John Huston

Starred review from July 25, 2011
In his detailed, absorbing portrait of Huston (1906â1987), biographer Meyers (George Orwell, Samuel Johnson, and Somerset Maugham) captures the remarkable parallels between these two men as he narrates the life and compelling work of one of the world's greatest film directors. Drawing on original interviews with Huston's family and friends as well as on newly available archival materials, Meyers traces Huston's life from his peripatetic childhoodâwhen he and his mother wandered from Missouri, Texas, and Indiana to St. Paul, Los Angeles, and Phoenixâto his stint in the army through his triumphs and failures as an actor, screenwriter, and director. Social and gregarious, Huston was also private and self-enclosed; he had a zest for life, and an aura of recklessness, ruthlessness and irresponsibility. He made war documentaries under fire, hunted tigers in India and elephants in Africa, and took near-fatal risksâsometimes with the lives of othersâin filming The African Queen and Moby Dick. Huston caught the world's attention in 1941 with The Maltese Falcon, his first feature in which all of his talents as a writer, actor, and director finally came together. Meyers points out that the characteristic theme of Huston's major films is the almost impossible quest, but one tempered by detachment and irony.

August 1, 2011

A richly flavorful biography of John Huston, great director and bona fide man's man.

Highly prolific biography Meyers (Orwell: Life and Art, 2010, etc.) presents a comprehensive life of Huston, a filmmaker of unusual range and power and a protean figure in real life, a renaissance man whose passions ran toward beautiful women, hunting, art and literature, gambling and general derring-do. The son of celebrated actor Walter Huston, John pursued painting and writing in his youth, accumulating a Hemingway-esque aura living rough in Mexico and London before embarking on his wildly successful Hollywood career. Huston was in fact a close friend of Hemingway's, and Meyers goes to some length explicating the similarities of the men; both were passionate individualists, obsessed with macho notions of masculinity. The author is at least as interested in Huston's persona—grandiloquent, casually cruel or generous, prone to boredom and constitutionally unable to practice monogamy—as he is in the man's work. This pays dividends in descriptions of his friendly, competitive relationships with tough guys like Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum, and in Meyer's accounts of the appalling bullying suffered by meeker collaborators such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Ray Bradbury. However, the copious cataloging of his many complicated love affairs and marriages becomes tediously repetitive and ultimately depressing. Meyers is informative and insightful about Huston's film triumphs (including The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen) and flops (Annie), providing fresh anecdotes about their production and astute analysis of Huston's laissez-faire directorial style (he believed in honoring the text and leaving the actors alone), making a strong case for Huston as one of cinema's most accomplished and significant creators.

The author is perhaps a bit overly enamored with his magnificent monster of a subject (and indulges a weakness for strained puns and clumsy humor), but this biography is a serious, intelligent, highly readable reckoning with Huston's outsize legacy.

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Starred review from August 1, 2011
Veteran biographer Meyers steps into the ring with legendary movie director John Huston and proves adept at wrestling the larger-than-life figure onto the page. He does it by achieving a nice balance between the life and the work, playing off the flamboyant Huston's romantic escapades (five marriages and hundreds of mistresses), world-class drinking (often in the company of good friend Humphrey Bogart), and reckless gambling against his prodigious appetite for work (he directed more than 40 films, including multiple masterpieces, ranging from his first directorial effort, The Maltese Falcon, in 1941, through his finale, James Joyce's The Dead, in 1987). Stressing the point that Huston, unlike many auteur directors, favored adaptations of literary works over original screenplays and was fanatically devoted to the texts of those works, Meyers portrays an artist in ultimate service to the word. Movie buffs will find a wealth of insider information herefrom a detailed account of the stunning choreography and camera work in Falcon through revelations of the homophobia that marred Huston's relationship with Montgomery Cliftbut, finally, it is the multifaceted picture of how a flawed man produced so many nearly flawless films that makes this biography essential reading for anyone with an interest in twentieth-century moviemaking.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)