“I prefer to think of God as not dead, just drunk.”
A director of rare breadth and impeccable taste, John Huston helmed an impossible number of Hollywood classics: The Maltese Falcon (1941), The African Queen (1951), The Misfits (1961), and at least a dozen more. His father, Walter Huston, was an actor, and Huston initially followed in his footsteps but turned to writing in his twenties, selling two short stories to H. L. Mencken for publication in the American Mercury. He landed a writing contract with Warner Bros. and earned two Oscar nominations for Dr. Erlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) and Sergeant York (1941). His next script, High Sierra (1941)—which launched Humphrey Bogart’s career—convinced Warner Bros. to allow him to direct his first feature, an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), with Bogart as the lead. It proved to be a huge hit, garnering Huston Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Huston went on to direct the majority of his screenplays from that point forward. Against Hollywood tradition, he rarely gave his films happy endings; the journeys his heroes undertook usually ended in failure. He turned to acting in the 1960s, with notable appearances in Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal (1963), for which he received a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). In 1985, at age seventy-nine, Huston became the oldest person to receive a best director nomination, for Prizzi’s Honor—his fifteenth nomination overall.
IT WAS A HANGOVER only a bullet could cure. That’s how John Huston described it. He’d spent the night at Bogart’s house because, during a party that climaxed with a game of indoor football, he’d gotten as drunk as he’d ever been in his life. Now it was morning, late morning, and he was waking up to the sound of Bogart in the other room on the phone. “Yes, Sam, he’s here.”
Sam? Shit. Sam Spiegel. The MGM meeting.
Huston, fresh off Key Largo and the expiration of his contract with Warner Bros., had recently agreed to partner up with German émigré Sam Spiegel to form a production company called Horizon Pictures. Spiegel, an independent producer whose biggest credit in the U.S. thus far was Orson Welles’s The Stranger, had set up a meeting with Louis B. Mayer and other MGM bigwigs to pitch Horizon’s first project: We Were Strangers, a feature-length adaptation of a story by New York Mirror reporter Robert Sylvester. Huston was slated as the writer-director, but in his drunken stupor, had forgotten all about the meeting. Spiegel had spent the entire morning on the phone looking for him before finally striking gold with Bogart.
To save time, Bogart’s driver dropped Huston off at Spiegel’s place, where he quickly showered, shaved, and dressed—in a suit borrowed from the much shorter Spiegel. The sleeves of the jacket rode up to Huston’s elbows. “Sam, I can’t do it!” Huston implored, his head pounding. “I don’t even remember what the hell the story’s about!” But Spiegel convinced him they at least had to show up. It wasn’t wise to stand up Louis Mayer.
Huston was useless during the meeting. Apart from a “How do you do?” at the beginning and a “Good-bye” at the end, he kept his mouth shut, watching Spiegel wing the entire presentation on his own. It was, Huston said, “one of the finest demonstrations of pure animal courage I’ve ever witnessed.” Mayer, however, didn’t see it that way. He found Spiegel too “streetwise” for his taste. Huston, on the other hand—so wrecked he could barely speak—struck him as the sort of calm, cool, and collected gentleman with whom he could do business.
MGM did eventually make an offer on We Were Strangers, but not before Columbia made a better one. Mayer still landed Huston, signing him to a two-picture deal that resulted in The Asphalt Jungle and The Red Badge of Courage. As for Spiegel? As the producer of The African Queen, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia, he and his upstart company did just fine.
John Huston’s Beat the Devil was a total disaster almost from the start. Maybe total disaster is a little strong, since by some miracle nobody actually ended up dead. The film, directed by Huston and featuring Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Peter Lorre, and Gina Lollobrigida was to be shot largely on location in Ravello, Italy, a picturesque mountain village high up on the Amalfi coast.
There were some early warning signs: First, the sexy Italian actress, Lollobrigida, had never been in an English-speaking film before. This, most likely, was because she could barely speak English. Second, traveling into Ravello, the Italian chauffer driving Huston and Bogart got into a car accident. Huston was fine, but Bogart was pitched forward, cracking some teeth and badly gouging his tongue. So even before shooting commenced, the female lead couldn’t speak English and the male lead couldn’t speak at all. And third, to complicate things even further, neither Lollobrigida nor Bogart—nor the rest of the cast—had yet to see any of their lines. Reason being, Huston had thrown a party the weekend before the start of principal photography during which he tore up the entire script. It was a tearing-up-the-script party. Apparently, the original draft, written by Anthony Veiller and Peter Viertal, had run into trouble with the Motion Picture Production Code and besides, nobody liked it much anyway.
At the recommendation of renowned producer David O. Selznick, Huston had flown novelist Truman Capote over to Italy to write the new script on a day-to-day basis, as they shot. It should be noted that Selznick was not officially involved with the film. However, since his wife Jennifer Jones was one of the stars, he was unofficially involved—in a Selznick kind of way. Selznick happened to be one of Hollywood’s most prolific memo writers. After receiving a number of such memos, Huston sent him a three-page reply. Huston numbered the pages one, two, and four. This so that Selzick would spend the rest of production looking for page three. And so the filming of Beat the Devil began.
Capote would work through the night and pages would be handed out to the cast in the morning. Lollobrigida would learn her lines phonetically. Bogart, until his mouth healed, would mime his lines, which would later be dubbed. Conceivably, it could have worked, had only the cast and crew not decided to embark on a bender of legendary proportions. Capote (or “Caposy,” as Bogart had begun to fondly call him) soon began to feel that Bogart and Huston were trying to kill him with their dissipation. He described everyone as “half-drunk all day and dead-drunk all night,” noting that “once, believe it or not, I came around at six in the morning to find King Farouk doing the hula-hula in the middle of Bogart’s bedroom.” It seemed Huston had not created a very productive work environment.
In Yiddish folktales, the Russian city of Chelm is depicted as a city of fools. Jennifer Jones’s character in Beat the Devil was named Mrs. Gwendolen Chelm—an insider’s wink, some believe, at what the production had become. Certainly, Huston seemed self-aware. In an interview years later he would say, “It was a bit of a travesty—we were making fun of ourselves.” Some critics would see the picture as one of the first examples of camp, arguing that Huston and Bogart were hell-bent on parodying the noir classics (The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo) they themselves had crafted. But that didn’t mean the mayhem wasn’t real.
Both Huston and Capote tell a story about Bogart arm wrestling all comers in the lobby of the Hotel Palumbo. He even challenged little “Caposy,” wagering five dollars. Astonishingly, Capote upped it to fifty dollars and then actually beat Bogart rather effortlessly, pushing his arm flat. Everyone was wide-eyed. “I’d like to see you do that just one more time,” Bogart said. Double or nothing, but again Capote pushed his arm down. Then once more, Bogart losing a total $150. Not having it, Bogart started to wrestle around with the writer, whom Huston now considered “a little bulldog of a man.” And here again, Capote somehow managed to trip Bogart, flipping the hard-boiled screen legend onto his ass and in the process hurting Bogart’s elbow so badly they had stop production for three days. “Huston, we have a problem,” to borrow a phrase from the production’s cinematographer, Oswald Morris.
In fact, Morris himself tells another story of being sent to fetch Huston early one morning, only to get a strong whiff of smoke as he approached Huston’s room. It seemed the bottom half of the bedroom door, from the doorknob to the floor, was red-hot ash. The door was cracked open enough for Morris to slip inside, where he found the director crashed out on the bed, empty bottles of Jack Daniel’s, a couple of sooty ashtrays and script pages littering the floor. Apparently, an electric room heater had been pushed too close to the door and was about to set the room ablaze. Morris reached out and shook Huston’s shoulder. “John, it’s Ossie.”
A muffled, “How’s the boy?”
“John, your bedroom door is alight.” Silence. Again, “John, your bedroom door is alight!”
And then, only, “Oh, how I love the smell of burning wood.” As Huston rolled over and went back to sleep.
But in the end the film was finished, and nobody had died. Bogart would go on to The Caine Mutiny and Huston would spend another thirty years directing films. Beat the Devil, however, would be both a commercial and a critical flop. But then over time that, too, would change, and it is now considered something of a cult classic. As for those lines of Bogart’s, the ones to later be dubbed, this was done during post-production at England’s Shepperton Studios. A young British actor was hired to provide Bogart’s voice, a remarkable mimic—his name was Peter Sellers. At last, a professional comedian had come on board.