Product Details

• Actors: Robert Mitchum, Lauren Bacall, Paul Newman, Evelyn Keyes, Arthur Miller
• Directors: Frank Martin
• Writers: Frank Martin, Charles Degelman
• Producers: Craig Byrd, David Ganz, Joni Levin, Judith Ganz
• Format: NTSC
• Studio: TURNER HOME ENTERTAINMENT
• Run Time: 126 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: 6301449029
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #346,512 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Robert Mitchum hosts this portrait of one of Hollywood's most colorful and eccentric directors, John Huston: former amateur boxing champion, honorary member of the Mexican cavalry, writer, and Hollywood's most inconsistent Great (with a capital G) director. Through film clips, interviews with former collaborators, ex-wives, and children, and rare on-set, behind-the-scenes, and home-movie footage, we follow Huston from his legendary directorial debut The Maltese Falcon through his final film, the delicate and devastating The Dead. Paul Newman calls him "an eccentric's eccentric," and there's no doubt Huston was a character, a scrappy, hard drinking figure of Hemingway-esque proportions who gambled and hunted (for decades he was the "master of the hunt" on his Irish estate) with the same passion that drove his best films. Director Frank Rich grapples with a tension between Huston the tough-guy and intemperate storyteller whose career is peppered with indifferent and just plain bad films and the thoughtful director of 40 years of Hollywood classics (The African Queen, The Man Who Would Be King) and uncompromising masterpieces (Let There Be Light, Fat City). When all is said and done, and witnesses from Lauren Bacall and ex-wife Evelyn Keyes to Arthur Miller and Michael Caine have their say, the accumulation of contradictions paint a fascinating portrait of a man that could have been a character in one of his own movies: a dreamer of epic proportions. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Artists. Troubled Souls., November 27, 2010

By 

Brad Baker (Atherton, Ca United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: John Huston [VHS] (VHS Tape)

In 1989, Turner Home Entertainment released this two-hour documentary on the life of legendary Hollywood director John Huston. A biting, honest report, it contains rare, behind-the-scenes footage exposing an artist's talents and the demons that drove him. In one 16mm sequence, John is seen at a Hollywood party, arms draped around an unknown friend, as he liberally swigs from a bottle of whiskey. John Huston's life was almost as colorful as any one of his 40 films. Huston was born in Missouri, in 1906, and spent a generally wayward youth, after his parents divorced when he was seven years old. He was then raised by his mother. His famous father was Broadway/film actor Walter Huston, whom John directed in two movies. John Huston was restless; his early years saw him as a Broadway actor, an amateur boxer, a cavalry officer in Mexico, and a damn good painter. But John wanted to write, and he landed in Hollywood, in 1932, writing dialogue for, among others, Universal's "Murders in the Rue Morgue". John bounced around. By 1940, he was writing screenplays at Warner Bros., and somehow, he was trusted to direct Warners' 1941 b-picture, "The Maltese Falcon", a huge hit; making a star of Humphrey Bogart, and a director of John Huston. The documentary includes several scenes from his World War II documentary, the excellent "Let There Be Light"; an expose of injured American soldiers(some mentally), which was banned by the State Department until 1980. In later years, John continued directing, and also acted in films. He appeared in Orson Welles "The Other Side of the Wind", playing a movie director. This film was never finished, or released, but clips from it are available. Photos, home-movies, and film clips reveal John's gambling, drinking, carousing, and other events that resulted in five marriages and four children. Details come from interviews with Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, and Evelyn Keyes, an ex-wife. Behind the director of the classics "The Asphalt Jungle" and "Moulin Rouge" was a great artist, and indeed, a complex, troubled soul. "John Huston The Man" is only available on VHS tape, but it can be found as an extra on the 2003 DVD of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre". The documentary is also available on the 2010 Blue-ray release of the same title.