John Huston

This is how John Huston summed up his career at the beginning of a memoir with a suggestive title: “An open book”. Born in Nevada, Missouri, in 1906, his life was anything but uneventful. He did not stop still, and he turned around a childhood weakness, to develop a physical activity that made him a champion boxer, horseman and hunter. In his thirst for adventure, he even joined Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army. Son of actor Walter Huston (he directed him inThe Treasure of Sierra Madre ) and the journalist Thea Gore, from them arose the love for letters and interpretation. His friendship with William Wyler helped him improve his screenwriting talent, until he made his directorial debut in 1941 withThe Maltese Falcon , an adaptation by Dashiell Hammett that recalled the stuff dreams are made of. An actor synonymous with toughness starred in the film, with whom he would repeat: Humphrey Bogart .

Going through Huston’s filmography is like going on a roller coaster. He, well, signed films of a very different nature, although many of his titles have a common feature: they are starring losers, who despite everything embark on the adventure of their lives. It happens in that film about greed called The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , but also in Kipling’s adaptation ofThe man who could reign , and in the hunt for the white whale ofMoby Dick , based on the novel by Melville. In the field of film noir, in addition to The Maltese Falcon , he delivered two other jewels:Key Largo andThe Asphalt Jungle , a film that put Marilyn Monroe on fire . With her he made another film of ineffable qualities,Wild Lives , scripted by Arthur Miller , about wild horse hunters, representatives of an endangered lifestyle. Huston was friends with writers like Hemingway, and worked with Truman Capote , with whom he didThe devil’s mockery . His love of literature led him to adapt Stephen Crane ( The Red Badge of Valor ), Tennessee Williams (The Night of the Iguana ), Carson McCullers (Reflections in a Golden Eye ) and Flannery O’Connor (wise blood ). He could fall for the cynicism of Judge Roy Bean inThe hanging judge , or deliver a delicious comedy inThe African Queen . She dared with the musical ( Annie ) and the Biblical show (The Bible (in its beginning) ), even finding himself like a fish out of water in both areas. The same approached a film about fugues and soccer (Evasion or victory ) that gave a twist to the gangster genre (Prizzi’s Honor ). And he approached the biopic without falling into the topic in Freud .

Explorer of new terrains until the end, his last film was originally titled, in a premonitory way, “Los muertos”. Based on a short story by James Joyce from his bookDubliners , was a beautiful, lyrical meditation on life and death, shot when his physical capabilities were already greatly diminished. And he delivered a masterpiece, which seemed to illustrate some words, written in his memories: “I have lived many lives. I have a tendency to envy the man who has starred in only one, with one job, one wife, in one country, under one God. It may not be an exciting life, but at least when he’s 73, he knows he’s got it.”