John Huston

With enough similarities and differences to make each film stand apart in their own right, Robert Siodmak’s version of “The Killers” is better in almost every way.

Key Largo is both pulpy and thought provoking. The obvious allusions to sexual and physical abuse, the overt racism demonstrated towards Native Americans (one of the odder inclusions to the story), the misogyny, all of these are balanced out by an intelligently woven battle between two wildly different personalities. True enough, Maltese Falcon and Asphalt Jungle have a greater sense of style about them and in that sense Key Largo might be considered a ‘lesser’ film, but lesser John Huston is plenty better than most other films in any event.

Film noir comes full circle in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). Thirty years before its release, crime dramas saw the birth of a fundamental character – the noir hero. From Dashiell Hammett to Raymond Chandler, The Maltese Falcon (1941) to The Big Sleep (1946), the noir hero inhabits a world of hopelessness and dark tragedy. The Maltese Falcon saw Humphrey Bogart’s inaugural portrayal of this amoral anti-hero and began film noir as we know it.

The Friday Noir column has been tugging along at a steady pace for well over a year at this point. After being privy to so many double-crosses, back stabbings, bleak outlooks and cynical one-liners, it feels like the right time to shine some proverbial light on the sinister world of film noir. What follows is …

Will Eisner did more than any other creator to alter the public’s perception of comics during the 1970s and 1980s. By coining, or, at the very least, popularizing, the terms “graphic novel” and “sequential art”, Eisner helped to lead the medium out of the wilderness of the subcultural trash heap and across the Red Sea …

The Treasure of Sierra Madre Directed John Huston Written by John Huston U.S.A., 1948 Gordon Gekko, the central figure of Oliver Stone’s famous Wall Street, once uttered the phrase ‘Greed is good.’ That same individual was, understandably, also that film’s antagonist. To willfully adhere to the aforementioned philosophy is one thing, yet the reality of …

The Maltese Falcon Directed by John Huston Written by John Huston U.S.A, 1941 It has often been written and said that John Huston’s 1941 classic, The Maltese Falcon, brought it in the era of film noir, or that it is the definitive entry within the genre. The origins of the genre and where Huston’s picture …