On John Huston as a director and why his career arc is so fascinating to trace.

John Huston directed The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen, Moulin Rouge, Beat the Devil, Moby Dick, The Misfits, Fat City, The Man Who Would Be King, Wise Blood, Prizzi's Honor, The Dead — and also several films of no merit at all.

The range of quality is so extreme that Huston is often cited as a craftsman rather than an auteur: a director who served his material when the material was good and produced commercial product when it wasn't.

But the best Huston films have a sensibility in common: they are about men who stake everything on an enterprise that fails, who respond to failure with dignity or disgrace but always with a specific kind of masculine recognition that the game was worth playing regardless of the outcome.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Man Who Would Be King, and Fat City are variations on this theme at different scales and in different registers. The first is dark comedy. The second is adventure and tragedy. The third is a portrait of failure at such close range that it becomes its own kind of magnificence.

Huston's late career — the films he made in his 70s and 80s — is among the most unexpected in Hollywood history. The Dead is a film about mortality made by a dying man, and it is among the most beautiful films he ever made.