The films of John Huston have few similarities between them save for broad, humanistic themes common to the literary works Huston often chose to adapt for screen. As he once said, directing a film was 'simply an extension of the process of writing,' thus he stuck to no single genre, something that has irritated auteurists and critics alike. Exasperated with the inability to neatly categorize Huston's oeuvre, Francois Truffaut wrote, 'Will John Huston always be no more than an amateur?' while Andrew Sarris spent several pages in his The American Cinema accusing the director of everything from 'middle-brow banality' to laughing at his own jokes while directing a scene.

Sarris, however, notes one unifying theme in Huston's filmography: Protagonists who set out to realize a dream, yet never manage to achieve it. Sarris, however, overstates his case when he claims Huston's protagonists were never at fault for their own failures. From The Maltese Falcon (1941) to In This Our Life (1942) to Under the Volcano (1984), nearly every character in a Huston film, from hero to supporting player, is a complicated and fascinating mix of charisma, deception, charm and rot, and when they inevitably fail to achieve their dreams, we feel some measure of sympathy, often despite ourselves.

Because Huston finessed these relatively faithful adaptations into such crowd-pleasing entertainment, the subtle complications within the plot are often difficult to suss out, subsumed under Huston's trademark violence, adventure and melodrama. One of the most striking of these subtle themes is the consistent use of the police force as the representation of the sociocultural status quo. The police are rarely benign agents of law and order in a Huston film, especially in his early filmography. Instead, they are harbingers of disarray, the personifications of a reality that intrudes on the tiny, uneasy, isolated cultures the characters have formed by necessity as they scrabbled their way toward a common goal.

Characters representing law enforcement in a Huston film aren't deployed simply to examine the status quo, but criticize it as well. A prime example can be found in what most consider to be Huston's most classically noir film, The Asphalt Jungle (1950). In Jungle, we make the acquaintance of two policemen, one a bombastic self-promoter and the other a corrupt cop. When the police commissioner should be leading his men and informing the public, he instead engages in hyperbole and outright lies which, consciously or not, elevate his political status. The corrupt cop, meanwhile, may have been willing to lie down with dogs, but it's not lost on the audience that as a policeman, he has enough power to rid himself of the fleas.

This examination of the law used for left-handed means was evident even in Huston's inaugural film, The Maltese Falcon. Generally considered the first of the classic Hollywood film noir cycle, Falcon is a detective story with a crime thriller feel, and a delightfully faithful adaptation of the Dashiell Hammett novel on which it was based. The Maltese Falcon was intended as a B-movie by Warner Bros., the studio that had made the film twice before: First in 1930, as a nasty little pre-Code starring Roberto Cortez, then as Satan Met a Lady (1936), a frothy crime caper-romance starring Bette Davis. When John Huston, a long-time screenwriter and son of celebrated actor Walter Huston, finally got his opportunity to direct, the studio wasn't expecting much. The film was a critical and commercial success, however, and became one of the most heavily-promoted B movies ever released by Warners.

As sinister and grungy as the original Maltese Falcon had been, Huston's 1941 version is even more cynical, the characters full of a casual cruelty toward each other, and often toward themselves. When the beautiful Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) arrives at the detective office of Archer and Spade, she tells a pitiful story that Archer, a wolf if ever there was one, falls for immediately. When Archer ends up dead that very night, his partner Sam (Humphrey Bogart) investigates, learning that Brigid is mixed up with a group of competitors-slash-compadres looking for a priceless and fabled falcon statue.


(Huston along with Maltese Falcon players Peter Lorre, Mary Astor & Humphrey Bogart)
These misfits searching for the Falcon are a chilly ensemble, people with greed and self-preservation where their emotions should be. Though Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) seems to possess an unwavering composure, Brigid notably breaks hers, just once, in a moment that's hilarious but easy to miss: Soon after the cops arrive to question Sam, we see Brigid from a distance, back to the camera, so angry she has briefly dropped her quavery-voiced starlet persona in favor of a heavy New York growl as she kicks Cairo in the shins.

The most composed member of this group is Kaspar Gutman, portrayed in a marvelous performance by Sydney Greenstreet. His cold-blooded pronouncements about the Falcon -- and, it should be noted, his gunsel Wilmer -- are tempered by a practiced geniality; his Gutman has the smoothest of sinister intents. The breezy detachment so easy for everyone involved to turn on and off at whim make the final scene of the film such a shock. It's frightening, probably the only truly frightening moment in the film, when the otherwise rock solid Sam Spade begins to tremble, his eyes watery with fear and loss, as he tells Brigid that much of his strength has been pretense, and he has to send her up the river, even if it rips him apart.

It's no coincidence that the breakdown of Sam's defenses comes after the police, merely annoying in their first brief interruptions, have finally forced their way into this den of thieves. The cops are reality intruding into the ersatz society that Gutman and the others have created. They may be on the right side of the law, but these policemen, played with stubborn resolve by Barton MacLane and Ward Bond, often don't know what they're doing; it's a common trait in hard-boiled detective novels, and Huston was nothing if not adamant about remaining true to the original literary source. The police in Falcon are easy to fool with distractions and silly stories, and just like any Vaudevillian could tell you, if one silly story doesn't work, throw them another, then another, then another, and eventually you'll be home free.

But the reality that comes calling in The Maltese Falcon can't be ignored -- it never can, as any cinephile knows -- and it's the acknowledgement of reality that kills the hopes of all involved. The intrusive nature of the police is also a metaphor for Huston's own struggles with his personal philosophy of art, especially cinema. Many references to acting are made in The Maltese Falcon, primarily in Brigid's playacting, complete with a tendency to swoon with her hand to her head like a silent movie starlet. There's also the glimpse of a ticket stub in Joel Cairo's wallet, Wilmer referred to as being 'made for the part' of a fall guy, Sam's use of the phrases 'playing straight' and 'playing the sap,' even a poster for a terrible Bogart film Swing Your Lady (1938) used as a setpiece in one of the few outside shots in the film.

To act is to lie in The Maltese Falcon, but these lies are perversely beautiful. Love springs from these lies, a small community is formed, alliances are made. It's the truth that's ugly, especially the truth that arrives in the form of the police. It's a violent truth, on one hand the metaphorical interruption of art by consumer and societal demands, and on the other, a hamfisted moralizing made tangible by an angry police officer with a grudge against Sam Spade. This officer, Detective Dundy, likes the power he wields more than the law and order he maintains. Meanwhile his partner, Detective Polhaus, is the dumb acquiescence of a society unwilling to question the methods by which its representatives maintain that order. Polhaus gives what might be the most heartbreaking monosyllabic line reading in the golden age of Hollywood: A dull 'Huh?' when Sam muses over the broken dreams that lead him to this final moment, with nothing to show but a forged Falcon statuette and a broken heart.

In a Huston film, everyone is after something, usually money, with the knowledge that their dreams, no matter how small, cannot come true without a cool stack of cash to finance them. Sam Spade's now-famous Shakespearean pronouncement that the coveted dingus is 'the stuff that dreams are made of' can be taken as John Huston's unofficial lifelong cinematic thesis, his acknowledgement of the uncomfortable connection between wealth and human fulfillment. One can choose the convictions of their morals but, as in so many films noir and hard-boiled detective yarns, choosing that life means choosing loneliness. Relax those morals a bit and love and money can be yours, and the only thing stopping you is the law.

Once those morals are relaxed, we find that greed makes the strangest bedfellows. People that usually wouldn't -- or definitely shouldn't -- be together form alliances, such as the rich old uncle and his pretty twenty-something niece in In This Our Life. The story of that niece, a spoiled bad girl named Stanley (Bette Davis), who ruins men and frames a young man of color for the crime she committed, In This Our Life is not usually considered noir but a rather old-fashioned Warner Bros. melodrama. It has noir elements, however: Questions of identity, femme fatales, scenes set in roadside bars and dingy apartments, bodies lying on dark wet streets. It lacks the gritty urban locales that are so crucial to identifying a film as part of the noir cycle, however, thus inadvertently flipping the usual rural-as-escape theme in films noir, creating an almost ironic undertone.

In This Our Life also features the distrust of law enforcement so prevalent in noir films and in the hard-boiled detective novels they were inspired by. We rarely see the law directly in the movie; rather, it's the spectre of the law that hovers over the entire drama, and our instinctive knowledge that too many in power are more than willing to blame an innocent man because of his social status. Stanley exploits this, and we recognize the phenomenon without being told.

Though In This Our Life and many other films in Huston's oeuvre could be considered light noir, his masterpiece The Asphalt Jungle is one of the quintessential films noir of the cycle. This crime caper was both visually and structurally one of the darkest films Huston ever made, in part because of the exceptional work of the B-movie unit at MGM, headed by Dore Schary. The Asphalt Jungle opens as life-long criminal Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) gets out of jail, his next job already planned, the proverbial one last heist needed so he can retire. With the help of minor league gangster Cobby (Marc Lawrence) and crooked businessman Alonzo Emmerich (Louis Calhern), Doc assembles a modest group of robbers to break into a jewelry store safe. The last to be hired on is Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden), a small-time hooligan from Kentucky just looking to make enough money to buy back the family farm.

The Asphalt Jungle is a classic tragedy at heart, condensed Shakespeare in a dark urban setting. Dix has a modest dream, but no way to achieve it beyond a risky robbery, the kind that has the potential to lead to deaths and national headlines. To survive at even the lowest level in the big city, he has to join in with a network of hoods, guys who live lean between the occasional grift, hustle and knock-over. Most of them are alone, and if their isolation is palpable, it's also cultivated. Even when together, there is no safety in numbers; the only time we see substantial groups of people in Jungle are during the commission of a crime, or at a funeral. For these men, crowds are dangerous.

To critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, The Asphalt Jungle itself was dangerous. In his review, he engaged in some spectacular hand wringing over the film, finding it 'repulsive' and 'corrupt' by elevating criminals to a higher moral status than the police. Tellingly, this was the same argument made against gangster films in the early 1930s, and it is those pre-Codes that Huston draws the most inspiration from.

What Crowther did not mention was how clearly The Asphalt Jungle could be seen as an expression of Huston's disillusionment with the sociopolitical climate of late-1940s America. So much in Jungle is a direct metaphor for politics: Repeated questioning of interpersonal allegiances, elected officials putting spin on the truth, the struggle of the powerless against the powerful. Huston surely saw the sharp reflection of Hollywood and HUAC and even the Smith-Mundt Act in this story of a cheap hood trying to make it home, and he knew, just as Emmerlich says in the film, everything is 'just politics, baby, good old dirty politics.'

Based on the novel by W.R. Burnett, Jungle wastes no time in establishing that the cops are part of the problem. They are either corrupt, incompetent, or fueled by a revenge that has more to do with class and power than it does justice. The police commissioner (John McIntire) is a near carbon copy of the detective chief in Scarface (1932, also written by Burnett). He paces and rants about evil in the world today, but as he does so, he tells us things about Dix we know aren't true. These accusations are designed to dehumanize Dix in a preemptive strike against anyone who might have empathy for him. Worse, the commissioner knows exactly what he's doing, as he minimizes the damage corrupt Lieutenant Ditrich (Barry Kelley) has done by deliberately humanizing him: 'The dirt they're trying to clean up is bound to rub off on some of them, but not all of them.'

The commissioner has power by virtue of his position, and because the media, citizens and rest of the police force respect that power, they assume he's telling the truth and trust him to not misuse his authority. Yet even if he only has good intentions, he sometimes lies, and in a way that benefits him personally. Meanwhile, the stringent code of honor amongst the thieves has been invoked time and again, each of them helping each other, even if that help is occasionally misguided, and our sympathies are stirred by their desperate attempts to manage even meager success. By contrasting the comparatively honorable way the criminals behave with the casual disregard for honesty by politicians, Huston has interrogated the American sociopolitical status quo, leaving the audience with a lingering question as to who truly can be trusted.

A noir film by nature tends toward the deconstruction of society, even if it has to build a representative miniature society first, just to tear it down. The makeshift society of The Asphalt Jungle is far more organic than the staged camaraderie of the Falcon, thus is ripe for comparison to our own culture. There will always be those with power who use it for specious ends, and Huston's scrutiny of this particularly common bit of human nature fit well with the crime thrillers he is so often associated with.

After release of The Asphalt Jungle, however, John Huston all but gave up the noir genre. It was as though, after not only beginning the film noir cycle but creating what was arguably the quintessential noir, Huston felt there was nothing left to do but parody himself. Thus Beat the Devil (1953) emerged, with its numerous parallels to The Maltese Falcon and sporting cops that aren't nearly as foolish as they had been in Huston's prior films. After such scathing sociopolitical commentary in The Asphalt Jungle, it seemed only fitting that a jovial satire was Huston's farewell to the film noir cycle.

When not watching classic movies, Stacia Kissick Jones is writing about them, dreaming about them or complaining about them. Her ruminations are there for all to see at She Blogged by Night.