaptation is the salient element in Huston’s identity as a filmmaker and that his early and deep attraction to the experience of reading informed his approach to film adaptation. Thirty-four of Huston’s thirty-seven films were adaptations of literary texts, and they stand as serious interpretations of literary works that could only be made by an astute reader of literature. Indeed, Huston asserted that a film director should be above all else a reader and that reading itself should be the intellectual and emotional basis for filmmaking. The seventeen essays in this volume not only address Huston as an adaptor, but also offer an approach to adaptation studies that has been largely overlooked. How an adaptor reads, the works to which he is drawn, and how his literary interpretations can be brought to the screen without relegating film to a subservient role are some of the issues addressed by the contributors. An introductory chapter identifies Huston as the quintessential Hollywood adaptor and argues that his skill at adaptation is the mark of his authorial signature. The chapters that follow focus on fifteen of Huston’s most important films, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The African Queen (1951), The Night of the Iguana (1964), Under the Volcano (1984), and The Dead (1987), and are divided into three areas: aesthetics and textuality; history and social context; and theory and psychoanalysis. By offering a more comprehensive account of the centrality of adaptation to Huston’s films, John Huston as Adaptor offers a greater understanding of Huston as a filmmaker. Douglas McFarland is a retired Professor of English at Flagler College. Wesley King is Assistant Professor of English at Flagler College.

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Popular cinema is saturated with images and narratives of empire. With "Projecting Empire", Chapman and Cull have written the first major study of imperialism and cinema for over thirty years. This welcome text maps the history of empire cinema in both Hollywood and Britain through a serious of case studies of popular films including biopics, adventures, literary adaptations, melodramas, comedies and documentaries, from the 1930s and "The Four Feathers" to the present, with "Indiana Jones" and "Three Kings". The authors consider industry-wide trends and place the films in their wider cultural and historical contexts. Using primary sources that include private papers, they look at the presence of particular auteurs in the cinema of Imperialism, including Korda, Lean, Huston and Attenborough, as well as the actors who brought the stories to life, such as Elizabeth Taylor and George Clooney. At a time when imperialism has a new significance in the world, this book will fulfil the needs of students and interested filmgoers alike.

This reference work provides a biography of John Huston; a critical survey of his oeuvre; a chronology of his life; a filmography with synopses of the films he directed, wrote for, or appeared in; an annotated bibliography of writings on Huston; a list of articles and reviews of particular films; and information concerning screenplays, awards and honors, archival resources, and related matters. Largely follows the organizational pattern of "A Reference Publication in Film" series. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR