Word: huston
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...brave director who will guide him through a performance that satirizes the grand manner of one of recent movie history's most revered auteurs and, in the end, devastates the great man's macho posturings. Obviously, Clint Eastwood, who both plays John Wilson -- read that as John Huston -- and directs White Hunter, Black Heart, has more gumption than, say, Dirty Harry Callahan. After all, the short-fused San Francisco cop only had to face down outrageous criminals. Having committed this iconoclastic vision of Huston to film, Eastwood may find himself confronting roving bands of outraged cinephiles...
They should look closely at the film before they leap to conclusions. White Hunter, Black Heart is based on co-screenwriter Peter Viertel's roman a clef, published some four decades ago, about his experiences in Africa when he was engaged by Huston to polish James Agee's script for The African Queen. Eastwood has dared to attempt a faithful impression of the director, his growling drawl, his loose-limbed stride, the arrogant tilt of his head. The result is a stretch for him as an actor, and fun for the audience...
What this film misses most is a character like Noah Cross, whom John Huston played with chilling false charm in Chinatown. The trail that led to him was as convoluted as the story line in this movie. But we knew all along the footprints had to arrive at his doorstep, and when they did, we confronted an unforgettable monster, whose political and economic immorality was of a piece with his sexual perversion. Dramatically he was an antagonist who functioned as a powerfully clarifying force, resolving, vivifying all the movie's ambiguities. There is just no one like him here, though...
Chinatown's powerful, bewildering plot came to a conclusion with Gittes failing to protect his lover Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) and her daughter/sister Katherine (Belinda Palmer) from corrupt millionare Noah Cross (John Huston). Katherine was the teenage product of the incestuous union of Evelyn and Cross, who was her father. While attempting to drive away from her pursuers, police working for Cross accidentally shot Evelyn Mulwray in the head. The absolutely hysterical Katherine was pulled from the car as Gittes, stunned by the loss of the woman he loved, looked on helplessly...
...played as brisk black comedy, an "I Led Three Wives" with memories of death ever kibitzing in his restless sleep. But Mazursky is scrupulously fair to the characters -- so fair that Enemies lacks his films' customary oomph. When it is not vitalized by the beautiful performances of Olin and Huston, the picture takes on Herman's dithering lassitude. And yet there is a method to this meandering. Novelist and director both know a man is more than the sum of the calamities that have befallen him. Herman is a victim, not just of the Nazis, but of his own demons...