TMI (Today’s Movie Info)
February: Director’s Month
JOHN HUSTON (1906-1987) put together an unusual career as writer, director and character actor … and excelled at all three. He was the son of actor Walter Huston and father of actress Angelica Huston and actor Danny Huston (with different mothers). John was writer/director for an impressive string of Hollywood classics: The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The African Queen (1951), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), Moulin Rouge (1952). After a round of directorial success, John returned to acting and was nominated for an Oscar in Otto Preminger’s classic The Cardinal (1963). He is also left quite an impression with his acting (as Noah Cross) in Chinatown (1974) and The Wind and the Lion (1975). In the 1985 he directed his daughter Angelica to an Oscar in Prizzi’s Honor, making him the only one to direct his father (Walter in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) and daughter to acting Oscars. John was nominated for 15 Oscars, wining for Best Director and Best Screenplay for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. His final film The Dead was finished and released in 1987, the year he died. He lived life to the fullest and is often described as a rebel and non-conformist … Hollywood’s version of Ernest Hemingway. Along those lines, he once said “I`ve lived a number of lives. I`m inclined to envy the man who leads one life, with one job, and one wife, in one country, under one God. It may not be a very exciting existence, but at least by the time he`s seventy-three he knows how old he is”
Movie Reviews from the Dark 