John Huston, the director who knew exactly what obsession costs and kept paying it anyway

The oxygen tanks arrived on the set of The Dead and nobody pretended they were there for anyone else. John Huston needed them to breathe. He directed from a wheelchair, a portable generator feeding oxygen tubes that trailed across the floor, watching his cast through a video monitor because his emphysema had advanced too far for him to stand at the camera for long. The film was a James Joyce adaptation. The subject was memory, and what the living owe the dead. Huston did not live to see it released.

He was born in 1906 in Nevada, Missouri — a small town his grandfather, a professional gambler, was said to have won in a poker game. The story may be apocryphal, but it has the quality of something Huston would have chosen to be true. He was a sickly child, treated for an enlarged heart and kidney ailments, spending long months in bed in Arizona while his body decided what it wanted to do. What it chose, eventually, was an extraordinary amount of activity: amateur lightweight boxing champion of California by fifteen, fine art painting in Paris in his early twenties, journalism in New York, a stint as an honorary member of the Mexican cavalry. He wrote screenplays before he directed anything. His father, Walter Huston, was one of Hollywood’s reliable character actors — a fact that would become significant later.

His directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon, arrived in 1941 and immediately established the template that would define his best work: morally compromised men pursuing objects of desire through a world that has no intention of rewarding them. Adapted from Dashiell Hammett’s novel and shot in six weeks, it launched Humphrey Bogart as a star. Huston treated it as a puzzle to solve. The puzzle stayed solved for eighty years and counting.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, made seven years later, is the film critics most often reach for when they want to describe what Huston was capable of. He directed it in Mexico, cast his father Walter in a supporting role that won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and took home both the Best Director and Best Screenplay awards himself. The film is about gold fever — about the specific moral collapse that follows when men who have nothing suddenly have everything to lose. Three Hustons had Oscars before any of them left the theater. No other family in Academy history has matched that particular geometry.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) codified the heist film. The African Queen (1951), shot on location in the Belgian Congo and Uganda with Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in conditions that defeated almost everyone else in the production, gave Bogart his only Oscar and gave Huston one of his most unlikely commercial successes — an adventure film that functioned simultaneously as a love story and a character study of two middle-aged people who discover, against their better judgment, that they are capable of heroism. The Misfits (1961), written by Arthur Miller for his wife Marilyn Monroe, became something other than what anyone intended: Clark Gable’s final film, Monroe’s final film, and a requiem for a kind of American masculinity that was already obsolete before filming began.

Huston’s admirers have occasionally overstated his consistency, and the record does not entirely support the most heroic version of his legend. He made The Bible in 1966, a 174-minute prestige production that exhausted its subject and its audience simultaneously. Annie in 1982 was a cheerful mediocrity he directed with the energy of a man completing a contractual obligation. His 1958 film The Barbarian and the Geisha was so poor that John Wayne, the star, publicly attacked it. The gaps between the masterpieces were real gaps. What remains true is that when Huston was engaged — by material he had chosen, locations that demanded something of him — the results carry a quality of conviction that is difficult to manufacture. Fat City (1972), a boxing drama that almost nobody saw on release, is now considered one of his most personal and accomplished works. And his 1946 documentary Let There Be Light, which documented American combat veterans suffering from what we now call PTSD, was so raw, so honest about the psychological costs of the war that had just ended, that the US Army suppressed it for thirty-five years.

He became an Irish citizen in 1964, renouncing his American passport to settle fully into St Clerans, the Georgian manor he had bought and restored in County Galway. He served as Master of Fox Hounds of the Galway Blazers for a decade. He was married five times. He also played Noah Cross in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown — one of cinema’s great screen villains, a man of inexhaustible appetites and absolute confidence in his right to satisfy them. It was not, by most accounts, a great stretch.

The Man Who Would Be King (1975), with Sean Connery and Michael Caine, was the film Huston had wanted to make for decades; Prizzi’s Honor (1985) earned his daughter Anjelica the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, making the Hustons the first family to win Oscars across three generations. The Dead, released months after Huston’s death in August 1987, adapts Joyce’s story of a Dublin dinner party at which an old song, a moment of jealousy, and the memory of a young man who loved once disrupts everything everyone believed about themselves. Huston filmed it with extraordinary restraint. His daughter Anjelica believed he did not think it would be his last film. But it was the right last film — an argument, made quietly and without sentimentality, that some things can only be understood when you have run out of time to look away from them.