SHADOWLAND
The emotional otherworlds of classic cinema. Unspooling the ribbon of dreams every Sunday afternoon.
Films in this Series
John Huston
100 minutes
In THE MALTESE FALCON, screenwriter-turned-director John Huston created a shadowed, unreal territory where nothing is as it seems. The rules of the game keep changing for everyone, save private investigator Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), who is unfailingly guided by his obfuscated sense of justice and a morality that has come full circle.
More than anyone, Bogart was the face of film noir. Most histories of the genre mark Huston’s definitive adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled novel as the starting point, and Bogie’s portrait of Sam Spade encapsulates much of what makes noir so compelling: Spade is a callous cynic by experience, a louse whose dim estimate of human behaviour is his strongest professional attribute, and a closet romantic beneath it all. THE MALTESE FALCON itself is poised in a world between romance and realism, a place where dreams come from.
More than anyone, Bogart was the face of film noir. Most histories of the genre mark Huston’s definitive adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled novel as the starting point, and Bogie’s portrait of Sam Spade encapsulates much of what makes noir so compelling: Spade is a callous cynic by experience, a louse whose dim estimate of human behaviour is his strongest professional attribute, and a closet romantic beneath it all. THE MALTESE FALCON itself is poised in a world between romance and realism, a place where dreams come from.
John Huston
126 minutes
There is no more perfect study of avarice gone to obsession and paranoia than John Huston's story of a threesome—Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt and Huston's father Walter—hunting for gold in the mountains of Mexico, where they come face-to-face with bandits, federales, and their own basest instincts. In one of his finest roles, Bogart reveals here the brittleness and menace his 1940s characters barely held in check.
Adapted from B.Traven’s explicitly anti-capitalist novel (published in 1920s Europe, in non-capitalist societies only), Huston’s film cuts back on those overt sentiments, but the indictment of the profit motive remains the same. THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE remains one of the most insightful films ever made about greed and the thorny effects of temptation on human nature.
“Partly realistic, partly poetic, fully moral, this deservingly canonized behemoth is one of the relatively few films that transcends the medium to become a mandatory viewing experience for anyone that identifies themselves as a human being, period.” - Rob Humanick, Slant
“THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE is just mad. It’s great because it’s really just watching someone go slowly insane, over ninety minutes—and what could be better? When I watch it again, all of life’s questions and answers are there in the movie; the way to make movies, live your life, get along, everything.” - Paul Thomas Anderson
Adapted from B.Traven’s explicitly anti-capitalist novel (published in 1920s Europe, in non-capitalist societies only), Huston’s film cuts back on those overt sentiments, but the indictment of the profit motive remains the same. THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE remains one of the most insightful films ever made about greed and the thorny effects of temptation on human nature.
“Partly realistic, partly poetic, fully moral, this deservingly canonized behemoth is one of the relatively few films that transcends the medium to become a mandatory viewing experience for anyone that identifies themselves as a human being, period.” - Rob Humanick, Slant
“THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE is just mad. It’s great because it’s really just watching someone go slowly insane, over ninety minutes—and what could be better? When I watch it again, all of life’s questions and answers are there in the movie; the way to make movies, live your life, get along, everything.” - Paul Thomas Anderson
John Huston
100 minutes
The final film pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall is a torrid noir chamber piece directed with sweltering, claustrophobic tension by John Huston. A hurricane swells outside, but it’s nothing compared to the storm brewing within the walls of the Hotel Largo in the Florida Keys. It’s there that sadistic mobster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) holds hotel owner Nora Temple (Bacall) and her invalid father-in-law (Lionel Barrymore) hostage at gunpoint—with world weary ex-GI Frank McCloud (Bogart) as perhaps the one man capable of standing up to him—all while the world blows away around them. You know it's gonna be something special if Bogey goes the whole film refusing a drink.
John Huston
112 minutes
In a smog-choked city somewhere in the American Midwest, an aging criminal mastermind, newly released from prison, hatches a plan for a million-dollar jewel heist and draws a wealthy lawyer and a cherry-picked trio of outlaws into his carefully devised but inevitably doomed scheme. Anchored by an abundance of nuanced performances from a gifted ensemble—including a tight-jawed Sterling Hayden and a sultry Marilyn Monroe in her breakout role—this gritty crime classic by John Huston climaxes in a meticulously detailed anatomy of a robbery that has reverberated through the genre ever since. An uncommonly naturalistic view of a seamy underworld, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE painstakingly depicts the calm professionalism and toughness of its gangster heroes while evincing a remarkable depth of compassion for their all-too-human fragility, and it showcases a master filmmaker at the height of his powers.
“There are precisely nineteen possible dramatic variants on the relations between cops and crooks, and all nineteen are to be found in John Huston’s masterpiece.” - Jean-Pierre Melville
“There are precisely nineteen possible dramatic variants on the relations between cops and crooks, and all nineteen are to be found in John Huston’s masterpiece.” - Jean-Pierre Melville
John Huston
94 minutes
"The weirdest movie Humphrey Bogart ever made." - Michael Phillips
The star lineup sparkles in this witty, lighthearted tale of a gang of international schemers and cutthroats trying to—well, what they’re trying to do is all but irrelevant. John Huston throws his picture together like a party, for a droll ‘thriller’ that yields off-kilter comic riches. It’s Bogart, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre and Gina Lollobrigida, plus Jennifer Jones as we’ve not seen her before or since. Truman Capote’s sly, unbeatably hip dialogue—totally written on the fly celebrates the underhanded ambitions of greedy fools everywhere.
Huston, Bogart, and Capote had (way too much) fun making BEAT THE DEVIL despite multiple disasters—which included Huston’s drunken fall off a cliff and an auto accident that shattered Bogart’s bridgework—and it shows. Like Orson Welles' THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI a few years earlier, BEAT THE DEVIL bent and stretched audience expectations to the snapping point. This is both why it was firmly rejected in its own time and why it works so weirdly well today. It’s a uniquely punch-drunk champion in the annals of rogue cinema
"BEAT THE DEVIL is the sort of eccentric, one-of-a-kind film that’s a natural candidate for cult status, and it has more to recommend it than a lot of other such films, especially now that it’s come back as its original, shaggy self in a transformative restoration that removes superfluous narration and restores unjust cuts." - Farran Smith Nehme
The star lineup sparkles in this witty, lighthearted tale of a gang of international schemers and cutthroats trying to—well, what they’re trying to do is all but irrelevant. John Huston throws his picture together like a party, for a droll ‘thriller’ that yields off-kilter comic riches. It’s Bogart, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre and Gina Lollobrigida, plus Jennifer Jones as we’ve not seen her before or since. Truman Capote’s sly, unbeatably hip dialogue—totally written on the fly celebrates the underhanded ambitions of greedy fools everywhere.
Huston, Bogart, and Capote had (way too much) fun making BEAT THE DEVIL despite multiple disasters—which included Huston’s drunken fall off a cliff and an auto accident that shattered Bogart’s bridgework—and it shows. Like Orson Welles' THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI a few years earlier, BEAT THE DEVIL bent and stretched audience expectations to the snapping point. This is both why it was firmly rejected in its own time and why it works so weirdly well today. It’s a uniquely punch-drunk champion in the annals of rogue cinema
"BEAT THE DEVIL is the sort of eccentric, one-of-a-kind film that’s a natural candidate for cult status, and it has more to recommend it than a lot of other such films, especially now that it’s come back as its original, shaggy self in a transformative restoration that removes superfluous narration and restores unjust cuts." - Farran Smith Nehme
