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John Huston was a legend in Hollywood not just because of his status as a first-rate director, but because he was a rennisance man. He was a boxer, hunter, sculptor, writer, and one of the best character actors Hollywood ever saw. He was one of cinema's greatest villains as Noah Cross in "Chinatown" and was even nominated for an acting Oscar in "The Cardinal". On top of that Huston was a great humanitarian and loving son and father. Because he directed both his father Walter (in Treasure of the Sierra Madre) and his daughter Anjelica (in "Prizzi's Honor") to an Oscar, the Huston family is one of only two in the history of the Academy Awards to have Oscar winners stretching three generations (the other is the Coppolas).

Huston's movies have some variation to them. He practically gave birth to the film noir genre by adapting Dashiel Hammett's pulp novel "The Maltese Falcon" in his debut and his films included romances ("Moulan Rouge"), musicals ("Annie") and American literary adaptations ("Moby Dick", "A Farewell to Arms").

On the whole though, Huston's films were adventures. They often were shot in exotic locations and featured explorers. It might be in this mold that the serials of the 1950's that influenced George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg when they made the Indiana Jones features, were created. In short, Huston's movies were fun and felt like theme rides at an amusement park. His contemporary David Lean would also shoot in exotic locations and create epics with grandiose themes. In contrast, Huston's films relied on kinetic excitement. In The African Queen, Beat the Devil, and Treasure of Sierra Madre, for example, the protagonists are on a journey and are therefore in a constant state of movement. While character development is occuring and worlds are colliding in the form of a stiff uppercrust missionary and a hard-drinking scruffy riverboard captain, the boat is always moving and danger is always impending. Similarly, The Treausre of the Sierra Madre is an allegory of greed but that's occuring in conjunction with the characters facing external forces on their journey to and from the gold mines.

In The Man Who Would Be King, the characters played by Michael Caine and Sean Connery undergo a great amount of development. They start out thinking that they will take over this country of savages but begin to fall in love with their own Godly images. Connery even falls in love and wants to take for himself a wife. Before they realize that they've fallen prey to their ambitions, it is too late and their plan has failed. All of this character development happens in the midst of a journey. Like in other John Huston films, the characters only develop through action. The journey of character development reflects a physical journey.

I don't know if that genre of films still exists. We had Indiana Jones though or Romancing the Stone and that might have been the closest that we have had in the blockbuster era to John Huston. Maybe, the era is lost or maybe with the world having become more and more global in the last 20 years, exotic places no longer exist. It would be fun, however, to witness it again.

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