Tuesday Minute
No. 13 | January 19, 2010

It Runs in the Family

Our theme this week
Families with three (or more) generations of film actors

Featured this week
Monday         —   The Fondas

The Hustons

The essentials
First Generation:  Walter
Second Generation:  John
Third Generation:  Anjelica, Danny

If Walter Huston had never done anything else, he’d still be remembered for that jig on a Mexican hillside in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).  But more he did.  A stage actor from Canada, he was in his forties when he went to Hollywood, soon after the first talkies were made.  He appeared in more than 50 movies before he died in 1950.  Some of his memorable roles were in Dodsworth (1937), The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and the classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, directed by his son, John.  He received Oscar nominations for each of those four performances, including a well-deserved win for the last (“I know what gold does to men’s souls”).

John Huston is best known as a director, one of the greats.  Most of his credits in the ’30s were for writing.  He made his directorial debut a memorable one, the classic adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon (1941).  The film featured a cast for the ages and was one of six movies that Huston made with Humphrey Bogart.  A few of Huston’s other films include Key Largo (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The African Queen (1951), Moby Dick (1956), The Misfits (1961), Fat City (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and The Dead (1987).  He directed both his father and his daughter in Oscar-winning performances—Walter for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Anjelica for Prizzi’s Honor (1985).  John won Oscars for writing and directing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and the Hustons are the only family with three generations of Oscar winners.  John Huston acted too, with memorable performances in Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal (1961) (he was nominated for an Oscar), as the corrupt Noah Cross in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1975), and in his own Wise Blood (1979).

Anjelica Huston has starred in a number of films with Jack Nicholson, with whom she had a long relationship.  They include the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), Prizzi’s Honor, and Sean Penn’s The Crossing Guard (1995).  She gave terrific performances in The Dead and The Grifters (1991), and got one of her three Oscar nominations for Enemies:  A Love Story (1989).  Huston’s most popular role may have been Morticia in The Addams Family (1991) and its sequel.  She’s made three films with director Wes Anderson:  The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), and The Darjeeling Limited (2007).  Like her father, she has directed (Agnes Browne, 1999).

Half-brother to Anjelica, Danny is perhaps the most active of the Huston clan currently.  He started as a director, then moved in front of the camera.  He’s appeared in a number of notable films, including Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003), the screen version of John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener (2005), and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006).  He took over the role of William Stryker in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), and costars in the thriller Edge of Darkness, opening this month.

Beyond the final credits
Walter Huston starred in the 1938 Broadway musical Knickerbocker Holiday.  When taking the role, Huston asked that he be given a solo.  Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson agreed, and they composed “September Song” for the character of Governor Pieter Stuyvesant.  The show closed after six months, but ”September Song” went on to became a standard.  Huston’s recording became a hit years later, after it was used in the 1950 film September Affair.  The song has been recorded by many others, including Bing Crosby, Ezio Pinza, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Jimmy Durante, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Lou Reed, and Ian McCulloch of Echo & the Bunnymen.

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Chinatown (1924)
John Huston, Jack Nicholson

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MAD FilmFest 101 Hint:
I had a hint for you about those characters with amnesia, but it seems to have slipped my mind…well, anyway, three of their five films start with the same letter.

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Point of View
“It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented.  They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.”
— Andy Warhol

…58…59…60.