10. Lillian Ross

“The style of the Huston pictures, Huston being one of the few Hollywood directors who manage to leave their personal mark on the films they make, was the style of the man.” -Lillian Ross

Andrew Sarris, for one, might disagree. The pioneering film critic and American popularizer of the auteur theory is having none of John Marcellus Huston. The auteur theory sought to rescue Hollywood directors of the studio era from the ranks of anonymous industrial laborers by locating a signature style and vision across their body of work and, for Sarris, Huston simply didn’t have it. In his classic 1968 study, The American Cinema, in which he groups Hollywood directors by tiers, Sarris famously damns the Maltese Falcon director to the “Less than Meets the Eye” category, noting, contra Ross, that “Even in his palmier days, Huston displayed his material without projecting his personality. His technique has always been evasive, his camera often pitched at a standoffish angle away from the heart of the action.”

In real life, though, it seems, Huston was pure personality, a strutting, hypermasculine man’s man who was perfectly at ease with all manner of people and whom one of the stunt men working on one of his films describes as “all guy” in Lillian Ross’s 1952 book Picture. He was a less sinister version of the flamboyant villain Noah Cross he played in Chinatown, a less stereotypical version of Clint Eastwood’s macho “John Wilson,” the thinly disguised Huston stand-in from White Hunter Black Heart. He certainly makes a vivid impression in Picture, Ross’ book-length account of the shooting and subsequent studio re-editing of Huston’s doomed version of The Red Badge of Courage. Early in the book, Ross observes Huston lighting a cigarette by scraping a match on his thumbnail and then smoking while looking out the window as the sun sets. It is, she thinks, just like a shot from one of his movies, and concludes “he was simply the raw material of his own art, that is, the man whose personality left its imprint, unmistakably, on what had come to be known as a Huston picture.”

Whether or not this famous personality comes through in his movies as vividly as it does in Picture may have to remain an unsettled question between Ross and Sarris (and Sarris does find some consistencies throughout Huston’s body of work, mostly having to do with his themes and his sense of defeatism), but it’s part of a once-lively debate. For Sarris, writing in 1968, it was easy enough to see the works of contemporary directors like Godard, Fellini, and Antonioni as auterist statements, but what about those American directors who had toiled under the now-defunct studio system? Echoing the concerns of earlier French film theorists, Sarris’ gestures were, in their way, heroic, rescuing the individual from the faceless factory system that aimed to squelch personality and any hint of art in equal measure.

But they were also a little silly. The image of a great man (they were almost always men) leaving his mark on a would-be anonymous product through sheer force of personality hasn’t exactly dated well. And furthermore, such an approach downplays the many contributors (screenwriters in particular) that played such an important part in what was always a highly collaborative process. Of course, many writers have taken issue with this exclusive focus on directors, most notably Thomas Schatz, in his widely-cited study of Hollywood’s Golden Age, The Genius of the System, but the auterist attitude still continues to hold sway in the film crit world. It was certainly the basis of my way of thinking during the half decade I worked as a movie reviewer.

In the end, Picture both confirms and denies the importance of auterism. John Huston sets out to make the movie he wants to make, a passion project of sorts, and although the studio head, Louis B. Mayer, hates the idea, Huston has enough clout to get the green light. He shoots what everyone seems to agree is an unconventional but highly effective war picture, but when test audiences hate it, the film is completely recut and narration is added, all of which is done when Huston is no longer working on the project, when he is off in Africa shooting another movie. On the one hand, then, the film is truly a studio product, subject to whatever butchering the executives deemed necessary. On the other hand, this butchery points up the importance of Huston’s vision. The film was pure and focused when he directed it; it only became the more conventional product, one that few people seemed much to like, after his involvement ended. No one should applaud that type of studio meddling. But nor should anyone be deluded into the cult of personality that ignores the influence of the Louis B. Mayers, the Dore Scharys, the Nicholas Schenks—or that of a legion of semi-anonymous screenwriters—on the final outcome of so many classic Hollywood films. On both counts, Lillian Ross sets the record straight.