Huston and favoured collaborator Humphrey Bogart, despite their reputation as macho, hard-drinking hell-raisers, also represented the leading edge of the Hollywood progressive ethos at the time, and with Bogart’s wife and frequent co-star Lauren Bacall, William Wyler, Sterling Hayden, and others helped form a protests and resistance organisation aimed at defending the “Hollywood Ten” called as witnesses before HUAC. By 1948, the optimistic and reforming zeal instilled by victory in the war was slowly devolving into the tense and paranoid early days of the Cold War and the Red Scare. Huston, never the most easy-going of personalities, was struggling through divorce and the lingering effects of wartime experience at the time, and was also facing a rapidly curdling peacetime zeitgeist. Huston immediately followed it with We Were Strangers, a highly underrated study in revolutionary terrorism only really hindered by the miscasting of Jennifer Jones, and The Asphalt Jungle, a film that was to inflect 1950s crime cinema as much or more than The Maltese Falcon had set the scene for film noir in the ‘40s. Key Largo was the price Warner exacted from Huston for backing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: in a classic “one for me, one for them” trade-off, Huston was obligated to take on a less expensive and arduous property for a follow-up.īut Key Largo provided an ideal blueprint that let Huston find new stages to work through the preoccupations had winnowed on The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and kicked off a triptych of films concerned with claustrophobic criminal enterprise and group dynamics. The run of work Huston accomplished in the first five years of his resumed Hollywood career – The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, We Were Strangers (1949), The Asphalt Jungle, The Red Badge of Courage (1951), and The African Queen (1952), is one of the strongest from any filmmaker of any time, even if not every film was appreciated in the moment. In terms of subject, it depicted the perpetually nagging and destructive nature of seeking wealth, into a mixture singular in its moment and near-endlessly influential, particular in the New Hollywood era: it’s been said that filmmakers from Sam Peckinpah to Robert Altman devoted themselves to remaking it again and again. In style, Huston melded aspects of the pre-war working class melodramas Warners had specialised in, the French Poetic Realist tradition, post-war noir, and neorealist and docudrama elements. More than that, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was a vital moment for American film. His comeback feature only gained mild box office success at first, but won plaudits including Oscars for himself and his father, and quickly became an anointed classic. he successfully battled a dubious Jack Warner to make The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). When Huston finally returned to the fold at Warner Bros. But he fought losing battles to keep more critical elements in the second film, and the third was suppressed altogether. He made three highly regarded documentaries during the war, Report From The Aleutians (1943), The Battle of San Pietro (1945), and the study of psychiatric treatment for shell-shocked veterans Let There Be Light (1946). But he only managed two more movies – the Bette Davis vehicle In This Our Life (1942) and Across The Pacific (1942), a lumpy espionage thriller with the reunited stars of The Maltese Falcon – before he left to join the US Army Signal Corps as a filmmaker. Huston was immediately ensconced as a major filmmaker. He recovered to make a startling directorial debut with 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, a work of machine-tooled efficiency that managed the impossible task of giving Citizen Kane a run for its money as the most significant debut film of the year. Huston, already long-weathered as a screenwriter who rode into that career on the coattails of his actor father Walter, had been lucky to survive some of his wild and oft-inebriated adventures in the 1930s: not everyone in his company did. When the ranks of Hollywood directors who left the sound stage to contribute to the World War II effort returned home to their careers, many had made a personal promise to strike out with a more independent and purposeful brand of cinema. Screenwriters: Richard Brooks, John Huston
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