Programmed August 2021

John Huston: Hollywood Maverick

By the time the thirty-one-year-old John Huston settled in Hollywood in 1937, he had already been, among other things, a professional boxer, a painter in Paris, and an honorary member of the Mexican cavalry—all experiences that would lend color and vividness to the extraordinary body of work he would produce over the next fifty years. The son of actor Walter Huston and father of Anjelica Huston, both of whom he would direct in Academy Award–winning performances, Huston contributed classics to nearly every genre, with a special affinity for film noir ( The Asphalt Jungle ) and brash adventure ( The African Queen ). An accomplished writer himself, Huston had a particular affinity for literary adaptations, transforming works by Tennessee Williams ( The Night of the Iguana ), Leonard Gardner ( Fat City ), Flannery O’Connor ( Wise Blood ), James Joyce ( The Dead ), and others into indelible screen art imbued with his own incisive, iconoclastic observations on the human condition.