The Treasures of John Huston

John Huston didn't just direct his movies, he lived them. For five decades as writer, director and actor, he infused his adventurous, go-for-broke spirit into his work. In this course, we take a deep dive exploring five of Huston’s unrivaled cinematic treasures, analyzing his films as a master class in the art of filmmaking, and discussing his little-known challenges behind the camera directing Hollywood’s biggest stars. In his first film as director, The Maltese Falcon (1941), Huston fashions the ultimate film noir with his close friend, Humphrey Bogart. It’s a masterwork which, like the precious falcon itself, is “the stuff that dreams are made of.” The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) won Huston Oscars both for writing and directing, plus one for his actor father, Walter, playing a wily prospector. Humphrey Bogart, acting against type, portrays a character driven by greed into madness. In Key Largo (1948), set in a hurricane-lashed Florida hotel, Bogart and Bacall appear in their last film together—pitted against mobster Edward G. Robinson in an intense duel of good against evil. The African Queen (1951), the only movie Bogart and Katharine Hepburn ever made together, was a production nightmare shot on a disease-infested African location. Hepburn called the filming “a cross between purgatory and paradise.” Critics called it a masterpiece. Huston shot Prizzi’s Honor (1985) while on oxygen at age 78. Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner play rival assassins who fall in love and are then hired to kill each other in this dark comedy that earned Huston's daughter, Anjelica, an Oscar.