John Huston was a very strange man--sort of like Ernest Hemingway (for good and bad) but with more of a commercial bent. He was an enigma, as he was supremely talented yet in addition to making many brilliant films (such as "The Maltese Falcon" and "The African Queen") he also made some films that were total crap ("Myra Breckinridge" comes quickly to mind). A terrific writer, director and decent actor, he was also a terrible husband and family man. He was also an amazing eccentric, owning monkeys and walking to his own drummer.
This film is a lengthy tribute about the man and his films--with a slightly emphasis on the man. Filled with clips of his films, interviews with family and movie stars from the late 1980s as well as a few clips of Huston later in his life. Unfortunately, the really interesting interviews were often missing--and you can't blame the film makers for not having a time machine to get them! But it would have been wonderful had there been some way to have interviews with Humphrey Bogart (one of his closest friends), ALL his many wives and John Wayne (who, unlike the rest, apparently hated the man and once decked Huston during one film shoot because of how Huston was treating the actors). Plus, a few people were alive but either were unwilling or unavailable for the film--such as Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando and many others. I am sure they tried, however, to get them but couldn't.
So how is the film overall? Well, it's excellent in many ways. Foremost, I loved that it was 129 minutes--too many film tributes on famous directors are just too short and cram too much into an hour or hour and a half. Also, while it was NOT exactly a 'warts and all' treatment of his life, it did discuss some of his MANY shortcomings--such as his wives, his time away from his kids, his ling and his drinking. BUT, it also felt a bit sanitized as well. How could the film fail to mention some of his most god-awful films--again, "Myra Breckinridge" comes to mind. Also, Huston was famous (at least earlier in his career) for mistreating his actors--yet the film talks about what a great guy he was--with Paul Newman saying how much he liked actors. I think the truth about the man is that while you probably would NOT want to have had him as a father or husband, he was an amazingly complex and talented man--one you CANNOT forget because of his oddness, his immense skills and his contributions to films.
Myra Breckinridge John Wayne--decked him
