TCM Schedule for Thursday, June 11 -- Great Directors -- John Huston/Akira Kurasawa

[Staph]

Today's great directors are John Huston, the only person to have ever directed a parent (Walter Huston) and a child (Anjelica Huston) to Academy Award wins, and Akira Kurasawa, the great Japanese director who was infamous for his perfectionism. Among the related tales are his insisting a stream be made to run in the opposite direction in order to get a better visual effect, and having the roof of a house removed, later to be replaced, because he felt the roof's presence to be unattractive in a short sequence filmed from a train. He also required that all the actors in his period films had to wear their costumes for several weeks, daily, before filming so that they would look lived in. Enjoy.


4:00am -- The Sin Of Harold Diddlebock (1950)
When he loses his job, a middle-aged bookkeeper goes out on the town.
Cast: Harold Lloyd, Jimmy Conlin, Raymond Walburn, Rudy Vallee
Dir: Preston Sturges
BW-90 mins, TV-G

Preston Sturges wrote this screenplay in order to entice Harold Lloyd out of retirement. It became Lloyd's last film.


6:00am -- In This Our Life (1942)
A neurotic southerner steals her sister's husband then vies with her for another man.
Cast: Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, George Brent, Dennis Morgan
Dir: John Huston
BW-97 mins, TV-PG

Warner Bros. was named to the Honor Roll of Race Relations of 1942 because of its dignified portrayal of African-Americans in this film. However, scenes in which Ernest Anderson's character was treated in a friendly fashion were cut for showings in the South to avoid offending those viewers. The film was initially disapproved for export by the Office of Censorship in Washington, D.C., because it suggests that the Negro's testimony would be totally disregarded by the jury when it was disputed by a white person, which, in the South at the time and for long afterwards, was true.


7:45am -- The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
A gang of small time crooks plots an elaborate jewel heist.
Cast: Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Jean Hagen, James Whitmore
Dir: John Huston
BW-112 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Sam Jaffe, Best Cinematography, Black-and-White -- Harold Rosson, Best Director -- John Huston, and Best Writing, Screenplay -- Ben Maddow and John Huston

Debut of Strother Martin and Jack Warden.


9:45am -- Annie (1982)
An orphan attracts the attention of a Wall Street tycoon and a con artist.
Cast: Albert Finney, Carol Burnett, Aileen Quinn, Ann Reinking
Dir: Gary Martin
C-127 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for Oscars for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration -- Dale Hennesy and Marvin March, and Best Music, Original Song Score and Its Adaptation or Best Adaptation Score -- Ralph Burns

John Huston's first and last attempt at directing a movie musical.


12:00pm -- Moulin Rouge (1952)
French painter Toulouse-Lautrec fights to find love despite his physical limitations.
Cast: Jose Ferrer, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Suzanne Flon, Claude Nollier
Dir: John Huston
C-119 mins, TV-PG

Won Oscars for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color -- Paul Sheriff and Marcel Vertès, and Best Costume Design, Color -- Marcel Vertès

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- José Ferrer, Best Actress in a Supporting Role -- Colette Marchand, Best Director -- John Huston, Best Film Editing -- Ralph Kemplen, and Best Picture

Tall actor José Ferrer was transformed into the short artist Toulouse-Lautrec by the use of camera angles, makeup, costume, concealed pits and platforms and short body doubles. Ferrer also used a set of special knee pads of his own design which allowed him to walk on his knees with his lower legs strapped to his upper body. He suffered extreme pain and could only use them for short periods of time. The cane he used in most of his scenes was of absolute necessity. This fact was covered in a LIFE magazine story in 1952.


2:00pm -- The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Hard-boiled detective Sam Spade gets caught up in the murderous search for a priceless statue.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Gladys George, Peter Lorre
Dir: John Huston
BW-101 mins, TV-PG

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Sydney Greenstreet, Best Writing, Screenplay -- John Huston, and Best Picture

It was Howard Hawks who knew that John Huston wanted to direct. He suggested that Huston do The Maltese Falcon (1941) which was already owned by Warner Brothers and had been adapted to film twice before. Unlike the previous productions, Hawks suggested that Huston "film the book." Before going on a vacation, John Huston gave his secretary a copy of the book and told her to type it up in screenplay form. Studio chief Jack L. Warner saw the script, read it, and gave it a green light even before John Huston has a chance to read it.


3:45pm -- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Three prospectors fight off bandits and each other after striking-it-rich in the Mexican mountains.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt, Bruce Bennett
Dir: John Huston
BW-126 mins, TV-PG

Won Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role -- Walter Huston, Best Director -- John Huston, and Best Writing, Screenplay -- John Huston

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture

John Huston was fascinated by mysterious author B. Traven, who was a recluse living in Mexico. Traven approved of the director and his screenplay (by letter, obviously), and sent his intimate friend Hal Croves to the location to be a technical advisor and translator for $150 a week. The general consensus is that Croves was in fact Traven, though he always denied this. Huston was happy not to query him on the subject but his then-wife Evelyn Keyes was certain Croves was the mysterious author, believing that he was continually giving himself away, saying "I" when it should have been "he", and using phrases that were exactly the same as those to be found in Traven's letters to Huston. All very ironic, especially considering that Traven was offered $1000 a week to act as technical advisor on the film.


6:00pm -- The African Queen (1951)
A grizzled skipper and a spirited missionary take on the Germans in Africa during World War I.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Robert Morley, Peter Bull
Dir: John Huston
C-105 mins, TV-PG

Won an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role -- Humphrey Bogart

Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role -- Katharine Hepburn, Best Director -- John Huston, and Best Writing, Screenplay -- James Agee and John Huston

According to cameraman Jack Cardiff, Katharine Hepburn was so sick with dysentery during the shooting of the church scene where she played the organ, a bucket had to be placed off camera because she had to throw up constantly in-between takes. Cardiff referred to her as being "a real trooper" because she kept working nonetheless. Hepburn herself described the incident in her book "The Making of The African Queen" (1987) more reluctantly yet more adventurously: She rushed for the outhouse only to find a black mamba inside, therefore had to retreat to the trees.


What's On Tonight: GREAT DIRECTORS: AKIRA KUROSAWA


8:00pm -- Seven Samurai (aka Shichinin no samurai) (1954)
Japanese villagers hire a team of traveling samurai to defend them against a bandit attack.
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Kuninori Kodo, Yoshio Inaba
Dir: Akira Kurosawa
BW-207 mins, TV-14

Nominated for Oscars for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White -- So Matsuyama, and Best Costume Design, Black-and-White -- Kôhei Ezaki

Akira Kurosawa's original idea for the film was to make it about a day in the life of a samurai, beginning with him rising from bed and ending with him making some mistake that required him to kill himself to save face. Despite a good deal of research, he did not feel he had enough solid factual information to make the movie, but came across an anecdote about a village hiring samurai to protect them and decided to use that idea. Kurosawa wrote a complete dossier for each character with a speaking role. In it were details about what they wore, their favorite foods, their past history, their speaking habits and every other detail he could think of about them. No other Japanese director had ever done this before.


11:30pm -- Kagemusha (aka The Shadow Warrior) (1980)
Japanese clansmen force a poor thief to impersonate their dead warlord.
Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Kenichi Hagiwara, Kota Yui
Dir: Akira Kurosawa
C-180 mins

Nominated for Oscars for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration -- Yoshirô Muraki, and Best Foreign Language Film -- Japan

When Toho Studios couldn't fulfill the budget demands of the film, American film directors George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola helped Akira Kurosawa by convincing 20th Century-Fox (still riding high after the success of Lucas' Star Wars (1977)) to fund the remaining portion of the budget in exchange for Kagemusha's international distribution rights.


2:45am -- Red Beard (aka Akahige) (1965)
A tough doctor takes a young intern under his wing.
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Yuzo Kayama, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Terumi Niki
Dir: Akira Kurosawa
BW-185 mins, TV-MA

This movie marked the end of Akira Kurosawa's collaboration with Toshirô Mifune.

[Staph]

1. Profiles of John Huston and Akira Kurasawa

John Huston Profile

In The Man Who Would Be King (1975), co-written and directed by John Huston, two rogues, Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine) and Daniel Dravot (Sean Connery), desert their British army post in India in the 1880s to go adventuring. In a retrospective voice-over, Peachy fondly remembers their encounters with native tribesmen: "At night, we told them stories of our own devising, and they loved them, because we showed them that their dreams could come true."

In the years immediately preceding his death in 1987, John Huston's critical reputation as one of America's leading directors was reestablished with the twin success of Prizzi's Honor (1985) and The Dead (1987). But it is his earlier films, especially The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The African Queen (1951) and The Maltese Falcon (1941) which will ultimately be responsible for Huston's place in film history as a teller of imaginative tales of enchantment, quest and loss.

The son of noted stage and screen actor Walter Huston (who would win an Oscar for his role in his son's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), John Huston was a juvenile actor on the vaudeville circuit, a champion boxer, a painter, a leading man on the legitimate stage, a writer and reporter and even a lieutenant in the Mexican cavalry. After an abortive career as a screenwriter in the early 1930s, Huston returned to Hollywood later in the decade and achieved great renown with his contributions to six screenplays written under contract at Warner Bros., including Jezebel (1938), High Sierra (1941) and Sergeant York (1941). Even after he became a director, Huston would continue to contribute substantially to the screenplays of all his films.

Huston made a stunning debut as a director with The Maltese Falcon. One of the first examples of film noir, this stylistically assured feature revealed his interests in ironic comedy and the motif of the unresolved quest. The Maltese Falcon is one of the most influential and enjoyable of the cinema's masterworks.

Huston's wartime filmmaking experiences for the signal corps resulted in equally groundbreaking documentary work, including The Battle of San Pietro (1945) and Let There Be Light (1945), the latter an account of psychological dysfunction among American G.I.s which federal authorities withheld from release for many years.

Between 1948 and 1952, Huston produced a succession of important films. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre refined the Huston theme of the quest into an archetype and cemented his critical reputation, largely thanks to a series of reviews and articles by James Agee--who would later write the screenplay for The African Queen. The Asphalt Jungle (1950) proved Huston's ability to manipulate simultaneously a variety of characters and stories; the film's sharply drawn milieu and unusual sympathy for its criminal protagonists mark it as among Huston's most compelling works. The Red Badge of Courage (1951) began Huston's identification as an adapter of literary classics. This film also marked the first of several visually stylized features which Huston based on specific visual sources. The Red Badge took its groupings of figures and sun-bleached tones from Mathew Brady's daguerreotypes of the Civil War; the compositions in Moby Dick (1956) emulate scrimshaw carvings from the whaling days it depicts; and Moulin Rouge (1952) utilizes a color scheme based on Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings, which are themselves an important part of the film's narrative. This period of maturity and experimentation also saw the production of The African Queen, an essentially two-character film which underscored Huston's deft control of actors.

Beginning with the disappointing reception accorded his offbeat comic thriller Beat the Devil (1953), Huston's reputation suffered a series of setbacks over the next 20 years. A tumultuous personal life mirrored this decline, but Huston continued his dedication to literary adaptations. In 1963, with Otto Preminger's The Cardinal, Huston began an acting career, appearing in his own and others' films. He provided narration for a multitude of TV shows and documentary films, and appearances in public service campaigns and his outspoken opposition to colorization gained him further public recognition. By the time of his death, Huston's craggy, beautifully ugly face and melodious baritone voice made him one of the few directors of his era as familiar to his public as any of his stars.

Fat City (1972), a sorrowful story of the ebbing fortunes of a washed-up boxer, marked the start of Huston's comeback in the critical community. The Man Who Would Be King, originally planned more than 20 years previous as a vehicle for Bogart and Gable, remains Huston's most fully realized quest narrative. Wise Blood (1979), a compelling piece of Southern Gothic based on Flannery O'Connor's novel, similarly represents one of Huston's greatest achievements as an adapter of literature. After the disasters of Escape to Victory (1981) and Annie (1982), Huston scored another triumph with Prizzi's Honor, a grim but somehow hilarious and touching comedy of love among mobsters. The film won a supporting actress Oscar for Huston's daughter Anjelica, mirroring father Walter's win for Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Huston's final completed film was The Dead (1987), another long-cherished literary adaptation, of James Joyce's short story. Huston's son Tony adapted the story and Anjelica was featured in the cast. At the time of his death, he was involved in the production of Mr. North (1988) as writer and producer, with his son Danny directing.

Information supplied by TCMdb


Akira Kurosawa Profile

Akira Kurosawa is unquestionably the best known Japanese filmmaker in the West. This can perhaps be best explained by the fact that he is not so much a Japanese or a Western filmmaker, but that he is a modern filmmaker. Like postwar Japan itself, he combines the ancient traditions with a distinctly modern, Western twist.

Kurosawa got his start in films following an education which included study of Western painting, literature and political philosophy. His early films were made under the stringent auspices of the militaristic government then in power and busily engaged in waging the Pacific war. While one can detect aspects of the pro-war ideology in early works like The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (1945) or, more especially, Sanshiro Sugata (1943), these films are notable more for stylistic experimentation than pro-war inspiration.

Before he had a chance to mature under these conditions, though, Kurosawa, like all of Japan, experienced the American occupation. Under its auspices he produced pro-democracy films, the most appealing of which is No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), interestingly his only film which has a woman as its primary protagonist. His ability to make films that could please Japanese militarists or American occupiers should not be taken as either cultural schizophrenia or political fence-sitting, for at their best these early films have a minimal value as propaganda, and tend to reveal early glimpses of the major themes which would dominate his cinema. His style, too, is an amalgam, a deft dialectic of the great pictorial traditions of the silent cinema, the dynamism of the Soviet cinema (perhaps embodied in the Japanese-Russian friendship dramatized in his Dersu Uzala 1975) and the Golden Age of Hollywood filmmaking (which explains how easily his work has been remade by American directors).

Above all, Kurosawa is a modern filmmaker, portraying (in films from Drunken Angel 1948 to Rhapsody in August 1991) the ethical and metaphysical dilemmas characteristic of postwar culture, the world of the atomic bomb, which has rendered certainty and dogma absurd. The consistency at the heart of Kurosawa's work is his exploration of the concept of heroism. Whether portraying the world of the wandering swordsman, the intrepid policeman or the civil servant, Kurosawa focuses on men faced with ethical and moral choices. The choice of action suggests that Kurosawa's heroes share the same dilemma as Albert Camus' existential protagonists--Kurosawa did adapt Dostoevsky's existential novel The Idiot in 1951 and saw the novelist as a key influence in all his work--but for Kurosawa the choice is to act morally, to work for the betterment of one's fellow men.

Perhaps because Kurosawa experienced the twin devastations of the great Kanto earthquake of 1923 and WWII, his cinema focuses on times of chaos. From the destruction of the glorious Heian court society that surrounds the world of Rashomon (1950) to the never-ending destruction of the civil war era of the 16th century that gives The Seven Samurai (1954) its dramatic impetus, to the savaged Tokyo in the wake of US bombing raids in Drunken Angel (1948), to the ravages of the modern bureaucratic mind-set that pervade Ikiru (1952) and The Bad Sleep Well (1960): Kurosawa's characters are situated in periods of metaphysical eruption, threatened equally by moral destruction and physical annihilation; in a world of existential alienation in which God is dead and nothing is certain. But it is his hero who, living in a world of moral chaos, in a vacuum of ethical and behavioral standards, nevertheless chooses to act for the public good.

Kurosawa was dubbed "Japan's most Western director" by critic Donald Richie at a time when few Westerners had seen many of the director's films and at a time when the director was in what should have been merely the middle of his career. Richie felt that Kurosawa was Western in the sense of being an original creator, as distinct from doing the more rigidly generic or formulaic work of many Japanese directors during the height of Kurosawa's creativity. And indeed some of the director's best work can be read as sui generis, drawing upon individual genius such as few filmmakers in the history of world cinema have. Rashomon, Ikiru and Record of a Living Being (1955) challenge easy classification and are stunning in their originality of style, theme and setting.

Furthermore, Kurosawa's attractions to the West were apparent in both content and form. His adaptations from Western literature, although not unique in Japanese cinema, are among his finest films, with Throne of Blood (1957, from Macbeth) and Ran (1985, from King Lear) standing among the finest versions of Shakespeare ever put on film. And if Western high culture obviously appealed to him, so did more popular, even pulp forms, as evinced by critically acclaimed adaptations of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest to fashion Yojimbo (1961) and Ed McBain's King's Ransom to create the masterful High and Low (1962). Of course such borrowings show not only the richness of Kurosawa's thinking and his work but also just how notions of "genius" require a complex understanding of the contexts in which the artist works.

Indeed, for all of the Western adaptations and the attraction to Hollywood and Soviet-style montage, Kurosawa's status as a Japanese filmmaker can never be doubted. If, as has often been remarked, his period films have similarities with Hollywood westerns, they are nevertheless accurately drawn from the turmoil of Japanese history. If he has been attracted to Shakespearean theater, he has equally been drawn to the rarefied world of Japanese Noh drama. And if Kurosawa is a master of dynamic montage, he is equally the master of the Japanese trademarks of the long take and gracefully mobile camera.

Thus to see Kurosawa as somehow a "Western" filmmaker is not only to ignore the traditional bases for much of his style and many of his themes, but to do a disservice to the nature of film style and culture across national boundaries. Kurosawa's cinema may be taken as paradigmatic of the nature of modern changing Japan, of how influences from abroad are adapted, transformed and made new by the genius of the Japanese national character, which remains distinctive yet ever-changing. And if Kurosawa tends to focus on an individual hero, a man forced to choose a mode of behavior and a pattern of action in the modern Western tradition of the loner-hero, it is only in recognition of global culture that increasingly centralizes, bureaucratizes and dehumanizes.

Information supplied by TCMdb

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