The Night of the Iguana (John Huston, 1964)

Ava Gardner and Richard Burton in The Night of the Iguana

Cast: Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon, Grayson Hall, Skip Ward, Cyril Delevanti, Mary Boylan. Screenplay: Anthony Veiller, John Huston, based on a play by Tennessee Williams. Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa. Art direction: Stephen B. Grimes. Film editing: Ralph Kemplen. Music: Benjamin Frankel. 

It's a movie adaptation of a play by Tennessee Williams, so you know you're going to see a lot of Acting and hear a lot of rather florid dialogue. As for the capital-A acting, it's Ava Gardner who almost steals the show, just by being her gorgeous, free-spirited self. It's a great part for an actress in her middle years (Gardner was 42), as the casting of Bette Davis in the original Broadway production suggests. Gardner plays Maxine Faulk, the proprietor of a slightly louche Puerto Vallarta hotel, who finds herself welcoming to the hostelry an old friend, the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton), along with a company of teachers from a Texas Baptist women's college, whose tour bus he has just hijacked. He has come to recuperate from a variety of scandals, including some carrying-on with the nubile Charlotte Goodall (Sue Lyon), who is chaperoned by the up-tight Judith Fellowes (Grayson Hall in an Oscar-nominated performance). Maxine is reluctant to shelter Shannon's flock, but his apparent disordered state of body and mind breaks down her resistance. Soon they are joined by another itinerant pair, Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) and her nonagenarian grandfather, known as Nonno (Cyril Delevanti) and billed by Hannah as "the world's oldest living poet." If I give the acting award to Gardner out of this company it's because her part is the most entertaining and she knows it. Kerr is stuck in yet another of her spinster roles, and she's given the burden of becoming the voice of truth and righteousness in the film. Fortunately, she's more than up to it, making Hannah a more interesting character than you might expect. It's Burton who comes off worst in the film, maybe because the screenplay's opening-up of the role, giving Shannon scenes that weren't originally contrived by Williams, fragments the character and causes Burton to have to act out what should have been a backstory better left to our imagination. We didn't need the prologue in which Shannon scandalizes his church and the scenes of rebellious misbehavior along the tour to understand why he's so close to a breakdown when they arrive at Maxine's hotel -- Burton is more than capable of delivering that kind of exposition, and seeing them only complicates our reaction to the character. So it's a mixed bag as a movie, though not without its pleasures and some genuinely moving scenes. It also suffers less from Hollywood censorship than most of the film adaptations of Williams's plays: By 1964 things had loosened up enough that the screenplay can be a little more explicit about things that had been swept under the carpet in the 1950s. I do happen to find that the implication that Miss Fellowes is a closeted lesbian unnecessary and tasteless, especially since it inspires disgust in the otherwise freewheeling Maxine, but such were the times.   

In This Our Life (John Huston, 1942)

In This Our Life (John Huston, 1942)

Cast: Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, George Brent, Dennis Morgan, Charles Coburn, Frank Craven, Billie Burke, Ernest Anderson, Hattie McDaniel, Lee Patrick, Mary Servoss. Screenplay: Howard Koch, based on a novel by Ellen Glasgow. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: William Holmes. Music: Max Steiner.

Just mentioning that Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland play sisters named Stanley and Roy should be enough to suggest what sort of movie In This Our Life is. And yes, it's a good sister (de Havilland/Roy) versus bad sister (Davis/Stanley) plot, with George Brent and Dennis Morgan as the men in the middle. As the movie starts, Stanley is on the brink of marrying Craig (Brent) but instead runs off with Roy's husband, Peter (Morgan), after which Roy gets divorced and falls in love with Craig, but Stanley's marriage to Peter goes sour and he commits suicide. So then she sets her eye on Craig again, and so on, accompanied by an almost nonstop score by Max Steiner to make sure you're feeling what you're supposed to feel. But this adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Ellen Glasgow wants to be more. The crux of the plot hangs on Stanley's attempt to frame a young black man named Parry (Ernest Anderson) for a hit-and-run accident that she committed. Unfortunately, the sensitivity of Hollywood studios about offending Southern audiences waters down this part of the narrative, even though Anderson has a good scene in which Parry despairs of receiving justice. Censorship also weakens the incest motif in Stanley's relationship with her uncle William (Charles Coburn), which was stronger and clearer in Glasgow's novel. Davis didn't want the role of the bad sister, and made things difficult for director John Huston (and for uncredited director Raoul Walsh, who filled in after Pearl Harbor when Huston was called into service as a documentarian/propagandist for the Department of War). The result is some of Davis's more flamboyantly mannered acting. De Havilland, however, gives a solid performance as the tough and thoughtful Roy. It would have been a more entertaining movie if it had had the courage to be trashier and less tepidly social-conscious.

The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston, 1975)

Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, and Sean Connery in The Man Who Would Be King

Daniel Dravot: Sean Connery
Peachy Carnehan: Michael Caine
Rudyard Kipling: Christopher Plummer
Billy Fish: Saeed Jaffrey
Ootah: Larbi Doghmi
District Commissioner: Jack May
Kafu Selim: Karroom Ben Bouhi
Roxanne: Shakira Caine

Director: John Huston
Screenplay: John Huston, Gladys Hill
Cinematography: Oswald Morris
Production design: Alexandre Trauner
Film editing: Russell Lloyd
Music: Maurice Jarre

John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King is not quite the unalloyed delight I remember it being, but in large part that's because I last saw it well before we became so inextricably embroiled in conflicts in the region where the film's action takes place. We've had our consciousness raised so high about the Middle East and Central Asia that larky adventures, even ones like Rudyard Kipling's story that don't end well for the adventurers, no longer seem so amusing when they take place there. And comic natives like Ootah, religious fanatics like Kafu Selim, or even collaborators with the West like Billy Fish, feel like distasteful stereotypes. As I've said about another film drawn from a Kipling source, George Stevens's Gunga Din (1939), "I have to swallow a lot that I object to when I admit that I still like" The Man Who Would Be King. Objections swallowed, is there another film team more beautiful than that of Sean Connery and Michael Caine, who bring their previous movie personae -- including James Bond and Alfie Elkins -- so effectively into the roles of Danny and Peachy? The story goes that Huston originally saw it as a vehicle for two other vivid stars with trailing personae, Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart, who never made a film together but should have. It would have been a very different film, of course, probably shot in black and white in the Sierra Nevada (like Gunga Din), but an entertaining one. As the years passed, the roles were handed down, at least in theory, to Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, and then to Paul Newman and Robert Redford, until Newman supposedly knocked some sense into the producers' heads and suggested Connery and Caine. As for the film, is there more to it than just larky adventure in colorful locations? Is it, perhaps, a warning about getting involved in politics and cultures that we don't fully understand? We are still getting our heads handed to us, and they don't usually wear crowns from Alexander's treasury.

The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston in The Other Side of the Wind

Jake Hannaford: John Huston
The Actress: Oja Kodar
Brooks Otterlake: Peter Bogdanovich
Julie Rich: Susan Strasberg
Billy Boyle: Norman Foster
John Dale: Robert Random
Zarah Valeska: Lilli Palmer
Pat Mullins: Edmond O'Brien
Maggie Noonan: Mercedes McCambridge
Zimmer: Cameron Mitchell
Matt Costello: Paul Stewart
Jack Simon: Gregory Sierra
The Baron: Tonio Selwart
Max David: Geoffrey Land
Themselves: Henry Jaglom, Paul Mazursky, Dennis Hopper, Curtis Harrington, Claude Chabrol, Stéphane Audran, George Jessel

Director: Orson Welles
Screenplay: Oja Kodar, Orson Welles
Cinematography: Gary Graver
Art direction: Polly Platt
Film editing: Bob Murawski, Orson Welles
Music: Michel Legrand

Inevitably (and intentionally), Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind is going to remind us of other films, including movies about making movies like Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) and such garish post-Code counterculture movies as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and Zabriskie Point *(Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970). But what it doesn't remind me of very much are the movies made by Orson Welles. In his most troubled and inchoate films, like Mr. Arkadin (1955), Welles always gave us something to look and marvel at, even if it was only Michael Redgrave in a hairnet. The long-posthumously assembled Other Side doesn't give us much we haven't seen before, aside from a naked Oja Kodar wandering around the ruins of old Hollywood studio sets. Welles's intention is to spoof those counterculture movies while telling a story about how hard it is to make one. I think perhaps the chief problem lies in Welles's casting John Huston as the ill-fated Jake Hannaford, the aging and put-upon director, when he should of course have cast himself. Hannaford's young leading man, John Dale, has left the film in a huff, and what forward drive the narrative part of the film has consists of the director's response to that defection. Huston's predatory grin feels all wrong -- I never sense that his Hannaford has lost control of anything, except perhaps his libido. We need the vast imperturbable presence of Welles in the role, if only to make the point that this is the most personal, the most autobiographical of all his films. It's lamentable that it took almost half a century to bring The Other Side of the Wind to the screen, but the truth is, the story about why it took so long -- which Morgan Neville tells in his 2018 documentary, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead -- is more interesting than the film itself.

*Some of The Other Side of the Wind was shot in a house across the street from the Arizona house featured (and blown up, at least in miniature) in Antonioni's movie.

Three Strangers (Jean Negulesco, 1946)

Geraldine Fitzgerald and Sydney Greenstreet in Three Strangers

Jerome K. Arbutny: Sydney Greenstreet
Crystal Shackleford: Geraldine Fitzgerald
Johnny West: Peter Lorre
Icey Crane: Joan Lorring
Bertram Fallon: Robert Shayne
Janet Elliott: Marjorie Riordan
Prosecutor: Arthur Shields
Lady Rhea Belladon: Rosalind Ivan
Junior Clerk: John Alvin
Gabby: Peter Whitney
David Shackleford: Alan Napier

Director: Jean Negulesco
Screenplay: John Huston, Howard Koch
Cinematography: Arthur Edeson
Art direction: Ted Smith
Film editing: George Amy
Music: Adolph Deutsch

This is the movie in which Peter Lorre gets the girl, though not the leading lady played by Geraldine Fitzgerald. Instead, Lorre's Johnny West winds up with Icey, the woman who adores him and even perjures herself to save him from being hanged. It's all the result of a rather charmingly tangled and entirely improbable plot cooked up by John Huston with the aid of Howard Koch and kicked around Warner Bros. for years until it finally settled in the hands of director Jean Negulesco. Like The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941) it teams Lorre with Sydney Greenstreet and features a mysterious artifact as something of a MacGuffin. Instead of a priceless black bird, the artifact in Three Strangers is a statue of the Chinese goddess Kwan Yin. Legend has it that if three people, strangers to one another, make a wish on the statue at the lunar New Year, the wish will come true. So Fitzgerald's character, Crystal Shackleford, lures the solicitor Jerome K. Arbutny and the down-on-his-luck Johnny to her flat, and the three agree that the only thing that will solve their problems -- she wants to win the love of her husband from whom she's separated, Arbutny wants to become a barrister, and Johnny just wants to own a bar -- is money. so they place their bets on a sweepstakes ticket. Sure enough, despite the skepticism of Arbutny and the comparative indifference of Johnny, Kwan Yin comes through. And equally sure enough, nothing goes right for the trio, with the possible exception of Johnny, who does, as we said, get the girl. Alfred Hitchcock had once expressed interest in the screenplay, and we might have gotten something great if he had settled on it, but Negulesco doesn't put much of an interesting spin on the material. But Lorre and Greenstreet, together or apart, are always fun to watch.

Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941)

Gary Cooper and Joan Leslie in Sergeant York

Alvin C. York: Gary Cooper
Pastor Rosier Pile: Walter Brennan
Gracie Williams: Joan Leslie
Mother York: Margaret Wycherly
"Pusher" Ross: George Tobias
Major Buxton: Stanley Ridges
Ike Botkin: Ward Bond
Buck Lipscomb: Noah Beery Jr.
Rosie York: June Lockhart
George York: Dickie Moore
Zeke: Clem Bevans
Lem: Howard Da Silva

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Abem Finkel, Harry Chandlee, Howard Koch, John Huston
Based on a diary by Alvin C. York edited by Tom Skeyhill
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Art direction: John Hughes
Film editing: William Holmes
Music: Max Steiner

Sheer Hollywood biopic hokum made watchable by Howard Hawks and Gary Cooper, along with a colorful supporting cast. Sergeant York earned Hawks his one and only Oscar nomination for directing -- not Bringing Up Baby (1938) or Only Angels Have Wings (1939) or His Girl Friday (1940) or To Have and Have Not (1944) or The Big Sleep (1946) or Red River (1948) or Rio Bravo (1959), more than two decades of the most entertaining movies anyone ever made. It was in fact Hawks's lack of the kind of high seriousness so often rewarded with Oscars that makes Sergeant York still entertaining today, which is why he lost to John Ford for How Green Was My Valley, a directing Oscar that by rights should have gone to Orson Welles for Citizen Kane. It's fairly clear that Hawks doesn't take Sergeant York entirely seriously, with its exteriors built on the soundstage, its well-scrubbed hillbillies, its cornpone hijinks and caricature religiosity, not to mention dialogue that sounds straight out of Al Capp's "Li'l Abner." But it also takes a Gary Cooper to deliver speeches like "I believe in the bible and I'm a-believin' that this here life we're a-livin' is something the good lord done give us and we got to be a-livin' it the best we can, and I'm a-figurin' that killing other folks ain't no part of what he was intendin' for us to be a-doin' here." Granted, Cooper had just turned 40 and was a good deal too old to play Alvin C. York, but his characteristic sly, shy self-effacement is essential to the role. The old story that York himself said that he wouldn't allow himself to be played on film by anyone else but Cooper sounds like the work of a Warner Bros. publicist, and one biographer has suggested that it was a hoax cooked up by producer Jesse L. Lasky to persuade Cooper to take the part, but se non è vero, è ben trovato -- if it's not true, it ought to be. Sergeant York cleaned up at the box office, especially when it got a second run after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and raked in 11 Oscar nominations, winning for Cooper and for film editing. Other nominees include Margaret Wycherly as Mother York -- a far cry from her killer mama in Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949) -- and Walter Brennan, with his false teeth in and his eyebrows darkened, as Pastor Pile, along with the screenwriters, cinematographer Sol Polito, the art direction, the sound, and Max Steiner's patriotic tune-quoting score. It can't be taken seriously today, but it can be enjoyed.

High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941)

Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra

Roy Earle: Humphrey Bogart
Marie: Ida Lupino
Red: Arthur Kennedy
Babe: Alan Curtis
Velma: Joan Leslie
Pa: Henry Travers
Louis Mendoza: Cornel Wilde
Big Mac: Donald MacBride
"Doc" Banton: Henry Hull
Algernon: Willie Best
Jake Kranmer: Barton MacLane
Healy: Jerome Cowan

Director: Raoul Walsh
Screenplay: John Huston, W.R. Burnett
Based on a novel by W.R. Burnett
Cinematography: Tony Gaudio
Film editing: Jack Killifer
Music: Adolph Deutsch

Ida Lupino gets first billing in High Sierra, an indication of where Humphrey Bogart's career stood at the time. He had labored for Warner Bros. for more than a decade as a supporting actor, usually in gangster films and occasionally miscast in roles like the Irish stablemaster in Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939). High Sierra would be a breakthrough into leading man roles, establishing his persona as a tough guy with a soft heart, as in films like Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944). He owes his role in High Sierra in large part to its screenwriter, John Huston, who as a director would emphasize the tough Bogart over the softie: the brutal Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the vicious Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). In High Sierra, however, although Roy Earle has just been released from prison and is off to pull another caper, he's full of nostalgia for his childhood as a farmboy and along the road adopts a family heading west, where Pa hopes to get a job and help his granddaughter, Velma, get surgery for her clubfoot. Roy gets soft on Velma and pays for the operation, but his proposal is turned down. Just as Roy has a soft side, Velma is at heart a party girl and wants to go back east and hook up with her ne'er-do-well boyfriend. High Sierra is full of reversals like that. Lupino, for example, plays a party girl who goes soft on Roy and turns into a stand-by-your-man accomplice. And there's even a cute little dog who turns out to be a jinx and rats on Roy at a crucial moment. There's a good deal of silliness in the plotting of High Sierra, as well as some lamentable racist shtick forced on the fine comic actor Willie Best, who is usually caught napping and awakens with his eyes crossed. But at its best, especially in the climactic chase scene along winding dirt roads in the Sierra, the film is a good vehicle for Bogart's leap into superstardom.

Beat the Devil (John Huston, 1953)

Humphrey Bogart called John Huston's Beat the Devil a "mess," which it is, but much of the messiness is due to Bogart's presence in the film. His tough-guy persona, for which Huston himself was largely responsible after casting Bogart in roles like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), puts him tonally out of sync with the rest of the cast of eccentrics in Beat the Devil. Bogart doesn't seem to know how to play Billy Dannreuther, an American trying to recoup his fortunes by playing along with some rather oddball crooks and grifters: the florid Peterson (Robert Morley), the German-Chilean who calls himself O'Hara (Peter Lorre), the lugubrious Italian Ravello (Marco Tulli), and the fascist Maj. Jack Ross (Ivor Barnard), whose name almost suggests his character -- a humanoid Jack Russell terrier with a hair-trigger temper. Moreover, Dannreuther is rather improbably mated with the scheming Maria (Gina Lollobrigida) and equally improbably wooing the compulsive liar Gwendolen Chelm (Jennifer Jones). That Bogart has no chemistry with either actress, both of whom give delicious performances, further drags the film down. Jones made two films with Huston, this one and the little-seen We Were Strangers (1949), and they are two of the most interesting performances in her career, making me wish that Huston had been able to release Jones more frequently from the clutches of David O. Selznick. Everyone, including Edward Underdown as Gwendolen's husband, Harry, does delightful comic work except Bogart, who glumly and blankly delivers lines he doesn't seem to be trying to understand. That may be understandable, given that the screenplay was being written by Huston and Truman Capote -- and the uncredited Peter Viertel and Anthony Veiller -- pretty much on the fly while the film was being made. The result is a collection of very amusing moments pieced together with a lot of cobbled-together nonsense about uranium deposits in Africa -- in short, the stuff of which cult movies are made. I'm not a member of the cult, but I happily watch Beat the Devil every now and then, especially for the performances of Jones and Morley and Lorre, while wishing that Huston had cast someone more skilled than Bogart -- Grant? Stewart? Cooper? -- at working amid chaos and nonsense.

The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946)

Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, at the start of their Hollywood careers, shine out against the noir background of The Killers like the stars they became. Which is perhaps the only major flaw in Robert Siodmak's version of -- or rather extrapolation from -- Ernest Hemingway's classic short story. They're both terrific: Lancaster underplays for once in his film career, which began with this movie, and no one was ever so beautiful or gave off such strong "bad girl" vibes as Gardner. But their presence tends to upend the film, which really stars Edmond O'Brien and a fine cast of character actors. Hemingway's story accounts for only the first 20 minutes or so of the film, the remaining hour of which was concocted by Anthony Veiller, John Huston, and Richard Brooks. In the Hemingway part of the movie, two hitmen (William Conrad and Charles McGraw) enter a small-town diner looking for their target, a washed-up boxer they call "the Swede." They bully the diner owner and tie up the cook and Nick Adams (Phil Brown), but when they decide that the Swede isn't going to show up for his usual evening meal, they leave. Nick runs to warn the Swede, Ole Anderson (Lancaster), in his rooming house, but the man exhibits only a passive acceptance of his fate. The short story ends with the Swede turning his face to the wall and Nick returning to the diner, but in the film we see the hitmen arrive at the rooming house and kill the Swede. What follows is a backstory that Hemingway never bothered with -- although he later told Huston that he liked the movie -- about an insurance investigator's probe into the killing. The Swede had left a small insurance policy, and when the investigator, Reardon (O'Brien), contacts the beneficiary he begins to find threads that lead him back to an earlier payroll heist. With the help of a friend on the police force, Lubinsky (Sam Levene), who knew the Swede from his boxing days, Reardon sorts out the tangled story of what happened to the loot and how the Swede became the target of a hit. Siodmak's steady hand as a director earned him an Oscar nomination, as did Arthur Hilton's editing and Miklós Rózsa's score, which features a four-note motif that was lifted by composer Walter Schumann for the familiar "dum-da-dum-dum" title music of the 1950s TV series Dragnet, leading to a lawsuit that was settled out of court. Veiller was also nominated for the screenplay, but the contributions of Huston and Brooks went uncredited, largely because they were under contract to other studios.

We Were Strangers (John Huston, 1949)

Fidel Castro, who died this year, came to power in 1959, ten years after We Were Strangers, which deals with an earlier Cuban revolution, was made. Castro's own revolution is probably why this film, despite its major director and stars, is so little known. It was never revived after its initial showing, and didn't become available on video until 2005 despite the reputation of its director, John Huston. It's a fairly scathing look at the failure of the United States to support the overthrow of the Machado dictatorship in 1933. John Garfield plays Tony Fenner, a Cuban-born American who works with the underground revolutionaries to overthrow Machado. He comes up with a rather complicated plot to tunnel into the Colón Cemetery and plant a bomb that will kill the regime's leaders. He enlists a group who have no previous ties with one another, including China Valdés (Jennifer Jones), a bank clerk whose brother was killed by the Havana police chief, Armando Aréte (Pedro Armendáriz), and who lives in a house across the street from the cemetery. The plan is to assassinate a high-ranking member of the regime and detonate the bomb when the dignitaries gather for his funeral. But Fenner's plan is just a little too complicated, and things go awry. It's a curious film to be made just as the red scare was heating up in Washington and Hollywood, for the script by Peter Viertel and director John Huston has no scruples about portraying the violent revolutionaries as heroic. The revolutionaries even countenance the collateral damage of killing innocent people at the funeral, although one of their company has serious reservations about it and, worn down by the hard work of tunneling, goes mad. Garfield, who would soon be threatened with blacklisting as a leftist, gives a typically intense performance, and Jones, though miscast, does a passable imitation of a determined Cuban revolutionary. Armendáriz, whom Hollywood often relegated to Latino sidekick roles, is a fine, sinister villain. Gilbert Roland, as a singing, wisecracking member of the revolutionary team, provides what levity the film possesses, and Ramon Novarro has a cameo as the chief who authorizes Fenner's plan. There's some obvious use of rear projection in which the actors are superimposed against scenes actually filmed in Havana, but Russell Metty's cinematography is mostly quite effective.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948)

I love Turner Classic Movies -- obviously, because it's where I see so many of the films I comment on here. But I don't always love the introductory segments they do for some of their films. It can be a real irritant when they bring on a celebrity as a "guest programmer." Some of them are excellent: Sally Field displays real knowledge and insight about the films she introduces. But The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was introduced by Candice Bergen, who is normally a witty and charming person, but seemed to have no idea about the movie she was showcasing. She admitted to interviewer Robert Osborne that she hadn't seen it for 35 years, and that she recalled it as this "little" movie that she surmised had been filmed on a small budget in locations maybe 20 minutes from the studio. To Osborne's discredit, he made no attempt to correct her: Warner Bros. gave it what was a generous budget for the time of $3 million, and it was mostly filmed on location -- a rarity for the time -- in the state of Durango and the town of Tampico, Mexico. (Some scenes had to be shot in the studio, of course, and it's easy to spot the artificial lighting and hear the sound stage echoes in these, which don't match up to the ones Ted McCord filmed on location.) It's hardly a "little" movie, either: It has a generosity of characterization in both the screenplay by Huston from B. Traven's novel and in the performances of Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, and Tim Holt. It's always shocking to realize that Bogart failed to be nominated for an Oscar for his performance as the bitter, paranoid Fred C. Dobbs. I mean, who today remembers some of the performances that were nominated instead: Lew Ayres in Johnny Belinda (Jean Negulesco)? Dan Dailey in When My Baby Smiles at Me (Walter Lang)? Clifton Webb in Sitting Pretty (Lang)? To the Academy's credit, Huston won as both director and screenwriter, and his father, Walter, won the supporting actor Oscar -- the first instance of someone directing his own father to an Academy Award for acting, which Walter Huston's smartly delineated old coot certainly deserved. But let's also put in a word for Tim Holt, who had one of the odder careers of a potential Hollywood star: He gave good performances in some of the best movies to come out of the studios in the 1940s, including The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) and My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946), and was a handsome and capable presence in them. But even after working for Welles, Ford, and Huston, after The Treasure of the Sierra Madre he went back to performing in B-movie Westerns, which had been the stock in trade of his father, Jack Holt (who has a small part as a flophouse bum in this film). His heart seemed not to be in the movie business, and he retired to his ranch, making only a few appearances after 1952.

The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)

"By gad, sir, you are a character," says Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet), with what Greenstreet's co-star Mary Astor once described as "that evil, hiccupy laugh." He is speaking to Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), who is certainly a character, if decidedly not a man of character. There aren't many other films so full of characters, but so lacking any with what one might call a moral center. Spade, for one, proves that you can be both misogynistic and homophobic -- as if proof of that were needed. Does he do the right thing at the end when he sends Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Astor) up the river? Perhaps, but he does it with such relish that it's hard to ascribe any probity to the act. The Maltese Falcon is one of the greatest examples of hoodwinking the censors of the Production Code, which among other things forbade depictions of homosexuality on screen. But does anyone miss the fact that Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) is meant to be gay -- from his fussy little perm to his teasing fondling of the handle of his umbrella to the scent of gardenia that Spade finds so amusing? And probably only the ignorance of Yiddish on the part of the Catholics in the Breen office allows Wilmer (Elisha Cook Jr.) to be called a "gunsel" -- a word that originally meant a young man kept  by an older man for sex. Actually, it was Dashiell Hammett who slipped that one by the watchdogs in the original novel -- John Huston kept it, doubtless smiling the sly smile of someone who knows what he's getting away with. Even today, most people probably think like the Breen office and Hammett's editors, that it means a gunman. But Huston also got away with the clear indication that Spade had been having an affair with Iva Archer (Gladys George), the wife of his partner, Miles (Jerome Cowan). And is there anyone who doesn't realize that Spade has slept with Brigid? This was Huston's first feature as a director, and the result of all this Code-dodging, as well as his unwillingness to sentimentalize his characters, made him a formidable directorial force in the years to come, one of the few Hollywood directors who knew how to make movies for adults.

Key Largo (John Huston, 1948)

This was the fourth and last of the films that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together, but the movie was stolen by Claire Trevor, who won a supporting actress Oscar, and by Bogart's old partner in Warner Bros. gangster movies, Edward G. Robinson. It's a little too talky and stagy, partly because it was based on a 1939 Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson, a once-admired playwright whose specialty was blank-verse dramas. Huston and co-screenwriter Richard Brooks took great liberties with the play, changing the characters and the ending, and updating the action to the postwar era, but occasionally you can hear a bit of Anderson's iambic pentameter in the dialogue. Bogart's Frank McCloud was originally called King McCloud and was a deserter from the Spanish Civil War; in the movie he's a World War II veteran, something of a hero, who comes to Key Largo to visit the father (Lionel Barrymore) and the widow (Bacall) of an army buddy who was killed in Italy. He finds them being held in the hotel they own by a group of gangsters, headed by Johnny Rocco (Robinson), a Prohibition-era mobster who is trying to sneak back into the States after being deported. As so often -- cf. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943) and To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944) -- the Bogart character is called on to make a choice between taking the kind of action he has renounced and remaining neutral. Bacall's role is somewhat underwritten, and what few sparks she and Bogart strike seem to be the residue of their previous films together, especially To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946). Having to play opposite that scene-stealing old ham Barrymore doesn't help much, either. But Trevor fully deserved her award as Rocco's moll, an alcoholic club singer known as Gaye Dawn. She has a big moment when she's forced by Rocco to sing "Moanin' Low" on the promise that he'll let her have a drink -- which he then sadistically refuses her. As usual, Robinson is terrific, and also as usual, he failed to receive the Oscar nomination he deserved and was never granted. Karl Freund's cinematography helps overcome the studio's decision not to film on location.

Moulin Rouge (John Huston, 1952)

If Moulin Rouge had a screenplay worthy of its visuals, it would be a classic. As it is, it's still worth seeing, thanks to a stellar effort to bring to life Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings and sketches of Parisian nightlife in the 1890s. The screenplay, by Anthony Veiller and director Huston, is based on a novel by Pierre Le Mure, the rights to which José Ferrer had purchased with a view to playing Lautrec. He does so capably, subjecting himself to some real physical pain: Ferrer was 5-foot-10 and Lautrec was at least a foot shorter, owing to a childhood accident that shattered both his legs, so Ferrer performed many scenes on his knees, sometimes with an apparatus that concealed his lower legs from the camera. But that is one of the least interesting things about the movie, as is the rather conventional story of the struggles of a self-hating, alcoholic artist. What distinguishes the film is the extraordinary production design and art direction of Marcel Vertès and Paul Sheriff, and the dazzling Technicolor cinematography of Oswald Morris. Vertès and Sheriff won Oscars for their work, but Morris shockingly went unnominated. The most plausible theory for that oversight is that Sheriff clashed with the Technicolor consultants over his desire for a palette that reproduced the colors of Lautrec's art: The Technicolor corporation was notoriously persnickety about maintaining control over the way its process was used. It's possible that the cinematography branch wanted to avoid future hassles with Technicolor by denying Morris the nomination. (Ironically, one of the more interesting incidents from Lautrec's life depicted in the film involves his clashes with the lithographer over the colors used in posters made from his work.) The extraordinary beauty of the film and some lively dance sequences that bring to life performers such as La Goulue (Katherine Kath) and Chocolat (Rupert John) make it memorable. There are also good performances from Colette Marchand as Marie Charlet and Suzanne Flon as Myriamme Hayam. And less impressive work from Zsa Zsa Gabor, playing herself more than Jane Avril, and lipsynching poorly to Muriel Smith's voice in two songs by Georges Auric.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (John Huston, 1972)

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean belongs to a sub-genre that prevailed in the early 1970s; I think of them as "stoner Westerns." The huge success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969) spawned a lot of movies that took an irreverent look at the legend of the American Old West and were aimed at the younger countercultural audience. They include such diverse films as Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (Philip Kaufman, 1972), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973), and Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974). Most of them were seen as commentaries on American violence and the quagmire of the Vietnam War. Paul Newman, who had played Billy the Kid earlier in his career in The Left Handed Gun (Arthur Penn, 1958) as well as Butch Cassidy, found himself the go-to actor to portray Western legends: In addition to Judge Roy Bean, he was also cast as Buffalo Bill Cody in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (Robert Altman, 1976). The Life of Times of Judge Roy Bean began with an original screenplay by John Milius, who wanted to direct it and to star Warren Oates in the title role, but when Newman read the script, he arranged for the rights to be bought up and for John Huston to be brought on as director. There is a whiff of hommage to (or perhaps parody of) Butch Cassidy in the film: As in the earlier film, which has a musical interlude with Butch and Etta Place (Katherine Ross) larking around to the song "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," Judge Roy Bean has a scene in which the Judge, Maria Elena (Victoria Principal), and a bear lark around to the song "Marmalade, Molasses & Honey," which was written for the film by Maurice Jarre, Marilyn Bergman, and Alan Bergman. The song earned an Oscar nomination, but Huston was unable to find a consistent tone for the movie, which lurches from broad comedy (much of it provided by antics with the bear) to satire (the triumph of an avaricious lawyer played by Roddy McDowall) to pathos (the death of Maria Elena). It is laced with cameos, some of which provide the film's highlights, particularly the over-the-top performances of Anthony Perkins as an itinerant preacher and Stacy Keach as an albino outlaw named Bad Bob. But Ava Gardner simply walks through her scene as Lillie Langtry -- a decided anticlimax, given that she's been the off-screen obsession of Bean through most of the film.

Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)

Where there's money, there's murder, and where the sun shines brightest, the shadows are darkest. That's why film noir was invented in Hollywood, and why California's greatest contribution to American literature may have been the pulp fiction of James M. Cain and the detective novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. Chinatown, which draws on that tradition, has a kind of valedictory quality about it, harking back to the 1930s roots of noir, although the genre's heyday was the postwar 1940s and paranoia-filled early 1950s. (Curtis Hanson would exploit that latter era in his 1997 film L.A. Confidential.) But it's also very much a film of the 1970s, which is to say that 42 years have passed and Chinatown is showing its age. The revelation that Katherine (Belinda Palmer) is both the daughter and the sister to Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) no longer has the power to shock that it once did, incestuous rape having become a standard trope of even TV drama. Nor does the "dark" ending, which director Roman Polanski insisted on, despite screenwriter Robert Towne's preference for a more conventionally hopeful resolution, seem so revolutionary anymore. It remains a great film, however, thanks to those quintessential '70s stars, Dunaway and Jack Nicholson, in career-defining performances, the superb villainy of John Huston's Noah Cross, and Roman Polanski's deft handling of Towne's intricate screenplay, carefully keeping the film limited to the point of view of Nicholson's Jake Gittes. Production designer Richard Sylbert and costume designer Anthea Sylbert (Richard's sister-in-law), aided by cinematographer John A. Alonzo, are responsible for the stylish evocation of 1930s Los Angeles. The atmospheric score is by Jerry Goldsmith.