John Huston was born in Nevada, Missouri, in 1906. Son of the actor Walter Houston, John survived a sickly youth (enlarged heart and kidney problems) to become a professional boxer and rise to the top rank in California only to have his career ended in 1921 by a badly broken nose during a fight. Huston them dabbled in painting, horseback riding, opera and finally began to follow in his father's footsteps by accepting minor acting roles in off-Broadway productions.
A career detour to Mexico found Huston teaching horsemanship and becoming an honorary member of the Mexican cavalry. On the side he began writing and authored a play called "Frankie and Johnny". It quickly sold. This encouraged him and soon he was back in California working as a script editor for Samuel Goldwyn Productions. After a number of personal misadventures, he then went to work for Warner Brothers Studio as a script writer, co-authoring scripts for a number of major pictures including Sergeant York. The success of this film and an Academy Award nomination provided leverage for Huston to request and get a chance to direct a film on the condition that his next script become a hit. With that incentive he wrote High Sierra which became a resounding success under the direction of Raoul Walsh and made a star of the little know actor (at that time), Humphrey Bogart.
In his directorial debut in 1941, Huston work on a Dashiell Hammett detective story, The Maltese Falcon. This was a risk as two previous movie versions of this novel had been box office failures, so Warner was taking a gamble on Huston's ability to avoid the problems that plagued the previous versions. The bet paid off with Huston sticking close to the novel, keeping much of the dialogue, tightly...
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...nations. His films were visually magnetic, tight and directed economically in such a way that little was ever left on the cutting room floor. John Houston left us with a rich heritage of films that will continue to entertain for generations to come.
Works Cited
"John Huston--Biography." IMDb. IMDb.com, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001379/bio, Web. 21 June 2014.
"John Huston." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Huston, 07 June 2014. Web. 22 June 2014.
"John Huston." TCM. TCM.com, http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/person/510041%7C86038/John-Huston/ Web. 21 June 2014.
"The African Queen (film)." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_African_Queen, 07 June 2014. Web. 22 June 2014.
"The Maltese Falcon (1941 Film)." TCM. TCM.com, http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/person/510291%7C86058/Maltese-Falcon/ Web. 21 June 2014
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born in 1894. He wrote the play in 1945 and set it in 1912 because he
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