John Huston

John Huston became one of my favorite directors rather unwittingly as I watched his movies when I was growing up. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre features Humphrey Bogart, who eventually goes mad over his lust and greed for gold. The Man Who Would Be King stars Sean Connery and Michael Caine as adventurers who end up ruling a hidden mountain kingdom until their charade fails and things turn deadly. Bogart again with Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen, on a river adventure to blow up a German gunboat. The epic sea tale of obsessive revenge, Moby Dick staring Gregory Peck. These movies were shown over and again on TV during the 1970’s when I was a kid. Since most people could only watch movies in the theater or on network TV, you ended up viewing whatever was showing. Once it was done playing in theaters you had to wait years for it to show on TV, so your choices were usually older movies, many made before you were born. What I didn’t pay much attention to at the time was the thing so many of my favorite movies had in common; they were directed by John Huston. As I got older I became aware of the link, and by the time VCR’s became widely available in the 1980’s I watched every Huston film I could find. He has been called the Hemingway of cinema, as he loved a good adventure, hunting, horses, women, writing and drinking. He was also a lifelong painter. In a biography I read about him a few years ago it was noted that he could have a hard time finishing his movies, because he would get distracted by his other interests and would be ready to move on to the next project. I remember we were in Georgia to attend a wedding in the summer of 1987 when the news came out that Huston had died. I felt strange about it and didn’t know why, until I realized I was mourning a man I never met, who had given me so many hours of enjoyment.