Pete Hamill - Piecework

Inside the Farolito, someone yells, “Silencio, por favor!” The Mexican family on the hill behind Gallo has yet to say a word.

And now at last, though the feeling had perhaps been growing on him all morning, he knew what it felt like, the intolerable impact of this knowledge that might have come at twenty-two, but had not, that ought to at least have come at twenty-five, but still somehow had not, this knowledge, hitherto associated only with people tottering on the brink of the grave and A. E. Housman, that one could not be young forever — that, indeed, in the twinkling of an eye, one was not young any longer.

— Malcolm Lowry

Under the Volcano

Here is John Huston, seventy-seven years old, five times married, director of thirty-eight motion pictures, actor in dozens more, winner of awards, storyteller, poker player, horseman, long-ago prizefighter, legend. He is in the Farolito, his squinting eyes taking in everything. He sees an ancient Mexican man playing with a four-piece band, a man so old he remembers seeing Halley’s comet flash through the skies in the first year of the Mexican Revolution. He sees nine whores, a transvestite, a dwarf. Along one wall is a bar, and behind the bar is Indio Fernandez, one of the greatest Mexican directors, now almost eighty, a survivor of prisons and gunfights, acting in this movie as a favor to the man everybody calls John. Behind the camera is Gabriel Figueroa, the fine Mexican cinematographer, another old comrade. Huston looks at them all, suggests a change in a whore’s costume, adjusts the angle of the camera.

There is, of course, a judgmental line on John Huston these days: He doesn’t work at directing any more; he has the job done for him, looks on, and cynically picks up his fee. In the five days that I watched him direct Under the Volcano, the line turned out to be as false as most lines, political or artistic. He was involved in every shot; he cared about the details of setting and performance and the placement of the camera.

On this day of shooting, he seems to be everywhere, tall, slightly hunched, oddly frail, so bony now that his hands seem immense, like drawings by Egon Schiele. He has had a heart bypass and he wheezes from emphysema. But John Huston is not yet old.

During a break, he talks about what finally brought him to this movie in this place: “People had been sending me scripts since, oh, not long after the war. For some reason, people connected me to this book, and most of the scripts were, not surprisingly, pretty bad. The book attracted an esoteric element, the astrologists, the numerologists, the occultists and kabalists; each one found something of themselves in this material. Of course, almost anyone can find something of themselves in this one; the mirror is very clear and clean. But one after the other, these opaque scripts kept arriving. I admired the book very much, not for the same reasons that all readers do. I objected to — how shall I say this? — Lowry’s taking every experience and writing it into his own use. Yes, just acquiring anything that has happened and putting it into the context of the book. And some of it was nonsense, absurd. For instance, there’s a poster about boxing; it’s about a boxing match. And in one biography, he’s asked about this, and said it symbolized the Consul’s conflict with Yvonne. Well, that’s bullshit.”

He pauses, and whispers something to Tommy Shaw, his production manager and assistant director; they go back to The Night of the Iguana together, and are friends. Shaw nods; Huston returns to the conversation. “Across the years, there were some fairly good scripts,” Huston says, covering his mouth to smother a cough. “But none of them had the solution to the picture. None offered the hope for a motion picture.” Pause. “Until Gallo’s came along.” Pause. “He had simplified it.”

Huston smiles. “I had a conversation a few months ago with Garcia Marquez, whom I’d met for the first time, and he had done a script — of which he thoroughly disapproved — and we were talking about some of the possible solutions to the novel, which he admired very much. We discovered we were in complete agreement. And by this time I was well into it with Guy Gallo. In his script, all those literary curtains had been pulled aside, Lowry’s mists had been blown away. He got through to the central idea, without all the literary persiflage.”

A number of Huston’s movies, beginning with The Maltese Falcon, have been adapted from novels. How did this project differ? “Well, each one was different, of course. In the case of the Falcon, I didn’t have to cut through anything. There it all was. It was practically a film script in novel form. Under the Volcano is quite the opposite. I have great admiration for the novel, and there are those who put it on the same plane as Ulysses and Waste Land and The Magic Mountain and so on. I don’t think of it in those terms. But I think it’s very fine. One of the best novels of our generation, surely. Even though there is a cult, yes, that maybe endows it with mystic qualities that I don’t appreciate, or fail to appreciate.”

He enjoyed working with Gallo on the script, a process that took place almost entirely during six weeks last summer in Huston’s home in Puerto Vallarta. “In this picture particularly, I wanted it to be an immediate experience, rather than telling a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with frozen climaxes. I wanted something that was happening constantly, that gives you a feeling that you are present, as though it were an actual experience, rather than a remembered experience.” He pauses, watches a whore go by. “To me, one of the great things of American writing is when you feel you are directly witnessing something. One has that feeling in O’Neill, that you are directly witnessing a happening. And are you familiar with W. R. Burnett? This is one of the least appreciated American writers, and you get that thing of direct experience in reading Burnett.”

Huston watches Tommy Shaw whip the extras into their assigned roles and smiles. “That man is the true hero of this production,” he says of the white-haired Shaw. “I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

He turns and sees Albert Finney, dressed in the soiled white suit of the Consul, smoking a cigar in the corner, mumbling to himself, as if rehearsing one final time before the cameras turn. “This fellow Finney is giving one of the finest performances I’ve ever seen. I thought he would be good; but I never dreamed that he would be as good as he is. Or that anybody would be as good as he is.”

It was one of those pictures that, even though you have arrived in the middle, grip you with the instant conviction that it is the best film you have ever seen in your life; so extraordinarily complete in its realism that what the story is all about, who the protagonist may be, seems of small account beside the explosion of the particular moment, beside the immediate threat, the identification with the one hunted, the one haunted.

— Malcolm Lowry

Under the Volcano

It is impossible, on these days at the Farolito, to imagine anyone other than Albert Finney in the part of the Consul. When he is supposed to be drunk, he is drunk; not the comic drunk, not the grotesque, exaggerated drunk of so many bad performers. Finney as the Consul plays an intelligent man, a man of language and smothered passions, who has moved past the point where the world is clear, yet remains capable of sudden explosions of clarity. It’s in the way he stands, in the looseness of his features that suddenly snap into tension. It’s in his great angers, breaking out of the emotional ice jam that the Consul has made of his life. This performance displays one possible solution to the old problem of making a movie out of a literary masterpiece: Strip away the literary style, get down to the bones of the narrative, and then fill the bony structure with performance.-