Sympathy for Beat the Devil

Okonheim, at the Sophomore Critic, is hosting a blogathon this week devoted to John Huston, renaissance man. And he was, Mr. Huston, just that - writer, actor, director, part of a family doing impressive work from the late 20s to the present - a major figure of American film.

For all that, though, he can be hard to get a handle on. He was one of the first directors I picked up on, when I started watching classic films - but it didn't take long for me to decide I like Hawks better. Why? Part of it might be plain inconsistency; another part might be that in all his films, even his best ones, there are moments where the seams show - where he seems to be laboring. Those low angle shots of Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon - he's trying too hard. And, I think, it can be hard to get a grip on his themes, his concerns as a director: there doesn't seem to be the thematic consistency you see in Hawks or Ford. But I am less convinced of this objection than I might once have been - and it is what I want to consider here: some of the themes you can see in his work.

What better place to look for a director's themes than a parody of his films? especially if he directs the parody himself. It's hard to think of anyone taking the piss out of themselves more than Huston does in Beat the Devil. (Taking shots at a host of other adventure films in the process, of course.) You can find some nay-sayers, but I love it - it's a hoot, packed with quotable lines ("I am going upstairs and read my bible"), an absurd plot, ridiculous characters, and a host of actors turned loose on the material with no restraints. And boy do they make a meal of it, every last one of them trying to steal every minute of the thing, every one of them given a wealth of material to work with. It's a blast.



But along with the comedy, there's something else. Huston mercilessly mocks Robert Morley's band of "brilliant criminals", but they are a bit more than parodies of the crooks and adventurers in his "straight" films. They are played for laughs - but what they are, and what they do - a bunch of dumb, greedy, desperate schemers, dreaming bigger than they have any business doing - is consistent with most of his career. Failure is almost a trademark for his characters - and even the best of them come in for a trace or two of the mockery heaped on Peterson and company.



It's a recurring theme in Huston's films: reaching too high, getting swatted down. High Sierra - The Maltese Falcon - The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - The Asphalt Jungle - The Man Who Would Be King - all offer men who go after something just a bit too far (or a lot too far) and fail, either ridiculously or tragically - usually a bit of both. And the mechanics of their failures - which occur in Beat the Devil as well - are repeated in many of those films. The way they are brought down by bad luck, a stray bullet, a rusty fuel pump. But not just luck - all these guys go in with their eyes open, and keep plowing on, in the face of everything that goes wrong, and keep going, past that last warning sign, playing their hand to the end, even when the hand has obviously lost...

It gets played for laughs in Beat the Devil, where the crooks are clearly dumber than usual - but builds on the rest of his work. All these characters do themselves in, at some level - Gutman refusing to give in or take the safe way out until he knows if he has the Falcon or not; Dobbs and Curtin hanging around for that much more gold, then turning on each other; Doc Riedenschneider eying the ladies just a few minutes longer; Danny Davot deciding he really will be king.... But fools or not, Huston can't quite condemn them. He always maintains some distance from them, turning a sardonic eye on them (even the heroes, even the Sam Spades - who are usually just a hair or two away from the rest of them - compromised and ambiguous, and if they get out alive, it's usually because, at some crucial moment, they see the abyss and pause, and let the rest of the gang go over. Sometimes maybe giving them a push...). He watches them, sometimes disapproving, but not quite condemning, sometimes sympathetic, but never quite endorsing them. And he allows all of them (maybe even Peterson and company, though obviously not as much) to register at least some of the depth of their hopes and desires. This can take many forms: from Sidney Greenstreet's bitter charm and rueful acceptance of failure, to the ridiculous tragedy of Bogie's Fred C Dobbs, to Sam Jaffe's resignation and Sterling Hayden's genuine pathos in The Asphalt Jungle.

It's a style that approaches tragedy, but doesn't quite make it: it is too ironic, too absurd to work as tragedy. It becomes, in a sense, a character actor's cinema: not built around heroes, stars, who either save the day or die spectacular cathartic deaths - but around characters doomed from the start, but who know how to make us feel it. All these things might help explain why Beat the Devil, proto-camp though it may be, seems as much an emblem of Huston's style as a parody of it. The foolish, blinkered, self-destructive, self-deluding losers here and the compromised, wobbly, self-destructive, self-deluding hero, are exaggerations of the characters in so many of his films. It makes things plainer than usual - including making the performances, the individuality of the actors, the very meat and drink of the film.