Huston’s Novel Approach to Film
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

It is an axiom of cinema that second- and third-rate books often make for good movies, while great books rarely do. Ethel Lina White (“The Lady Vanishes”), Alan Le May (“The Searchers”), and Mario Puzo (“The Godfather”) all are immortalized in auteurist filmographies, whereas Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty have not fared too well at the movie theater. Still, personal and even visionary films adapted from slavishly admired literary works do exist, and John Huston made an impressive number of them.
Nearly half of Huston’s 39 feature films, not counting his wartime documentaries (good as they are) and his acknowledged or unacknowledged collaborations (bad as they are), are based on literary landmarks — novels, plays, and stories. Only four (“The Bible,” “Moby Dick,” “The Red Badge of Courage,” and “The Man Who Would Be King”) predate the 20th century, which is copiously examined in the others. Some of his films have supplanted source material that was once highly regarded (“The African Queen,” “Key Largo”); others helped to establish or raise the stature of their sources (“Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “Fat City”). Huston’s best films, beginning with his first, 1941’s “The Maltese Falcon,” survive on a parallel plain to that of the originals. They reflect, above all else, Huston’s craggy sensibility.
That sensibility, essentially agnostic and existential, is predicated on a conviction that heaven and hell exist not in the clouds or along the Styx, but in what we make of the world. It prizes moral courage over physical derring-do and sneers at moral certainty. Kafka wrote somewhere that the victorious man inflicts more damage on the world than the world inflicts on him. This is a speculative idea but one that Huston, the most concretely centered of storytellers, illuminated time and again. Few of his heroes get to taste victory, but he admired those who die trying.
Criterion has now released one of Huston’s most neglected, nitpicked, and misunderstood films, “Under the Volcano” (1984), in a beautifully transferred two-disc DVD that does justice to Gabrielle Figueroa’s brightly sinister photography. A thoughtful gathering of commentaries, documentaries, and interviews reconsiders the film and its relationship to Malcolm Lowry’s novel. In a year that has seen much ado about the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s underwritten rave-up, “On the Road,” it should be noted that nary a toast has been raised to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Lowry’s death or the 60th anniversary of his masterpiece, itself a road trip fueled by stimulants and religious delirium.
In fact, Lowry’s novel, which is set in Mexico and recounts the last day — the Day of the Dead, 1938 — of a consul named Geoffrey Firmin, consists mostly of hallucinations, flashbacks, allusions, metaphors, symbols, and signs — printed signs, including a movie poster. Huston, working with a daringly efficient script by Guy Gallo, tossed almost all of that by the wayside. He retained a few symbols, including a sickly green poster of Peter Lorre in “Mad Love,” peering over the consul’s shoulder in the grim Farolito whorehouse, and even added one of his own: a carnival re-enactment of Don Juan in hell. For the most part, however, the director and Mr. Gallo drew a scalpel down the novel’s body, extracted key plot elements, and arranged them chronologically, ruthlessly discarding one of four central characters (M. Laruelle) and hundreds of pages of background material (including, alas, the many references to Joe Venuti and 1920s jazz), retaining only the consul’s wartime disgrace and his wife’s adulterous liaison with his halfbrother, Hugh (played by Anthony Andrews).
The remarkable thing is that Huston and Mr. Gallo managed to construct a moving, plausible, and faithful interpretation of Lowry’s vision in the absence of Lowry’s prose and the intricacy of his method. Immeasurably aided by Albert Finney’s devouring performance as Firmin, which remains one of the most involving and comprehensive depictions of addiction ever filmed, Huston’s “Under the Volcano” is ultimately worthy of the consul, even if in other respects it is only a patch on the novel. The clarity of Huston’s direction and the confidence of its tempo, buoyed by a colorful supporting cast, fastidious art direction, and a crafty Alex North score, belie the small budget.
In an audio interview included on the DVD, Huston makes clear his ambivalence about the novel; he disapproves of the literary frou-frou. He accuses Lowry of hiding behind showiness and insists that it ultimately undermines the work’s effectiveness. He’s mistaken, but his error is hard won: In reducing “Under the Volcano” to the plight of Geoffrey Firmin, Huston reveals that touching protectiveness toward his heroes that characterizes his best work. Mr. Gallo’s script underscores the political treachery of the time by introducing a Nazi bureaucrat and undermines the personal treachery by cutting out of one Yvonne Firmin’s adulteries, granting her a surprising, saintly forbearance (beautifully realized in Jacqueline Bissett’s delicate performance). But even Mr. Gallo and the three producers, in their commentary tracks, express ambivalence about the degree to which Huston fixated on Firmin.
Huston’s literary films, especially those in the magical last act of his career, between 1972 (“Fat City”) and 1986 (“The Dead”), are characterized by critical adjustments to the original works. Huston never merely transposed a story from one medium to another. His thematic consistency — often conveyed in dark, willful humor — allowed him to pay homage to the stories while making them over. “The Man Who Would Be King” (1976), perhaps his masterpiece, is more resourceful, weird, and hilarious than Kipling. His “Wise Blood” (1979), though largely faithful to Flannery O’Connor’s short novel, makes vital changes that define the difference between the author’s Catholic vigor and the director’s cunning humanism. He turned Joyce’s “The Dead” from censure to elegy.
Much of the strength in “Under the Volcano” stems from Huston’s recognition that Firmin’s alcoholism has a courageous facet. It represents a way of staying alive in an insane, toppling world. Firmin achieves clarity in mescal drunkenness, even though it requires his denunciation of submissive diplomacy (he has renounced his consulship) and of Yvonne’s love, which he concedes is the only thing that makes life worth living. Yet in choosing hell, represented by the Farolito (“the paradise of his despair” in the novel), Geoffrey is permitted a moment of grace — a heroic last stand as, impotently swinging a machete, he denounces the murderers and thieves who have hijacked Mexico. His “dingy” death is also his deliverance.
It is also Yvonne’s death sentence, something she predicted in one of her letters, unread by Geoffrey until he discovers them in the Farolito: “If you let anything happen to yourself you will be harming my flesh and mind.” Lowry transposed their deaths, showing Yvonne’s mishap before Geoffrey’s murder, but Huston made a better choice, connecting the dots as Geoffrey’s defiance liberates the white horse that runs down Yvonne, underscoring the possibility (which Ms. Bissett, in her DVD interview, acknowledges was an aspect of her interpretation) that Yvonne may exist only in Geoffrey’s mind. Huston was at his best in staging their first scene together: Geoffrey, pontificating in a cantina, thinks at first that Yvonne must be a mirage and shrugs her off.
Huston also retained the humor that resonates throughout the novel (especially the hapless comings and goings of the sublime fifth chapter). But he was most stimulated in the film’s final 35 minutes — more than a quarter of the picture, based on the nightmarish final chapter, staged in the Farolito. Huston insisted that the whores be played by genuine Mexican prostitutes, and their authenticity must have inspired him because, shot for shot, it is one of the most riveting, wrenching sequences in his canon, insolently cold and unsentimental and agonizing.
Mr. Giddins is the author of “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books.”