This week’s pick is the 1941 Howard Hawks classic Sergeant York which stars Gary Cooper as the back woods Tennessee hero of World War I. The supporting cast include Walter Brennan (Pastor Pile), Joan Leslie (Gracie Williams), George Tobias (“Pusher” Ross), Ward Bond (Ike Botkin), Stanley Ridges (Maj. Buxton), Dickie Moore (George York), June Lockhart (Rosie York), and Margaret Wycherly (Mother York).

The film was adapted by Harry Chandlee, Abem Finkel, and actor/director John Huston, from York’s own memoirs about his experiences.

It was Alvin York himelf who insisted on Gary Cooper taking the role. Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart and Ronald Reagan were also considered for the part, but York still insisted that Cooper was the right choice for the role.

The film is an autobiographical account of York’s upbringing in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee where he is struggling to make enough money so that he may be able to buy a plot of land for himself. He is young, rambunctious, a drinker, and brawler who has good intentions, but is a burden on his poor family who share a tiny shanty.

Pastor Pile (Brennan) sees good in Alvin and tries to convince him to put his faith in god. Alvin is at first against the idea of religion and asks why he should trust in god. An epiphany overcomes Alvin one night after a night of hard drinking and fighting, which makes him change his ways and to put faith in the lord, in order to marry his sweetheart Gracie (Leslie) and acquire a piece of land in order to be a good husband and provider for her.

Happy New Year to all you faithful War Movie Monday fans, and thank you for a fantastic year of classic war films. This week’s pick to ring in the start of a new year is the John Milius 1975 classic The Wind and the Lion, which was loosely based on an international incident which led to possible war between the U.S. and European powers in 1904 Morocco. The film stars Sean Connery (Raisuli), Candice Bergen (Eden Perdicaris), Brian Keith (President Theodore Roosevelt), John Huston (Sec. of State John Hay), Geoffrey Lewis (American Ambassador to Morocco Samuel R. Gummere), Steve Kanaly (Captain Eugene Jerome, USMC), and Vladek Sheybal (The Bashaw of Tangier).

The film open up with a sweeping score from famed composer Jerry Goldsmith, who sets the stage for a fantastic adventure film with a tone of modern era warfare between desert tribesmen and the imperial powers of Germany, France, and Great Britain who are trying to establish their own spheres of influence throughout the Arab world.

Mulai Amhed er Raisuli (Connery) is the leader of a band of Berber tribesmen who are opposed to the Sultan and his Uncle (Sheybal) the Bashaw of Tangier who are corrupt and easily influenced by the European powers. The Raisuli plans to embarrass the rulers of Morocco by having his men kidnap an American woman, Eden Perdicaris (Bergen) and her two children from their home in Tangier, and hold them for ransom for gold, rifles, and sovereignty from the Europeans.

Milius wrote and directed the film which was loosely based on an actual account which was known as the “Perdicaris incident” in 1904. An American man and his stepson were kidnapped by Barbary pirates and were ransomed. Both were unharmed and the incident gave President Theodore Roosevelt a platform to wield the “big stick” of foreign policy for his re-election to office that year in November.

Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is Huston’s foray into the wonderful of what we happily refer to as “Nuncore.” Well, maybe not too explicit, but there is some latent sexual tension pervading the film.

Rusty-voiced Hollywood badboy Robert Mitchum plays the titular Mr. Allison, a U.S. marine stranded on a small island in the South Pacific, which happens to be populated solely by the comely and angelic Sister Angela (Deborah Kerr). Allison and Angela bond on a fishing excursion to catch a sea turtle and life goes about as usual on the island until some Japanese land and make an impromptu camp.

The two set up camp in a cave before Allison runs some recon but gets stuck in one of the shelters when two Japanese soldiers decide to take their break and play a game of Othello and a few rounds of sake.

Allison returns the next morning and Angela makes him promise never to worry her like that again. One day the Japanese mysteriously leave the island—and their provisions—behind. One thing leads to another and eventually Allison discovers that Angela has not yet taken her final nun vows. He tries to convince her to marry hi, but she resists, prompting Allison to break open the sake and in a drunken rant chase off Angela, who spends the night in the cold, catching a bout of pneumonia.

Moby Dick is probably the pinnacle of 1950s Huston. Moving from his ‘40s adaptations of contemporary American pulp (The Maltese Falcon) and popular works (In This Our Life) to more ambitious projects (The African Queen, The Red Badge of Courage, Moby Dick, and, eventually even The Bible), the decade marks a grandiose turn in Huston. It’s a bittersweet transformation. On the one hand, these works have a high spirit of adventure to them that still holds up and stay true to the original material. On the other, they lack the deeper, personal, more profound humanity of his earlier films.

Moby Dick is grounded firmly in the former, and, watching it now in 2010, nearly 55 years after it was made, it’s still a fun watch. Moby Dick is among the finest novels this country has ever produced and has held a special place in this English majors’ heart since college, when I took an hour-a-week class on it taught by my grizzled advisor “Uncle” Vic, a mid-fortiesh Virginian with a dusty leather jacket, beady horse eyes, and a half-kempt beard.

The class was only an hour long and held once a week, but in it, we exhausted nearly every theme, brought in a biology professor whose specialty was cetology, and garnered an appreciation for Melville’s epic prose.

Beat the Devil, despite it’s 1953 release, may be the most relevant Huston film for our current Age of Self-Parody Performances. You know: once-serious actors who now seem to coast by on playing offsetting exaggerations of former roles–Christopher Walken, Gary Busey, and, of course, William Shatner, spring to mind.

I’m sure there’s plenty more, but these three are the front-runners (Nick Cage doesn’t quite make the cut because I don’t think he’s ever doing a parody of himself–it’s just him). Walken led the way somewhat accidentally, revealing a comic side on Saturday Night Live and showing the world that this creepy, Oscar-winning skeleton man can dance in Spike Jonze’s music video of Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” (ahh 2001…).

Reading The Three Little Pigs; The Country Bears, “Poker Face.” Busey kind-of, sort-of predates even that with his cameo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (“Gimme a kiss”), but with his recent Vitamin Water ads it’s become pretty full blown. Aaaaaaand then there’s Shatner.

But whatever the reason for our love of character actors mocking their early, legitimate stuff, it’s nothing new, because Beat the Devil is essentially the same thing, and one of the oddest entries into Huston’s filmography (a phrase I feel I’ve been typing a lot).

The African Queen is kind of an odd duck in the Huston pantheon. And I’m not just saying that because I love the phrase “…is an odd duck.” Seriously! The next time you’re with your friends and see a flabby middle-aged man, balding, with glasses and a briefcase looking like he’s regretted every decision he’s ever made in his life, point at him and say, “That’s an odd duck.” Guaranteed laugh every time.

Anyway, African Queen. It’s Huston’s first “comedy,” or at least there’s a great deal more humor in it than you’d expect from Huston coming off The Red Badge of Courage and Key Largo. And much of the laughs come from the chemistry between Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn.

Actually maybe it’s more notable for being Huston’s first stab at a romantic drama. I don’t know, it’s weird. On the one hand, you have Katharine Hepburn who was known for screwball comedies, then you have Bogie who was known for being the stoic hero. The two don’t naturally seem to go together in the first place, but then Huston reverses their roles and makes Hepburn the wise-cracking tough guy and Bogie the straight man.

The Plot: Rose Sayer (Hepburn) and her brother are British missionaries in German East Africa on the eve of World War I. All but isolated, their only contact with the civilized world is crude slob of a deliveryman Charlie Allnut (Bogart), who brings them supplies and mail with the use of his dilapidated boat, The African Queen.

The war breaks out, and, after some manhandling from the Germans, Rose’s brother dies. With nothing left, Rose joins with Charlie and the two voyage downriver, careful to evade German fortresses and gunboats, crocs and leeches, and the other’s personality.

What’s Good About It: I’m not a fan of Katharine Hepburn (who, if you ever see Dick Cavett’s interview with her, was every inch of bitch in real life as she played on screen), but she and Bogie do have chemistry. Hepburn was born to play the uptight, domineering Rose, and Bogie’s happy-go-lucky hard-drinking Charlie was probably the closest he ever came to playing himself. It also earned him his only Oscar.

After tackling two contemporary classics (The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre), a few other popular works (In This Our Life, We Were Strangers, Key Largo), and three war documentaries (Report from the Aleutians, Battle of San Pietro, Let There Be Light), in 1951, Huston delved into America’s literary past and adapted Stephen Crane’s 1895 Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage.

Clocking in at a miniscule 69 minutes and starring war hero Audie Murphy, veteran and two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin, Andy Devine, Royal Dano, among others, Badge is among the more forgotten than remembered of Huston’s filmography. It’s more or less faithful to the novel, following the young Henry Fleming from his first experience in combat to his flight, his wounding from the rifle butt of a fellow soldier, on up through his final heroics as flag bearer, and seems appropriate for its time, coming relatively soon after the end of World War II.

Almost everyone, Huston included, speaks of Badge as though it was in line to become his next masterpiece had it not been for the meddling studio and their insistence on cuts. Whether that’s true or not, and whether the excised footage had been restored, honestly, I don’t get much of a sense of greatness from Badge.

For one, this is one Huston film where the narration seems wholly unnecessary. Maybe that was a studio decision, but I have yet to read anything that says it was. Huston’s a talented enough director to show everything the narrator mentions, so when he does, it’s overkill. Fleming has just shown the audience he’s brave by carrying the American flag head first into combat, do we really need this ponderously officious voice to confirm it?  And I’m not one of those viewers who dislikes narration in any form, because I usually don’t mind it—just that here it’s repetitive.

The shortness is a detriment as well. Fleming sort of drifts through the narrative hazily wanting to achieve true courage on the battlefield and going from coward to braggart to hero all in the span of around 20 minutes. This is the main focus of the story—to show Henry’s transformation from recruit to warrior, boy to man—but it just sort of happens. The narrator may make some comment about how it was at this or that moment that Henry understood the nature of war or manhood or whatever, but it feels haphazard.

This is one of those films that makes me happy about doing a retrospective on John Huston. Just when I think it’s going to get boring, I stumble on a movie like The Asphalt Jungle, and it blows me away.

The Asphalt Jungle, for a cinemaphile today, is a study in influence—not what it was influenced by, rather what it influenced later and still influences now. I can’t think of any other Huston film I’ve seen that so readily ignites callbacks (call-forwards?) to so many films I’ve seen before seeing this.

If I were pitching it to a studio today, I’d say, “It’s like Reservoir Dogs meets The Seven Samurai meets David Mamet.” You can’t watch it without hitting your head and saying, “So that’s where that’s from.”

And to say this is Huston at the height of his powers” isn’t enough. You must say, “This is Huston at the height of his powers in the 1950s.”

And it is. Structurally, Jungle is air tight. It takes chances, but they’re carefully controlled to provide maximum shock, at least retrospectively—I can’t know how shocking they were in 1950, but I do know that in the context of the film they’re surprising and clearly deliberate—the gun falling on the floor and nailing one of the gang members, the abrupt execution of the double-crosser, the delightful close-up of teenage boobies…

Is this the same guy who made The Maltese Falcon? It doesn’t quite feel that way. Falcon seemed a little tighter, more rigid. Here Huston feels more relaxed—the dialogue isn’t a rapid-fire barrage of quips and one-liners. The characters aren’t as grotesque—they seem a little more human.

Here’s a quick recap: Several men of various means and personalities join together to pull off one big score that will set them for life.

Huston doesn’t give much time to Key Largo in his autobiography, save for sharing his dissatisfaction with Warner Brothers in the late 1940s and some epic stories of his gambling debts. Offhandedly he mentions that it was nominated for Best Picture and Claire Trevor won the award for Best Supporting Actress.

What small part that does focus on the film mentions Edward G. Robinson’s reluctance to take up another gangster role, having played so many of them in the past. However, there is a spot-on description of Robinson’s first scene in the movie, where he’s soaking in a bathtub and smoking a long cigar: “He looked like a crustacean with its shell off.” To put it succinctly, it’s perfect.

But despite Huston’s reticence to talk about it (or write, as it were), Key Largo is still very fun. Not as deep as The Maltese Falcon, but not quite as bang-out, mindless entertainment as Across the Pacific.

Based on the play of the same name (I would use “eponymous,” but I don’t want to sound like a snob) by Maxwell Anderson, Largo stars Bogie as WWII veteran Frank McCloud, who’s made the trip down to the eponymous Key Largo to seek out the father (Lionel Barrymore) and widow (Lauren Bacall) of a former war buddy.

After The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre is probably Huston’s most famous film—the two may vie for the title of best known. It’s a great movie in the sense that The Godfather and Casablanca are great movies: memorable characters, rich in themes, steep in action, imminently watchable.  The kind of “old” movie for people who don’t like “old” movies.

I doubt anyone reading this won’t know the plot, but just in case, Humphrey Bogart plays Fred C. Dobbs, an out-of-luck drifter settled like dirt in one of Mexico’s dirtiest towns. He meets up with fellow drifter Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), and the two try to pick up odd jobs with even less luck than they started with. After taking brutal revenge on an employer who stiffed them, Dobbs and Curtin meet up with the grizzled and half-mad Howard (Huston father Walter, in an Oscar-winning role), a seasoned prospector looking for some men to share the costs of an expedition to mine for gold.

The three team up and head for the wilderness. Soon after, it’s clear that Howard is the most valuable member of the outfit, able to recognize Fool’s Gold and find the real stuff where the others see dust.  He’s also the mediator, picking up early on the paranoia and greed that will eventually lead to Dobbs’ ruin. At first Howard’s placating, going along with Dobbs to stave off his growing insanity, but as Dobbs’ mental instability increases, Howard becomes warily assertive, suggesting that stop while they’re ahead, planting suggestions in Dobbs’ head, and eventually convincing the group to pull up stakes and quit while they’re ahead.

When I first came back to the film after seeing it years ago, the character of Howard struck me as a first-rate candidate for a paper on behavioral studies and decision-making. The way he subtly becomes the leader who keeps the group together while consistently downplaying his role to elude confrontation made him the most interesting character for me. Of course, any such study would devalue the film, but it’s worth mentioning.

First off, let me admit that I jumped the gun getting to Huston’s war documentaries before covering 1942’s Across the Pacific. But I’m kind of glad I did, because it provides a nice break between Let There Be Light and Treasure of the Sierra Madre—two very intense films.

Pacific is much lighter and a lot of fun. It reunites three stars from The Maltese Falcon—Bogie, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet—all playing the roles we love them in. Bogie is Rick Leland, an undercover Army agent trailing Japanese sympathizer Dr. Lorenz (Greenstreet), who’s intent on bombing the Panama Canal. Aboard the Genoa Maru, bound from Halifax to Panama. Along the way, they encounter a number of mysterious figures, chief among them the all-to-proud-to-be-an-American Joe Totsuiko (brilliantly played by Victor Sen Yung), a second-generation Japanese man who makes a point of showing up when he’s not wanted and talking at you like you’re old friends when he’s met you only five minutes prior.

First-time viewers will notice a lot of similarities between Pacific and Casablanca, from the exotic locations, international intrigue, and Bogart’s performance, right down to his iconic trenchcoat and fedora and even his name. But Pacific actually came out two months before Casablanca. Casablanca‘s the better film, yeah, but the spirit of high adventure is just as good–actually, better.

Huston doesn’t say much about the picture in his autobiography other than he was called away for Army duty right near the end of it, so director Vincent Sherman was called in to finish it. I won’t go into many details, but at the end of it, Bogie’s trapped in an impossible situation, and it was left to Sherman to get him out of it. His solution was haphazard, and Huston said he felt that the picture “lacked credibility” after that point, but that’s all of a scant five minutes, and the action is nevertheless fun.

Okay, finishing up the documentaries this week with two stellar, if unnerving, entries: 1945’s The Battle of San Pietro and 1946’s Let There Be Light. I mentioned last week that Report from the Aleutians came under some scrutiny from the Army, but these two were lucky to have seen the light of day (pun kind of eh, intended).

I recently went through John Huston’s autobiography An Open Book, which provides a lot of details regarding Huston’s troubles with Army censors while making all three of these films, and while I’m going to focus on the films themselves, the stories behind them are almost as compelling.

San Pietro was controversial for its depiction of war, and it was only through the intervention of General George Marshall, who said it’d make a good training film, that it was shown. Let There Be Light wasn’t so lucky.

The Battle of San Pietro depicts the eponymous battle between Allied Forces and the Italian Royal Army and Germany. But the actual battle is not the main focus, just as the Aleutians were not the main focus of Report from the Aleutians or the Mason General Hospital in Let There Be Light is the main focus, as we’ll see. In all three, Huston uses his setting to address a larger theme—the daily life of soldiers; the brutality of battle; the psychological consequences of war.