The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle was based on W.R. Burnett’s novel of the same name and released by MGM in 1950.

Doc Erwin Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) has just been released from prison and he’s planning a big caper. It’s a fool-proof plan to knock over a jewellery story and steal a million dollars in jewels.

He needs someone to put up fifty grand for operating expenses. Using bookie Cobby (Marc Lawrence) as an intermediary he approaches crooked lawyer Alonzo D. Emmerich (Louis Calhern).

Meanwhile small-time stick-up man Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) needs $2300 badly to pay a gambling debt. His pal Gus Minissi (James Whitmore) can advance him a grand and persuades Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso) to find the rest of the money.

Gus, Louis and Dix are recruited to help carry out the robbery.

We have indications very early on that this heist is likely to run into trouble. There are warning signs, in fact we’re pretty sure that a major double-cross is going to go down.

That’s bad enough, but bad luck takes a hand as well. You can plan a robbery in intricate detail but you just can’t predict the trivial little things that are are likely to go wrong, and that’s how guys end up in the penitentiary.

Our sense that things are going to go badly wrong turns out to be correct. It’s then a question of whether there’s still a chance of getting clear before the cops close in.

The police are a slightly sinister presence in this movie. Our sympathies are with the criminals. They’re crooks but they’re not evil. They all have at least one major weakness (women, liquor, gambling or in the case of Louis a desire for money to provide for his wife and son). But these crooks all have redeeming qualities as well. They’re a lot more sympathetic than the cops. And a lot more likeable.

Dix resembles Roy Earle from High Sierra, another W.R. Burnett story. Both have a yearning to return to the past, to their rural boyhoods, and the past is wildly romanticised in their minds. There’s a lot decency in Dix. He can’t bring himself to treat Doll badly. Doll is a hooker and she’s crazy about Dix. He thinks she’s a nuisance but cruelty is just not in his nature.

Sterling Hayden’s reputation as a film noir icon rests mainly on this movie. There’s no question that very few actors ever looked more like film noir icons than Hayden. He gives a typically understated but effective performance.

Louis Calhern as Emmerich, Sam Jaffe as Riedenschneider and James Whitmore as Gus are all very good. This is a movie that focuses more on the characters, and the interactions between the characters, than on plot (although the plot is actually very solid).

Don’t get too excited by the prominence given to Marilyn Monroe on the re-release posters. Hers is strictly a bit part, although it has to be said that she’s fun as Emmerich’s ditzy mistress Angela.

John Huston and Ben Maddow co-wrote the screenplay. They retain much of Burnett’s original dialogue, which is fine since Burnett’s dialogue is terrific. This is an extraordinarily faithful adaptation of the novel. The heist is made slightly more elaborate in order to make it more cinematic but there are no significant changes at all to the story. The ending is unchanged, although it’s also handled in a more cinematic way (which actually improves it).

This is film noir but there’s no femme fatale. Doll is perhaps a sad character but she’s goodhearted and devoted Dix. Angela isn’t really a femme fatale. Her attraction to Emmerich is clearly based entirely on his money but she’s pretty open about it and she’s sweet and good-natured.

The Asphalt Jungle is top-notch entertainment.

I’ve also reviewed W.R. Burnett’s novel, on Vintage Pop Fictions.

Moby Dick (1956)

By 1956 John Huston was developing a taste for risk-taking in his movie projects. Sometimes his gambles paid off and sometimes they didn’t but the results are always interesting. Moby Dick represented a very considerable gamble and while it found little favour at the time with either critics or the public it’s aged rather well.

Adapting Herman Melville’s novel to the screen presented many challenges. The narrative of the book is broken up by lengthy digressions and it’s more concerned with philosophical and spiritual questions than with telling a story. There is a great story in there though and Huston’s film makes the most of it.



A young man named Ishmael (Richard Basehart) signs on to the whaling ship Pequod in 1841. Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) is not interested in making money or catching whales. He is interested in one thing - revenge. A year or so earlier he had suffered horrific injuries in an epic struggle with a gigantic white sperm whale, a whale known as Moby Dick. He intends to renew the struggle and this time it will be a fight to the death, although as he explains to his first mate Starbuck (Leo Genn) it’s not Moby Dick that he hates. The great white whale is just a mask, and it’s what’s behind the mask that he hates.

Ahab is not just obsessive but also very thorough. He has studied accounts by other whalers and he has charted the movements of whales. He has developed a theory as to their movements and he believes he can accurately predict just where Moby Dick will be found. He intends to be waiting for the whale.



His predictions prove to be accurate but the whale escapes. Ahab sets off in pursuit. By this time he has communicated his obsessiveness to his crew. They regard him as being almost a god and they are as keen for the final showdown as he is.

The screenplay by Huston and Ray Bradbury sticks reasonably close to the book although naturally much had to be omitted. They have also striven for a deliberately archaic feel to the dialogue which suits the material. It gives it a kind of Old Testament feel, combined with some of the flavour of epic poetry. The danger with this approach is that it can make movie seem too literary but in this case that’s not such a disadvantage.



Huston wanted the movie to have the washed-out sepia look of old photographs whilst still being shot in colour and he and director of photography Oswald Morris came up with a complicated process to achieve this. It succeeds extremely well. A few years later Huston did something similar in Reflections in a Golden Eye - he seems to have been obsessed by the idea of getting away from a conventional colour palette in his films made in colour.

Of course you couldn’t make a movie such as this at the time without utilising process shots but they generally work pretty well. The movie avoids any hint of appearing to be studio-bound while at the same time avoiding a realistic look. This is a tale that does not lend itself to a straightforward realistic approach.



A major challenge was to satisfy the commercial requirements for an exciting action-packed entertaining film while preserving as much as possible of the metaphysical dimension of the novel. It has to be more than just a seafaring adventure yarn. It’s an almost impossible compromise that mostly comes off.

The biggest problem was the casting of Gregory Peck as Ahab. While it’s true that someone like Orson Welles would have been more suitable Peck is actually surprisingly effective. You just have to forget his usual screen image. Leo Genn as Starbuck is more of a problem - he’s good but a little too civilised to be convincing as the first mate of a whaling ship. The rest of the supporting is excellent with Harry Andrews particularly good as the second mate. Richard Basehart as Ishmael is fine. As the narrator he has to be a neutral sort of character but also sympathetic. Orson Welles and James Robertson Justice contribute brief but impressively scenery-chewing cameos.



The special effects are excellent. Filming the epic struggle between the Pequod and the whale in those pre-CGI days was awesomely difficult but those scenes are gripping and convincing. Huston also comes up with some memorable visual images - Orson Welles preaching from the prow of a ship mounted inside a chapel in the Pequod’s home port and the typhoon scene with St Elmo’s Fire dancing on the masts are both stunning, but they also contribute to the biblical feel of the story.

The DVD presentation of Moby Dick is quite acceptable and, importantly, preserves the unusual colour scheme.

A very underrated John Huston movie - highly recommended.

The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

It took John Huston a quarter of a century to bring Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King to the big screen, but the wait was worth it.

Like almost everybody who has read Kipling’s original short story Huston had fallen in love with, and being a fikm-maker he recognised that not only would it make a great movie, it would it make a great John Huston movie. His first idea was to cast Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart in the lead roles, but every time he thought the film was going to happen something went wrong. He had almost given up hope, and then in 1975, courtesy of producer John Foreman, he finally got his chance.

In some ways Huston was fortunate he had to wait until 1975 to make this move. While Gable and Bogart could certainly have played the leads there’s no question that Sean Connery and Michael Caine were much more suited to the roles.



The story opens in India in the late 19th century with an encounter on a train between a newspaper reporter named Rudyard Kipling (Christopher Plummer) and a very disreputable character named Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine). Peachy has just stolen Kipling’s watch, but he then looks at the medallion attached to the watch chain discovers to his horror that he has robbed a fellow Freemason. Peachy is a rogue, a cheat, a blackmailer and a thief but he does have a moral code of his own and stealing from a a brother Mason is something he could never do.

As a result of this chance meeting Kipling gets to meet both Peachy and Peachy’s partner-in-crime, Daniel Dravot (Sean Connery). And Kipling comes to learn of their plan. Peachy and Daniel have decided that India is too small for men such as them. They are planning to journey to Kafiristan to become kings. To reach Kafiristan they must pass through Afghanistan and Kipling assures them they will never make it alive.



Peachy and Daniel are not deterred. They have spent every penny of their ill-gotten gains on the purchase of twenty Martini rifles. Being ex-British Army NCO’s they know how to train men to fight and they are confident they will soon carve out a kingdom. Kipling expects that he will never hear from them again but three years later he hears their tale. They achieved their goals, they won their kingdom, but at a terrible price.

Since the source material was a short story a considerable amount of expansion was necessary to make a feature film (the screenplay was co-written by Huston and Gladys Hill).The extra material is a perfect fit with Kipling’s original tale and adds to the power of the story. In particular the movie stresses the extent to which Daniel comes to believe in his destiny. He had always believed in his destiny of course of course but he had thought his destiny was to become fabulously rich by plundering a kingdom. Now he realises there was more to it. He has been hailed as the son of the legendary Sikander (Alexander the Great who conquered northern India in 328BC). Daniel starts to believe he really is the successor to Sikander.



Freemasonry played a role in Kipling’s story but it’s even more important in the film, providing the key to the recognition of Daniel as a god as well as a king and leading him on to a dangerous self-delusion.

Connery and Caine are magnificent. These are larger-than-life characters and they pull out all the stops. The support cast includes Michael Caine’s wife Shakira in one of her rare acting appearances.



The location shooting (done mostly in Morocco) is spectacular, the action sequences are impressive, the movie looks absolutely glorious. It has all the themes that were bound to appeal to John Huston - it’s a story of friendship, of aspirations that are insanely excessive and bound to have tragic results, of greed and ambition, of loveable rogues who are dishonest but brave, and it’s a story of obsession. It was perfect material for the man who’d made movies such as The African Queen, Beat the Devil and Moby Dick. It’s a story that is at times very moving but with a sense of fun mixed with tragedy, and with tragedy mixed with irony.

Of course such a movie could never get made today. It would be accused of cultural insensitivity and countless other sins against political correctness.



The UK Blu-Ray release looks superb and includes a contemporary making-of featurette that shows John Huston clearly having a great time.

This has always been one of my favourite movies of all time and it still stands up as well as ever. Very highly recommended.

Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)

By 1967 The Production Code was starting to crumble and it had already been watered down in several important respects. Homosexuality was no longer a forbidden subject. It still had to be approached obliquely, but that actually works to the advantage of John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye. Based on a scandalous 1941 Carson McCullers novella, it is after all a movie about repressed homosexuality. The indirect approach to the subject matter perfectly captures the mood of repression, of secrecy, of forbidden desires and hidden passions.

Marlon Brando plays Major Weldon Penderton, a lecturer in military tactics and leadership at an unnamed military base somewhere in the US South. His homosexual tendencies are so deeply buried he’s almost succeeded in hiding them from himself. He certainly hasn’t been able to hide his sexual problems from his wife Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor) and his failure to perform in bed is causing steadily escalating tensions. Penderton’s repressed homosexuality hasn’t just made him shut down sexually, it’s made him shut down emotionally as well. Leonara taunts him not so much because of sexual frustration, but simply because she wants to get some kind of response, any kind of response, from him. She can’t even get him to hate her.

The lack of sex isn’t a problem for her, because she’s getting plenty of that from Penderton’s best buddy, Colonel Morris Langton (Brian Keith). But he has his own problems. For one thing, he’s too obsessively masculine, too afraid of his emotions, and he’s clearly very uncomfortable around his wife’s very gay Filipino houseboy. His wife has repressions of her own, which led her to cut off her own nipples with a pair of garden shears.

And then there’s Private Williams, who cares for Leonora’s horse. He’s apparently a virgin, and he’s taken to sneaking into her house to watch her sleep while fondling her lingerie. But is it Leonora he’s obsessed with, or does he want to be Leonora? And Major Penderton has developed his own obsession with Private Williams, especially after seeing him riding in the woods naked.

This isn’t so much a movie about repressed homosexuality as it is a movie about repressed sexuality and repressed emotions in general, and in particular with the severely abnormal atmosphere of a military camp. The fact that Huston can’t confront the issues directly makes it impossible for him to present any of the characters or relationships in a simple straightforward way. Again this turns out to be a plus, adding layers of complexity and subtlety. The viewer really does inhabit this strange military world in which nothing can be stated openly and nothing can be felt directly. Huston’s approach may be indirect, but the movie certainly doesn’t avoid the issues. There’s no subtext here. Huston decided to use an odd sepia wash on the film that mutes and transforms the colours. This was lost in earlier releases but has been restored for the DVD release, and it adds to the feel of an unhealthy distorted reality.

The Brando role was originally intended for Montgomery Clift. Personally I think that would have been far too obvious a piece of casting for such a movie, and I think Brando’s macho but tortured performance is perfect. When you see him start to disintegrate in the middle of a lecture you’re seeing a touch of Brando brilliance. Elizabeth Taylor gives Leonora considerable complexity as well. She doesn’t play her as an emasculating bitch. She can be cruel certainly, but her pain and confusion over her loveless marriage are obvious and she shows unexpected moment of sensitivity. Taylor’s performance once again highlights just how bland and uninteresting most modern actresses are. Brian Keith is the real surprise. His performance is absolutely superb.

This is an odd movie, a movie that contemporary audiences and critics (and sad to say some modern critics as well) found too perplexing and too unconventional. It’s an odd mix of subtlety and outrageousness (Taylor publicly horse-whipping Brando certainly qualifies as outrageous). A strange and unusual piece of cinematic magic.

The Night of the Iguana (1964)

The Night of the Iguana, based on Tennessee Williams’ play, was directed by John Huston and released in 1964.

It’s the story of drunkard defrocked clergyman Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon (played by Richard Burton) who works as a tour guide in Mexico. His life reaches a crisis as he’s escorting a busload of female Southern Baptist school-teachers. Unfortunately for Shannon one of the teachers is chaperoning Charlotte, an under-age girl who has even more unfortunately decided that she’s madly in love with the reverend. And more unfortunately still the teacher who is chaperoning Charlotte already hates Shannon and is determined to see him fired from his job, and preferably gaoled for sexual misconduct with a minor.

He finds refuge in a seedy hotel run by an old friend of his, the colourful Maxine Faulk (Ava Gardner). Maxine has problems of her own to grapple with, most notably her severe and chronic lack of a bed partner after a sexless marriage. At this point Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) and her elderly grandfather, who eke out a living giving poetry recitations and doing sketches, arrive. Hannah Maxine has the opposite problem to Maxine – she’s severely sexually repressed.

So what we have are exactly the sort of characters we expect from Tennessee Williams, and an ideal line-up of actors to play them.

Deborah Kerr is terrific as always. Sue Lyon is unexpectedly impressive as Charlotte. For Richard Burton it’s an ideal role, the kind of thing that gives him the opportunity to overact outrageously but effectively, and he makes the most of it.

But it’s Ava Gardner who steals the picture, giving the performance of her career.

The end result is a very fine movie. In fact it’s the best ever movie adaptation of a Tennessee Williams work, and one of Huston’s two or three best pictures.