Now I've Seen Everything Dept.: John Huston, Part 1

The Laughing, Inveterate Gambler

"The Monster is stimulating," Humphrey Bogart said of his director on the set of The Maltese Falcon. "Offbeat kind of mind. Off center. He's brilliant and unpredictable. Never dull." "The Monster" was his affectionate nick-name for John Huston.

John Marcellus Huston was born August 5, 1906 into a "show-biz" family. His father was the well-regarded actor Walter Huston (although, at the time of John's birth, his father had not yet achieved any real fame for his work, and when his son was born took a job as a civil engineer). His mother, Rhea, was a sports editor up to the time of his birth, but gave that up to raise John.

The Huston's divorced when John was six, and while the two went off a pursued their original careers, young John was sent to a series of boarding schools. Young John was a sickly child, but once he moved to Los Angeles with his mother to attend high school, he became an amateur boxer, giving it up after breaking his nose. Los Angeles also made him aware of the new medium of films, and he was fascinated with it, and made it one of his interests, along with acting, literature, abstract painting...and writing.

He had his first successes, while living in Mexico, writing for The American Mercury, at the time edited by the legendary H.L.Mencken. He moved back to Los Angeles to work with Samuel Goldwyn Studios and Universal Pictures as a dialogue writer and script doctor, a period which he called "a series of misadventures and disappointments," characterized by hard-drinking and reckless gambling. A traffic accident, in which a pedestrian was killed, traumatized Huston and he left the country for five years drifting between London and Paris, studying painting and making a meager living as an artist.

Huston returned to Hollywood in 1937, determined to make it as a writer-director in Hollywood, working for Warner Brothers, where his screenwriting work, attracted attention around the industry. His work on such films as Jezebel, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, Juarez, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, and Sergeant York. After his second Oscar-nomination for writing York, Huston made a deal with Warners that if his next script made money for them, he would be allowed to direct his own scripts. His next writing was High Sierra, which became a huge hit for Warner Brothers and brought notice to its star mostly known for playing "heavies," Humphrey Bogart. His first film for Warner Brothers would become not only a hit, but a classic film that has never dulled in its luster or power.

Huston inspires as much as he is inspired.  Huston's free-wheeling productions in the 50's were the focus of three books—Lillian Ross' "Picture" (a non-fiction book on the making of The Red Badge of Courage), and Peter Viertel's "Black Hunter, White Heart" (a roman a clef about The African Queen), Katherine Hepburn's non-fiction account of the Queen filming "The Making of the African Queen (or How I went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and almost lost my mind)" and Ray Bradbury's collection of his stories about writing Moby Dick for Huston—"Green Shadows, White Whale."

The Maltese Falcon (1941) Warner Bros. had already filmed "The Maltese Falcon" twice before and made some money from the property, so it was a good bet to give a remake to their current screenwriting phenom' as his first directing job. They couldn't lose much, what with a limited budget, a B-grade cast of "nobodies," and an investment in future directing talent. Well, sometimes you bet small and hit the jackpot, as the forties version of The Maltese Falcon became the definitive one and elevated its cast to star status. Huston stuck to Dashiell Hammett's gritty roots straddling the needs of the Hollywood mystery film and what would become (post-war) "film-noir." He also lucked into the casting of Humphrey Bogart as detective Sam Spade (George Raft turned it down), and decided that maybe Bogart shouldn't smile so larkily through the whole thing (as Ramon Navarro had), keeping Spade more in the realm of Bogart's previous Huston-penned role in High Sierra as a sympathetic hoodlum—cynical, but with reason. Mary Astor's drama-queen performance as Brigid O'Shaunessy is a fine deflect for the story, and Huston excelled at casting character parts with Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Elisha Cook and Ward Bond in key roles. Just to show that "the stuff that dreams are made of" can come from humble origins.  

It was named to the National Film Registry in 1989, the first year of its inception.

 

In This Our Life (1942) Remember the song "Sisters" from White Christmas, the one with the lyric "Lord help the Mister that comes between me and my sister, and Lord help the sister that comes between me and my man?" Huston's second directorial assignment for Warner's (when he was called away after the Pearl Harbor attack, Raoul Walsh—who directed Huston's script of High Sierra—completed the film) is this soapy adaptation (by Howard Koch) of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Ellen Glasgow, which was strong enough for Bette Davis to be attracted to the project. She didn't like the script, though, and thought she was too old for the part of the younger sister of the Timberlake family (she is, but co-star Olivia deHavilland probably couldn't pull off the other role, where Davis could in spades). 

DeHavilland and Davis play Roy and Stanley Timberlake (yep, girls with male names), the older sensible and settled, the other, young and vainglorious—if not downright evil. The movie flirts with adult themes—the younger sister runs off with the elder's husband of deHaviland's Roy (Dennis Morgan), causes a scandal among the town and family who have to pick themselves up from the incident and bear up. Despite that husband's subsequent suicide, Stanley Timberlake never learns her lesson and continues to take the selfish path, destroying lives like stepping on ants, which Davis performs with dervish-like zeal. 

Extraordinarily melodramatic, but with enough of a social conscience—in the course of the story, a servant's son is caught up in her machinations and it is admitted that a black man's word will never be held equal to a white woman's, no matter the evidence—to make it notable.

Winning Your Wings (1942) The only film Huston made with James Stewart, albeit Lieutenant James Stewart, one year in the Army Air Corps. A recruitment film for the war effort, Huston directed Stewart and a cast of would-be recruits, answering questions about how the Corps can serve them, while they're serving it. Stewart is folksy, and "aw-shucks" in the on-camera portion, and was probably told to "punch up" the narration in spots, because he goes into his high, slightly panicky tones in parts.  Winning Your Wings was nominated for Best Documentary that year at the Oscars.

Across the Pacific (1942) A Warner's programmer, ostensibly to re-team Bogart and Astor, that fed on American anger over the recent Pearl Harbor attack (interestingly, the first version of the film involved subverting a planned attack on Pearl, then quickly shifted to Panama after the actual attack). It's an odd movie for Huston to make (but then so is the previous one) and the caricaturish nature of the Japanese depicted is outlandishly cartoonish and offensive. But, America was at war, and Warners found a new avenue for making money by stoking the war-fever. 

Huston was called into the military during filming and the film was completed by Vincent Sherman, not to the film's detriment, as it's a minor effort with the basest of intentions.

Report from the Aleutians/The Battle of San Pietro/Let There Be Light (1943-1946) Of all the directors who made documentaries during the Second World War, Huston is perhaps only second to John Ford in the best chronicling of the war effort. Huston was on the front lines and some of his footage is damned scary, but his propaganda efforts were not glossed-over tales of the glory of battle, and dared, rather, to show Americans audiences the danger and terrible conditions their family members were forced to endure fighting overseas (as much as the military censors would allow, anyway).  

Huston crossed into the military no-man's-land, however, with the final film of the trio, Let There Be Light, about the psychotherapy being used to treat post-traumatic stress (or "battle neurosis" as it was called then), as it pushed the boundaries so much it was deemed too controversial* and was banned from viewing until the 1980's.

It was, however, voted into the National Film Registry in 2010.  

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) Huston's Oscar-winner about greed and American psychosis south of the border was his first film after the second World War. Based on the novel by "the mysterious" B. Traven, the film follows three American ex-pats ("down on their luck") who collaborate to find gold in the Sierra Madre mountains. The hard work pays off, all too well it seems, for along the way, they must fight Mexican bandits, greedy interlopers, and their own internal squabbles over "gold-fever," and ingrained paranoia. Huston won an Oscar for writing and directing and his father Walter won for his portrayal of the old prospector Howard, who is the conscience and philosopher of the film. Curiously though, the awards escaped Humphrey Bogart who gives the best performance of his career as Fred C. Dobbs, the ferociously weak and venal member of the gold-diggers (Tim Holt is the third member who could turn good or bad, depending on circumstance and his own moral compass). Men under duress, whether by Nature or their own making, can turn against themselves and their best interests. There's a gambler's story for you. Complex, yet with the basest of intentions and the simplest of plots, it is atmospheric, incessantly intriguing and daringly powerful. 

And it's one of those Huston films that end in fateful laughter. One is tempted—very tempted—to call this Huston's best film in a career full of great ones that are both highly regarded by critics and the public. 

This one was voted into the National Film Registry in 1990.

On Our Merry Way (1948) Not sure what he did on it, but Huston (along with George Stevens) was reportedly involved in the direction of a segment of this anthology film, but no one knows how (The film is listed as being directed by King Vidor and Leslie Fenton).  Indeed, it might have been a story cut from the film that starred Charles Laughton as a preacher tasked by a young boy to visit his dying father—deemed too serious for a comedy, it was cut before wide distribution in theaters.

The first pairing of best buddies Henry Fonda and James Stewart
was in one of the surviving segments of On Our Merry Way,

Key Largo (1948) Bogart plays a war vet who comes to the Largo hotel to explain to the managers, the Temples (Lionel Barrymore and Lauren Bacall) the circumstances of his friend's death—Barrymore's son and Bacall's husband—in Italy during World War II. He helps them prepare the hotel for an upcoming hurricane, but ends up protecting them from another storm in the form of the Johnny Ricco gang, whose leader (Edward G. Robinson) is trying to sneak back to America after an extended Havana exile to avoid prosecution. 

For fans of Bogart, if that plot seems familiar, it's because the story is very reminiscent of "The Petrified Forest," the play that made Bogart a well-considered actor on Broadway. This time, though, he's not playing the "heavy," (as he did then) but is playing the affected hero, changed here to reflect the post-war environment, returned from the war with a heavy burden— survivor's guilt—and finding himself the one man, however reluctantly, to stand up against the Ricco gang. It is a chance for redemption of a sorts, and the best way of letting go of the past—by finding a future. 

Great cast, willing to delve into the psychological cruelty layered into the story, that makes it rise above the pre-war gangster films, with their more simplistic view of good and evil.

Claire Trevor won her second Oscar playing Ricco's humiliated moll.

We Were Strangers (aka: Rough Sketch) (1949) In 1933, the Cuban congress under President Machado cowardly votes to outlaw assembly to four people at a time in an effort to suppress protest and insurrection. At the same time, political dissidents are being targeted for assassination by Havana police officer Armando Ariete (Pedro Armendariz), including Monolo Valdez, whose sister China (Jennifer Jones) witnesses his gunning down in the street. A bank employee, she decides to join forces with a revolutionary cadre (Gilbert Roland, David Bond, Jose Perez, Wally Cassell, Ramon Navarro, and John Garfield), who plan to kill the president and his cabinet at the funeral of a government official. As her house is across from the "rich" cemetery, the group decides to tunnel underground to set the explosives to take the down the regime.

Garfield plays the "Bogart" role, Tony Fenner, but plays him as if he were playing a noir detective. Jones is miscast, but does her best with her role, but the guy you can't take your eyes off is Gilbert Roland...and Pedro Armendariz. Armendariz plays his corrupt-to-the-core policia all circumspect and restrained—you almost don't recognize him—then he plays a drunk-scene that is so impressive, you forget how good he could be.

Supposedly, Huston and script-writer Peter Viertel spent time working on the script with Ernest Hemingway at his Havana hideaway, but Papa's suggestion that all the revolutionaries die wasn't taken to heart. There is plenty of blood-shed, though, during a night-time machine-gun shoot-out where the only illumination is from the fire coming from the gun-barrels.

Of all the movies made by John Huston, this one is hardest to access (and that includes Let There Be Light, which the Army suppressed for 40 years). The reason? It (as well as the Frank Sinatra movie Suddenly) figured in testimony before the Warren Commission about the assassination of President Kennedy. It seems assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was a fan.

Jennifer Jones rocks a machine-gun against the Cuban secret police.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) Gritty film-noir caper movie about a team of down-on-their-heels grifters carrying off an elaborate jewel heist planned by a criminal genius (Sam Jaffee) and funded by a corrupt lawyer (Louis Calhern).  It's one of the seminal heist-noir films, extraordinarily influential (Stanley Kubrick used it as a model for his early noirs, and there are echoes of it in in 1955's Rififi), with a terrific cast headed by Sterling Hayden and Jean Hagen (it also has a small but notable role by Marilyn Monroe). What must have impressed Huston is its haunting "best laid plans" moral about the vagaries of collaboration when motivated by personal greed and ambitions in a combustible mixture with Fate, no matter what rung of the social ladder you may be clinging to. In that way, the Reidenschneider gang, pulling off their elaborate jewel robbery, are in the same family as the criminals seeking The Maltese Falcon, or the drifters panning for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Skirting the Hays Code requirements by its unglamorous and often violent outcomes, there isn't an upright copper or detective in sight until the end, leaving one to suspect that the culprits' own moral decay decided their futures from the beginning.

It was named as part of the National Film Registry in 2008.

The Red Badge of Courage (1951) M-G-M's released version of it is incredibly paired down from Huston's intentions (as chronicled in Lillian Ross' book about the filming, "Picture"), but it is still a powerful "small" telling of the Civil War story, with bleak battleground landscapes the like Matthew Brady would have captured if only he had a movie camera. Huston adapted the Stephen Crane novel himself and cast WWII's most decorated soldier Audie Murphy as The Youth who must overcome his fear of dying if he's ever going to be effective in the war.  Huston also cast the baby-faced Bill Mauldin, vet-creator of the "Willie and Joe" cartoons, as The Loud Soldier, making the film feel much more realistic in the depiction of raw kids fighting the war.  The movie was a pet project of Huston's, but the studio producing it (M-G-M) didn't like his non-star stunt casting and the lack of romantic interests in a story about youths at war, so while the director was distracted prepping The African Queen, executives ordered the film cut to a length of just over an hour (from its intended two hour length) for theatrical release and kept it as the second feature on double bills.

The full-length version is considered "lost." 

WWII vets Bill Mauldin and Audie Murphy in The Red Badge of Courage

The African Queen (1952)  Bogart and Hepburn (Katherine) are thrown together by tragedy as two quarreling river-rats who take the rickety scow The African Queen down the African river for a rendezvous with World War I Prussians.

No wonder Huston couldn't wait to get to this one—an exotic location, Africa, with buddies Bogart and Bacall and the feisty Hepburn—and if there were logistical problems (and how could there not be in Africa?) the director could always go off and indulge in some exotic hunting.**
The scrpt, by James Agee and Peter Viertel (who would go on to write a roman a clef about the filming, "White Hunter, Black Heart") is a fine mixture of preparation and happenstance, allowing things to change as serendipity came into view. And given the hectic production, it's no wonder that there is an awful lot of studio work done in front of projectors to pick up pieces and avoid complications. But, you'd never notice it looking at the film and the rigorousness of the performances. Bogart and Hepburn are at the top of their respective games sparking off each other—and it's just them and The Queen for 80% of the film. This is the film that won Bogart his Oscar for an uncharacteristic, but enthusiastic performance as the gin-soaked Canadian ship-pilot Charlie Allnutt—as independent as the river is long—until he is giving passage to missionary Rose Sayer after the death of her brother and the annihilation of their ministry. It's a small boat, a long river, and the two are going to be in each other's business the entire trip, God help them both.

Until recently, The African Queen has been in the most egregious conditions of any motion picture still being printed, but the recent restoration for Blu-Ray has worked some miracles at long last and the film appears in much better condition than it has in decades.

Again, National Film Registry. 1994.

"Oooh, Miss..."

Moulin Rouge (1952) Not the Baz Luhrmann musical spectacular (this has no exclamation point in it), but John Hustons' masterful film of the life of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. A painter himself, Huston was determined to bring Lautrec's life to the screen and, in collaboration with his cinematographer Oswald Morris) was determined to recreate the colors and images in Lautrec's paintings and photographed it in three-strip Technicolor in order to grade and saturate the colors to achieve that end.

The effect is masterful and quixotic, as is the film.  Lautrec (Jose Ferrer, who had to do some painful gymnastics to play the diminutive painter) is an aristocrat, but sees himself as an outcast for his diminutive height—4 ft. 8—which the film attributes to his falling down stairs as a child, and although, in real life, he did fracture both his legs at an early age, the real reason his legs did not heal properly was a genetic one—his mother and father were first cousins.

They split in order to not bear any more children, and Lautrec frequents the Moulin Rouge dance hall as he sees himself a misfit and is attracted to the baudy clientele and dancers. Trained in painting, he is soon asked to create a poster for the venue, to which Lautrec devotes himself, painting and overseeing the printing to make it "just so." The poster proves controversial and popular, but Lautrec's lonely existence drives him to depression and alcoholism. 

Cameos by Zsa-Zsa Gabor (who can't lip-synch), and Christopher Lee—as Georges Seraut (who wonders "what has made Henri so unhappy,"), and a dashing Peter Cushing. 

Growing up, my family's kitchen was festooned with a bright festive wall-paper patterned after Toulouse-Lautrec's poster art of dancing girls and frivolities (but not his sketches of prostitutes), so it was fascinating to see Huston go to pains to recreate the scenes that the artist was beholding to make those splashy images.

Beat the Devil (1953)  "Only phonies like it," said Bogart of this film, made by his own Santana Productions (that he lost money on it might have colored his opinion). It's an odd one, though. Anyone familiar with Bogart and Huston (this was their last collaboration) will recognize a kinship with The Maltese Falcon (but others as well) as a group of mutually distrusting grifters (Bogart, Gina Lollabrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, Marco Tulli, Ivor Bernard) prove there's no honor among thieves as they await a tramp steamer to Africa where they're trying to acquire mineral rights to uranium (not exactly a jewel-encrusted statue, but as one of them says "it's a brave new world"). They meet the Chelms (Edward Underdown and Jennifer Jones), two Brits who are also making their way to Africa to see about coffee interests, but whose stories also seem to change. Loyalties divide and conquer in a screenplay (that was said to be re-written every day) by Huston and Truman Capote. It's a twisting, humorous caper in which no one can be trusted—not even the film-makers—a lark of a movie with nasty undertones, that ends as so many Huston films with the sound of laughter. One suspects that everyone had a good working vacation.

Moby Dick (1956) Call Richard Basehart Ishmael in this extraordinarily ambitious film of Herman Melville's "wicked book" of the whaling vessel Pequod and its captain's monomaniacal search for the whale that disfigured him. Huston tapped Ray Bradbury*** to write the script, and the fantasy author managed to pair down the classic's bulk and detail and strip it to its bare essentials and imagery. Huston had wanted to make a film of this for years with the intention of casting his father in the role of Captain Ahab. Walter Huston died in 1950, and with the insistence of Warner Bros for a "name actor," Gregory Peck was cast in a departure from most of his leading man roles. 

Peck is quite good, flinty and growly in the role—sort of Abe Lincoln's evil twin—but came away after a grueling production period (in which for a while he was lost at sea on the big floating whale model) harboring the opinion that Huston himself really should have played Ahab.**** 

Maybe. It's still a visually impressive accomplishment (photographed by Oswald Morris again, leeching out the more vibrant color spectrum) with some manic direction during the whale-hunting scenes that border on hysteria, that it still manages to shoe-horn some of the darker themes of the book amidst the basic adventure story of man shaking his fist at God for the vagaries of his life.

Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) After the arduous filming of Moby Dick, this island-bound variation of The African Queen must have seemed like a vacation to Huston. The laid-back Robert Mitchum, the fun and professional Deborah Kerr (albeit playing a nun), hiding from Japanese troops on a sunny, palm-festooned Pacific island has just the right amount of exoticism, but with fewer leeches. Marine Corporal Allison is washed ashore on a Pacific island that has just been evacuated pending a Japanese landing. He finds the island abandoned, save for Sister Angela, who has stayed behind with an elderly priest who has subsequently died. When a Japanese meteorological team comes ashore, they hide in a cave playing a game of cat and mouse with the Japanese troops, watching naval battles light up the sky just over the horizon and awaiting the day when they can be rescued. Mitchum's in top-form playing a New Jersey rough-neck, full of slang, contrasted with Kerr's reserved Irish nun, both belonging to a corps of sorts, him the Marines, she the Catholic church. The story flirts briefly with a love story, but abandons it for one of mutual respect and duty. A neat return to themes and a more personal scale for the director. 

The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958) It's evidence that the Hollywood Blacklist was starting to lose its stranglehold when anti-Communist John Wayne decided to make a movie with leftists John Huston and Sam Jaffee. Huston spent most of the 1950's globe-trotting away from the U.S. and Wayne was intrigued with the story of Townsend Harris, America's first Consul General to the Empire of Japan, who opened up relations between America and the empire after Commodore Perry established trade between the two countries. The movie gets the trade parts right, but not the relationships as it tries to make a big deal between Harris and the geisha Okichi, something that apparently is the stuff of myth—Okichi was a house-maid and Harris fired her after three days (not much plot for a movie there).

But, the odd pairing of Huston and Wayne has its cinematic benefits—Huston makes full use of Wayne's large presence as very much a bull in a china shop, big and ungainly, but not without its charms—you couldn't find a better contrast between the West and the East, as Wayne must pick his way through, ducking his head from the low doorways, not talking much, but with actions serving as a better bridge than words.

Say what you want about Wayne's acting, but he's terrific in the role and there's a wonderful line of dialog—"Well, Henry, we were sent out here to establish diplomatic relations with Japan. So far, we have let in a cholera ship, started an epidemic, burned down half the town, and been taken into custody. Wonderful record. Let's drink to it."—that a lesser actor might have chewed to ironic effect and Wayne plays straight with just a hint of rueful brio. Huston must have loved that.

The Roots of Heaven (1959) Seven years after traveling to Africa to make The African Queen, and pursuing a personal yen to kill an elephant, Huston returned to Africa—this time Camaroon, Chad, and the Belgian Congo to make this penitent film about an idealist (Trevor Howard), determined to single-handedly stop the hunting and poaching of elephants by any means necessary. Starting by petitioning the government, then the local games-men, who both turn a blind eye to the elephants' plight in favor of short-term economic gains, he turns to more aggressive tactics—burning down ivory trade-posts and shooting buckshot into the prominent back-sides of offenders, even the most prominent, that of TV commentator Cy Sedgwick (Orson Welles in a brief comic performance), which draws the attention and ire of a beleaguered bureaucracy. Despite Errol Flynn being top-billed (William Holden was originally to play Howard's part) and producer Darryl F. Zanuck's hopes for what it would do for Juliette Greco's career, this is Howard's movie all the way, and he's the best thing in it, besides Oswald Morris' lush location photography. Interesting theme, years ahead of its time, about ecology, sustainability, the human imperative, and the power of a grassroots movement.

The Unforgiven (1960) Based on a novel by Alan LeMay (who wrote "The Searchers"), The Unforgiven plays like a twisted reverse version of John Ford's film version of that tale, but whereas the Ford film, filmed five years previously, seems optimistic in the softening of racial hatred in even the worst of mankind, Huston's film is considerably mixed in its messages. The Zachary family, led by Lillian Gish, are part of a cattle ranching concern in Texas. The kids, Ben (Burt Lancaster), Cash (Audie Murphy), Andy (Doug McClure) and adopted daughter Rachel (Hepburn...Audrey) try to keep things together after the death of their father at the hands of Kiowa fighters. The white populace is in a murderous frenzy over their frequent attacks, but the Kiowas may have their reasons. According to the raving Abe Kelsey (a great, creepy performance by Joseph Wiseman), Rachel may have been an infant stolen from the Kiowas during a reprisal raid, and raised as white in the Zachary family. The Zachary kids deny it, but the rumor and subsequent death of the son of partner Zeb Rawlins (Charles Bickford) over Rachel, turns the community against them. 

The language is coarse (referring to Kiowas as "red-hide niggers") but the subsequent attack on the Zachary household is carried out like any Western shoot-out, despite the motivations involved. Huston was deeply dissatisfied with the film, its intended message of racial tolerance negated by the actions of the Zachary's at the end of the film in order to have a traditional Western outcome (the "injuns" die, the whites live and "justifiably" so) insisted on by the producers. Some good performances (by Gish, Murphy and Wiseman), but one could see why the liberal Huston, who was making effective statements about racism 'way back around the time of In This Our Life, would look back on this one and curl his lip.

* The reason given was that it invaded the privacy of the 76 subjects of the film, but a cynical view would consider the devastating effect its portrayal of what at the time was termed "battle fatigue" would have on Army recruitment, rather than on the subjects.

** 

*** Ray Bradbury wrote a fictional account of his working with Huston on Moby Dick called "Green Shadows, White Whale." One of the parts of it was the story "Banshee," which was subsequently adapted for the syndicated "Ray Bradbury Theater." The material is a little slight, but Peter O'Toole (who was Huston's Angels in The Bible) played director "John Hampton," (Charles Martin Smith played the Bradbury character)...

...And let us not forget that Clint Eastwood did a credible Huston imitation—the sort of acting Eastwood just never did—when playing the Huston-like character in White Hunter, Black Heart.

**** Peck would play the part of Father Marple in the 1998 television movie of "Moby Dick" produced by Francis Coppola and directed by Franc Roddam.  The Marple role is played in "the Huston version" by his pal Orson Welles for an entire reel of film.