A Certain Autonomy: Music in the Films of John Huston

John Huston was an American actor, director, and screenwriter, who became one of the world’s most influential filmmakers. Born in Missouri to Rhea Huston, a sports editor, and Walter Huston, a vaudeville actor and eventual film star, Huston spent his early years as an artist, author, reporter, soldier, and amateur boxer. He started out in Hollywood as a screenwriter for Samuel Goldwyn at Universal Studios, and later for Warner Bros. At Warner Bros., he helped to launch Humphrey Bogart’s career with High Sierra (1941). A string of successful scripts gained him his first directing job with Maltese Falcon (1941), a film that would thrust Huston into the limelight. In total, his career spanned over five decades, earned him fifteen Oscar nominations and two Academy awards, a Golden Globe, and several lifetime achievement awards. Huston worked in multiple genres, including comedies, war films, musicals, Westerns, adventures, and literary adaptations. His most pronounced role, however, likely involved his development of the modernist film noir, writing and directing several classics of the genre, including Key Largo (1948) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Many of these films call into question traditional forms of authority, religious faith, and epistemology, and focus on protagonists who wander the world on a journey to define their own values.

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Hollywood Dubliners become personal: Joyce’s Gabriel morphs to John Huston in The Dead

Cogent Arts and Humanities ◽

10.1080/23311983.2020.1848754 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

pp. 1848754

Author(s):

Azra Ghandeharion ◽

Roya Abbaszadeh

Keyword(s):

John Huston ◽

The Dead

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Review: Freud by John Huston

Film Quarterly ◽

10.2307/3185959 ◽

1963 ◽

Vol 16 (4) ◽

pp. 50-51

Author(s):

Ernest Callenbach ◽

Wolfgang Reinhardt

Keyword(s):

John Huston

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Rewriting Moby-Dick: Politics, Textual Identity, and the Revision Narrative

PMLA ◽

10.1632/pmla.2010.125.4.1043 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 125 (4) ◽

pp. 1043-1060 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

John Bryant

Keyword(s):

Digital Humanities ◽

Cultural Criticism ◽

First Century ◽

Revision Process ◽

Moby Dick ◽

John Huston ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

Revision Sequences ◽

The Way

The study of textual evolution, or revision as a textual phenomenon, requires a form of fluid-text editing that not only gives readers access to the textual identities that constitute the versions of a work but also makes the revision process witnessable by generating revision sequences and revision narratives for every revision event. Traditional editorial approaches that mix versions in the editing of a work compromise the integrity of textual identities, and the problem of mixing versions is demonstrated in three examples of the way editors and critics (in the context of orientalist and colonialist discourses) have changed the text of, or rewritten, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: Edward Said's mistaking John Huston and Ray Bradbury's film ending for Melville's, the British expurgations that modulate Queequeg's homosexuality to preclude the idea of homosexual domesticity and marriage, and the British editors' conversion of Queequeg's Christianity (and modern editors' perpetuation of the unwanted conversion). These historical and modern cases show that readers, sometimes despite themselves, revise texts materially in ways that mirror their desire and the ways of power. Editing the rewriting of a text like Moby-Dick in a digital critical archive would preserve all versions and generate revision narratives that textualize the otherwise invisible dynamics of revision in a culture. With its capacity to edit fluid texts, digital humanities scholarship is well situated to expand the discourse on the dynamics of textual evolution into the literary and cultural criticism of the twenty-first century.

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